Improve Your SEO By Understanding Search and The Importance Of Technical Optimization For SEO

The Importance Of Technical Optimization For SEO

SEO optimization for website

Search engine optimization (SEO) continues to be an essential part of any digital marketing strategy. As much as we like talking about the newest and latest digital marketing tactics, SEO is a reliable mainstay and will be so for the foreseeable future.

When designing a comprehensive SEO strategy, however, most digital marketers spend their time on several things. Choosing high-ranking keywords to target is obviously an important step. Integrating these into high-quality pieces of content may be your next goal. At the same time, building backlinks is also critical.

All these on-page and off-page SEO strategies are necessary elements. However, technical search engine optimization is equally important to create strong SEO. Focusing on your website architecture and ensuring that Google can properly crawl your website goes a long way in allowing your website to rise in the search rankings.

Why Technical SEO Is Important

There isn’t one overarching plug-in or hack that will help your website have the “perfect” technical SEO. That said, there are a variety of things you can do that, collectively, can significantly improve your technical SEO and put you ahead of the competition.

Why do you want to prioritize technical SEO?

 Well, because technical SEO is what allows search engines like Google to know that you have a website of high value. This is important because it can prompt the search engines to rank you higher. After all, they primarily want to present users with the best possible results for their chosen keywords, and technical SEO is a way to ensure your website meets the requirements.

If Google prioritized webpages that were slow, nonresponsive or confusing to navigate, Google users would be more likely to take their search queries somewhere else. So if your website loads quickly, has no dead links and is secure, Google’s crawlers will give it an extra boost in search rankings.

The reasons for this are evident. Creating a strong technical foundation for your website will go a long way in satisfying and delighting your users. Search engine crawlers take notice and prioritize your website over others who offer slower and buggier experiences.

Technical SEO: Some Tips And Advice

Technical SEO is definitely something that you should take seriously. So, what are some of the things that you can do to raise your technical SEO? While it would be impossible to list all of them in this article, here are some of the most important things that you can do.

First, make sure that your website is optimized for mobile devices. This is a big one, because more users are now browsing the internet on their smartphones. Google and other search engines, therefore, prioritize websites that offer a great mobile browsing experience. Luckily, search engines like Google have released mobile-friendly tests that can help you optimize your mobile website.

Website speed also plays an important role. To get a basic audit of your website’s current speed, you can use a tool like Pingdom or Google PageSpeed Insights. With that baseline, make sure that you are doing several key things. Think about enabling browser caching, optimizing your website’s images and enabling compression on your site. These are small steps, but put together, they can make your website much faster.

Next, make sure that you include an SSL certificate on your website. SSL (secure sockets layer) certificates provide extra security for visitors to your website. It protects data, confirms identities and improves customer trust. Therefore, by purchasing an SSL certificate, you will not only improve your SEO ranking, but you will add additional security to your website. It’s a no-brainer, so if you haven’t already obtained an SSL certificate, don’t hesitate to do so.

Finally, submit your sitemap to search engines. Sitemaps are essentially lists of pages on your website. They are critical because they let search engines find and index your website. Fortunately, sitemaps aren’t that difficult to create. For instance, if you use WordPress as your content management system, you can easily find a plug-in that will create a sitemap for you. Once your sitemap is ready, submit it to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Doing this makes it easier for these search engines to crawl your website.

Rising Through The Rankings

Technical SEO isn’t going to automatically get you to the top of Google or Bing. That said, ignoring technical SEO will guarantee that doesn’t happen. A slow or buggy website is going to be punished by search engines, thereby preventing you from achieving your digital marketing goals.

Because of this, we encourage you to take technical SEO seriously. Audit your website, and implement some of the suggestions mentioned above. Ultimately, they will go a long way in strengthening your website’s technical SEO.

Give Your SEO a Boost with Structured Data

SEO is more than just ranking and driving traffic. It’s about driving traffic that engages and converts readers to users. In order to help ensure your site shows up for the right users, it’s important for search engines themselves to understand your site, its content, and the context in which it’s presented. Using structured data and schema can help you better inform the search engines about your content and get your webpages to rank higher in the SERPs.

What is Structured Data?

Structured Data Defined

According to Ahrefs, “structured data” is a general term that refers to any organized data that conforms to a certain format. Structured data refers to kinds of data with a high level of organization, such as information in a relational database. When information is highly structured and predictable, search engines can more easily organize and display it in creative ways.

Structured data involves using a piece of code that is laid out in a specific format easily understood by search engines. The search engines read the code and use it to display search results in a more dynamic way.

Schema.org often referred to as “Schema,” is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in SERPs. According to their site, Schema.org “is a collaborative, community activity with a mission to create, maintain, and promote Schemas for structured data on the Internet, on web pages, in email messages, and beyond.” Schema.org makes it easy for SEOs to find, create, and add structured data to their websites.

There are four main semantic annotation formats you can use to structure data on the internet:

JSON-LD

RDFa + GoodRelations

Microdata

Microformat aka μF

Schema.org can provide you with the Schema you’re looking to add in any of these formats, but JSON-LD is the format that Google recommends.

Types of Schema

There are hundreds of schema markup types. Using Schema.org, you can find markup data for:

Articles

Local businesses

Restaurants

TV episodes and ratings

Book reviews

Movies

Software applications

Events

Products

Benefits of Schema

Adding Schema markup to your HTML improves the way your page displays in SERPs by enhancing the rich snippets that are displayed beneath the page title. 

Structured data gives Google and other search engines more details on your content which helps them better understand your intent and match it with more targeted users looking for what you provide. While having structured data is not a necessity, it can help your site earn a featured snippet, which appears at the top of the SERP, before organic listings. This can lead to more visibility from the people you are trying to target – the people most likely to convert.

Improve Your SEO By Understanding Search

Since our previous article was published, we’ve noticed something typical within the marketing world.

Everyone loves to read about hacks and tricks to achieve better Google rankings. And doing so might give you some positive results since some aspects of SEO are common sense and easy to follow.

However, to really master a channel of marketing, you have to understand its fundamental logic and functionality. This is especially important with SEO because it is dependent on a barely predictable black box called the Google algorithm.

Here are two valuable fundamentals to understanding how Google works and ranks your website.

Understand The Spider's Web

Optimizing factors alone is not enough, because all good things need a system. Just like in a spider's web, it is not enough in SEO to pull the right strings here and there. Our next step should be to connect these strings.

Specifically, we are talking about the internal linking of content on your website — for example, when you link from products or articles to other products or articles on a blog.

Important here is the Googlebot, which wanders through the whole internet at regular intervals. It "crawls" all visible pages and their contents and puts them into the Google Index, which populates the search results. This is where we can then take a strategic approach and use internal links to direct the Googlebot to the most important pages of our website, such as products from our online shop or good content such as articles, in order to specifically increase their relevance and strength for Google. We can also prevent the so-called orphaning of weaker pages of our website.

In short, solid backlinks through link building ensure us a good PageRank. Google founder Larry Page invented PageRank, which allowed Google to measure the quality of a page by the number of links pointing to it, among other things. This metric was used as part of the entire ranking algorithm and became a strong signal because it was initially a very good way of determining the quality of a page. In his first article on PageRank in 1999, Larry Page wrote, "For a page to get a high PageRank, it must convince an important page or a lot of non-important pages to link to it."

These backlinks were and still are the ranking factor par excellence, which can ensure that you quickly reach the much-desired status of the authority in your niche and rise in the ranking positions, thus receiving significantly more traffic. Strictly speaking, backlinks are actually the No. 1 ranking factor that remains if you've produced good content and implemented the OnPage SEO factors properly and you own a high-performance site.

Historically, Google was only able to dominate the search engine market in the late 1990s by using backlinks as a ranking factor in the search algorithm. To this day, however, the full algorithm that Google uses to determine its search results is still unknown, as this is logically the company's "secret sauce." Despite this, the general consensus in the international SEO community is that links still play a major role in this Algorithm.

Keep in mind that SEO is always an ongoing, methodical practice that requires strategic focus and regular maintenance in order to maintain and ultimately improve rankings. Search engines are constantly adapting their algorithms, so it is important to keep up to date. Keep up with the times, and time won't pass you by.

I recommend you first get a basic understanding of the tasks and functionalities of SEO and then see an SEO expert help you optimize your strategies, keep an eye on competitors and buy additional knowledge for your own organization. In addition to keyword analysis, competitor analysis, link building, and even online reputation management, there are many other essential methods to get the most out of the world's largest search engine for you and your company.