In this post, we’ll go into the basics of technical SEO. Now, discussing the basics of technical SEO might seem like a contradiction in terms. Nevertheless, some basic knowledge about the more technical side of SEO can mean the difference between a high-ranking site and a site that doesn’t rank at all. Technical SEO isn’t easy, but we’ll explain – in layman’s language – which aspects you should (ask your developer to) pay attention to when working on the technical foundation of your website.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is all about improving a website’s technical aspects to increase its pages’ ranking in the search engines. Making a website faster, easier to crawl, and more understandable for search engines are the pillars of technical optimization. Technical SEO is part of on-page SEO, which focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. It’s the opposite of off-page SEO, which is about generating exposure for a website through other channels.
Why should you optimize your site technically?
Google and other search engines want to present their users with the best possible results for their queries. Therefore, Google’s robots crawl and evaluate web pages on many factors. Some factors are based on the user’s experience, like how fast a page loads. Other factors help search engine robots grasp what your pages are about. This is what, among others, structured data does. So, by improving technical aspects, you help search engines crawl and understand your site. If you do this well, you might be rewarded with higher rankings. Or even earn yourself some rich results!
It also works the other way around: if you make serious technical mistakes on your site, they can cost you. You wouldn’t be the first to block search engines entirely from crawling your site by accidentally adding a trailing slash in the wrong place in your robots.txt file.
But don’t think you should focus on the technical details of a website to please search engines. A website should work well – be fast, clear, and easy to use – for your users in the first place. Fortunately, creating a strong technical foundation often coincides with a better user and search engine experience.
What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?
A technically sound website is fast for users and easy to crawl for search engine robots. A proper technical setup helps search engines to understand what a site is about. It also prevents confusion caused by, for instance, duplicate content. Moreover, it doesn’t send visitors, nor search engines, to dead-ends caused by non-working links. Here, we’ll shortly go into some important characteristics of a technically optimized website.
1. It’s fast
Nowadays, web pages need to load fast. People are impatient and don’t want to wait for a page to open. In 2016, research showed that 53% of mobile website visitors will leave if a webpage doesn’t open within three seconds. And the trend hasn’t gone away – research from 2022 suggests ecommerce conversion rates drop by roughly 0.3% for every extra second it takes for a page to load. So, if your website is slow, people get frustrated and move on to another website, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.
Google knows slow web pages offer a less-than-optimal experience. Therefore, they prefer web pages that load faster. So, a slow web page also ends up further down the search results than its faster equivalent, resulting in even less traffic. Since 2021, Page experience (how fast people experience a web page to be) has officially become a Google ranking factor. So, having pages that load quickly enough is more important now than ever.
Search engines use robots to crawl, or spider, your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. A great internal linking structure will ensure they understand the most important content on your site.
But there are more ways to guide robots. You can, for instance, block them from crawling certain content if you don’t want them to go there. You can also let them crawl a page, but tell them not to show this page in the search results or not to follow the links on that page.
Robots.txt file
You can give robots directions on your site by using the robots.txt file. It’s a powerful tool, which should be handled carefully. As we mentioned initially, a small mistake might prevent robots from crawling (important parts of) your site. Sometimes, people unintentionally block their site’s CSS and JS files in the robots.txt file. These files contain code that tells browsers what your site should look like and how it works. Search engines can’t determine if your site works properly if those files are blocked.
All in all, we recommend diving into robots.txt if you want to learn how it works. Or, perhaps even better, let a developer handle it for you!
The meta robots tag
The robots meta tag is a piece of code you won’t see on the page as a visitor. It’s in the source code in the so-called head section of a page. Robots read this section when finding a page. In it, they’ll discover what they’ll find on the page or what they need to do with it.
If you want search engine robots to crawl a page, but to keep it out of the search results for some reason, you can tell them with the robots meta tag. With the robots meta tag, you can also instruct them to crawl a page, but not to follow the links on the page. With Yoast SEO, you can easily learn how to noindex or nofollow a post or page.
We’ve discussed that slow websites are frustrating. What might be even more annoying for visitors than a slow page, is landing on a page that doesn’t exist. If a link leads to a non-existing page on your site, people will encounter a 404 error page. There goes your carefully crafted user experience!
Moreover, search engines don’t like to find these error pages either. And, they tend to find even more dead links than visitors encounter because they follow every link they bump into, even if it’s hidden.
Unfortunately, most sites have (at least some) dead links, because a website is a continuous work in progress: people make things and break things. Fortunately, some tools can help you retrieve dead links on your site. Read about those tools and how to solve 404 errors.
To prevent unnecessary dead links, you should always redirect a page’s URL when you delete or move it. Ideally, you’d redirect it to a page that replaces the old page. With Yoast SEO Premium, you can easily make redirects yourself. No need for a developer!
4. It doesn’t confuse search engines with duplicate content
Search engines might get confused if you have the same content on multiple pages of your site – or even on other sites. Because, if these pages show the same content, which one should they rank highest? As a result, they might give all pages with the same content a lower ranking.
Unfortunately, you might have duplicate content issues without even knowing it. Because of technical reasons, different URLs can show the same content. This doesn’t make any difference for a visitor, but for a search engine, it’ll see the same content on a different URL.
Luckily, there’s a technical solution to this issue. With the so-called canonical link element, you can indicate what the original page – or the page you’d like to rank in the search engines – is. In Yoast SEO, you can easily set a canonical URL for a page. And, to make it easy for you, Yoast SEO adds self-referencing canonical links to all your pages. This will help prevent duplicate content issues you might not even know about.
5. It’s secure
A technically optimized website is a secure website. Making your website safe for users to guarantee privacy is a basic requirement nowadays. You can do many things to make your (WordPress) website secure, and one of the most crucial things is implementing HTTPS.
HTTPS ensures that nobody can intercept the data sent over between the browser and the site. So, for instance, if people log in to your site, their credentials are safe. You’ll need an SSL certificate to implement HTTPS on your site. Google acknowledges the importance of security, making HTTPS a ranking signal: secure websites rank higher than unsafe equivalents.
You can easily check if your website is HTTPS in most browsers. On the left-hand side of the search bar of your browser, you’ll see a lock if it’s safe. If you see the words “not secure” you (or your developer) have some work to do!
Structured data helps search engines better understand your website, content, or business. With structured data, you can tell search engines what kind of product you sell, or which recipes you have on your site. Plus, it will allow you to provide details about those products or recipes.
Implementing structured data can give you more than a better understanding of search engines. It also makes your content eligible for rich results, those shiny results with stars or details that stand out in the search results.
7. Plus: It has an XML sitemap
Simply put, an XML sitemap is a list of all pages of your site. It serves as a roadmap for search engines on your site. With it, you’ll ensure search engines won’t miss any important content on your site. The XML sitemap is often categorized into posts, pages, tags, or other custom post types, and includes the number of images and the last modified date for every page.
Ideally, a website doesn’t need an XML sitemap. If it has an internal linking structure that connects all content nicely, robots won’t need it. However, not all sites have a great structure, and having an XML sitemap won’t do any harm. So, we’d always advise having an XML site map on your site.
8. Plus: International websites use hreflang
If your site targets more than one country or multiple countries where the same language is spoken, search engines need a little help understanding which countries or languages you’re trying to reach. If you help them, they can show people the right website for their area in the search results.
Hreflang tags help you do just that. You can use them to define which country and language each page is intended to serve. This also solves a possible duplicate content problem: even if your US and UK sites show the same content, Google will know they’re written for different regions.
Optimizing international websites is quite a specialism. If you’d like to learn how to make your international sites rank, we’d advise looking at our Multilingual SEO training.
Want to learn more about this?
So this is what technical SEO is, in a nutshell. It’s quite a lot already, while we’ve only scratched the surface here. There’s so much more to tell about the technical side of SEO!
Want to learn more? We have a great collection of SEO training courses in Yoast SEO Academy, including Structured data for beginners. We’ve added a new Technical SEO training course covering Hosting and server configuration (for WordPress), and Crawlability and indexability.
Want to learn everything? Get Yoast SEO Premium and enjoy full access to our training courses!
There’s more! You can also take our technical SEO fitness quiz if you want to know how fit your site’s technical SEO is. This quiz helps you determine what you need to work on and points you in the right direction to improve your site.
Edwin is an experienced strategic content specialist. Before joining Yoast, he worked for a top-tier web design magazine, where he developed a keen understanding of how to create great content.
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