SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation, which is a methodology of strategies and techniques used to increase the amount of visitors to a website, obtained by a high-ranking placement in the results page of a search engine like Google, Bing or Yahoo.
Optimisation means having high quality content matching the intent of the searcher. Technical SEO, then, is all about the process of optimising your website for the crawling and indexing phase. Technical SEO ensures that search engines can access, crawl, and index your website without any issues. Why is it technical, then? Because it has nothing to do with your website’s content, only its technical infrastructure.
Once you understand SEO and technical SEO, it’s time to get to grips with the best practices for boosting your ratings. You can conduct your own technical SEO audit in order to ensure that your website is performing as best as it should be.
Specifying a domain
Your website or blog should have a specified domain. This means that search engines are instructed as to which variation of the domain you want your website to always use. By default, you can access a website with or without ‘www’ in front of a domain name. Meaning if your domain is ‘example.com’, your website can be accessed using ‘http://www.example.com’ and ‘http://example.com’. This may seem fine to you, but this is a confusing problem for search engines; they view these as two different websites. This will lead to duplicate content, indexing issues, and loss of page rank. Set a preferred variation of your domain to avoid this.
Optimise Robots.txt
You then need to check your robots.txt file, a text file which lives in the root directory of your website. It functions by giving instructions to search engines as to which pages of the website they can crawl and index. Whilst this is a simple file format and you probably won’t need to make any changes to it, it’s worth checking to ensure there are no false blockings.
Revise your URL structure
Your URL structure is the format of your URLs. For best practice, use lowercase characters, make them short, use dashes to separate words, avoid using unnecessary characters, and use your target keywords. Once you’ve settled upon your permanent link structure, when you publish new content you can simply optimise your URL.
Structure your website
The structure of your website is very important for technical SEO. Users are more likely to stay on a website if they can navigate it, and a simple structure means a search engine can understand and index your website better. Your category pages should also be optimised – don’t make the mistake of hiding them.
Use a digital marketing service
Digital marketing services can do all of this work for you, if you’re looking to optimise your technical SEO without any hassle. With their expertise in digital PR, outreach, and technical optimisation, SEO gurus can work with you to devise a strategy to boost your ratings.