Technical SEO: What is it and what does it include?

While searching for SEO services, you most probably encounter the term “Technical SEO”. People who are new to the world of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) often wonder what exactly this term means. Aren’t all strategies in SEO technical? Maybe that’s why Technical SEO is one of the most searched terms in the SEO glossary. In this blog, we will discuss Technical SEO and what it involves.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the optimizations done on a website for the indexing and crawling purposes. Any structural and architectural changes made on the website to make it more search-engine friendly come under the category of technical SEO. For instance, when you add top navigation on the website, it is a part of technical SEO because, this way, the most important pages are linked to each page of the website.

What does Technical SEO include?

Before carrying out technical SEO, you should always do the technical audit because it helps you check the SEO compliance of the website. The technical audit includes various factors and criteria, such as checking the implementation of robots.txt, sitemap, redirections, page speed, and more. Besides, it also involves assessing various on-page factors, such as content, header tags, and meta tags.

One can conduct a technical audit using tools like SEMrush and Ahrefs. Apart from using tools, one should also do a manual audit during which you can follow a checklist to assess different parameters of the website. This will be more helpful and give you surety about findings because audit tools cannot reach every page on the website. Once you know what issues there are on the website, then you will know where your website needs improvements.

Here are two of the many areas where technical SEO implementation is highly effective.

• Fixing internal links, breadcrumbs, and pagination

When your website is suffering from internal links that have not been updated with the latest URL structure, breadcrumbs missing on several pages, and unsuccessful implementation of pagination, don’t neglect them thinking that they don’t have anything related to ranking. Even though pagination is not an indexing factor, it is still used for link discovery. As soon as you fix these things, your website crawling and indexing might show a significant improvement.

• Fixing Hreflang, rendering, and crawling issues

Hreflang can be tricky, thus it should be used properly. If you are using hreflang where it is not required, it might cause different page rankings in different geographies. Crawl issues often occur when search engine bots are unable to reach a website or an important page of the website. And heavy use of javascript can complicate the search engine’s ability to read the page, which could be a detrimental rendering issue for the SEO. After performing a technical audit, one can enlist all the implementations required to fix those issues.

When you hire SEO services, not only these issues but several other technical aspects that impact the visibility, ranking, indexing, or crawling of a website are taken care of       . At present, when Google and other search engines are adding more parameters to their ranking and indexing list, not paying attention to the technical SEO is a huge mistake. So, apart from enhancing the quality, also work on things that fall outside the basic and general concepts.