What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process carried out by websites to make sure that they meet the technical requirements of modern search engines. The goal of doing so is to improve organic rankings. These include all backend website optimization processes like internal linking, improving page speed, mobile optimization or usability.
Purpose:
The purpose is to make it easy for crawlers and website visitors to easily access and use your site. Web users better understand your website and it also leads to higher organic search result rankings because you provide them with high quality content and exceptional user experience (UX).
Important Elements of Technical SEO:
The key elements of a technical SEO comprise of:
- Crawling
- Indexing
- Rendering
- Ranking
- Website architecture
Why is Technical SEO Important?
Because you want your website to be seen and used! Of course, you have invested your time, energy, financial and human resources into making and launching your website. You definitely want maximum value out of it. To do so you need to infuse technical SEO optimization in your strategy, so that it serves the purpose of attracting potential customers and generate leads.
Easier you make your content for Google to access, higher will be your search ranking. Technical SEO:
- Impacts your SERP ranking
- Influences visitor’s action and decision
- Help you out throw competitors
- Maximizes your return on investment through SEO
- Help enhance conversions, leads and sales
If your website is not technically optimized, you are holding it back from ranking high in search engine result pages despite having valuable content. Your website must be composed in way that search engines (Google and others Yahoo, Bing etc) are able to easily and quickly find, crawl, render and index your pages. Otherwise it will become inaccessible to potential visitors and of no use.
Relevant Article Link to follow : Is SEO Worth it for Small business in 2024?
How do Search Engines Function?
Whenever you give a search command on a search engine, it starts working by crawling, indexing, rendering and ranking the Internet’s content.
Parts of Technical SEO:
Let us get to know in detail how search engines perform these tasks to serve the purpose.
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Crawling:
Crawling (also termed as spiders) occurs when web crawlers/ spiders crawl their way through the internet to discover the desired content. The content may comprise of texts, images, books, news, videos or previously searched content. It is like a librarian looking through the library for required resources.
It is the foundation of the indexing stage that provides search engines with the desired content to generate search result. Search engines are unable to provide search results without crawling because they can’t function without it. The process may seem simple and straightforward to hear but it involves a lot of complications in what goes on in this first stage alone.
Crawling discovers new and existing content on the internet that is relevant to the query and works by bringing it to search engine’s index. As crawling is expensive process to do, search engines tend to optimize crawling via an algorithm that finds out which sites to crawl, how many per site need to crawl and how frequently to crawl them.
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Rendering:
After a search engine done with crawling a webpage, it then “renders” the page. Which means taking the HTML, cascading style sheet (CSS) and JavaScript information to make how the resulting page will display to different mobile and desktop users?
Rendering is essential in turn for the search engine as it allows them to know how the webpage content will be displayed in context. Using JavaScript helps make sure that they have all the related content displayed nicely that a human user would see and understand when visiting the page.
The search engines rendering is actually a sub process within the first crawling stage. But searching a webpage and structuring it in a way that is comprehensible to users in a browser are two different processes.
Google and Google Chrome browser use the same rendering engine, called “Rendertron”. It is built from the open-source original Chromium browser system. Bing bot runs JavaScript and render webpages via Microsoft as its engine. Google saves the copies of the pages in a compressed format in its repository.
Sometimes, some conditions can interfere with smooth rendering. For example, sometimes is one or more CSS or JavaScript files become hard to find by the search engines because their subdirectories are disallowed by robots.txt. So, it will not be possible for search engines to fully process the page. Some cookies may also cause obstacle in full or proper rendering of some sites.
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Indexing:
The process of search engine index is similar in functionality to an index of words of at the end of a book. Like in a book’s index, all the major topics and important words are listed at the end along with their page numbers so that they could be found easily when needed, a website indexing does the same.
Indexing occurs when search engines evaluate, process and store crawled content in its storage index. It then analyzes the content based on the quality of its content, title, URL, image, language, videos, usability and other elements to see if it is eligible for display.
It does not include indexing everything. Low-quality, repeated, duplicate and irrelevant or no index content will not be indexed. It will not be added in search engine’s database to ensure quality of the delivered content. Once a page gets crawled and rendered, the next process is to understand what it is about and whether it will be stored in the index or not.
The content of a search engine may contain keywords and keyword sequences, related to web pages where the keywords were found. Indexing helps build the library of a search engine with helpful content. Quality is important for search engine results. Not all content gets indexed. Thin content pages, pages with too much or too irrelevant content, or duplicate content does not get eligible for quality standard indexing.
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Ranking:
Ranking refers to when search engines display search results as a result of a user query. Search engines use sophisticated algorithms to determine in which order to display found results. The content is judged by search engine on various factors before their display on search engines result pages. Then they create a user friendly, personalized, optimized and relevant result. Just like librarians recommend a book on a certain topic when you ask for their advice, search engine does the same when you enter a query and displays the most valuable result according to it.
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Website Ranking:
Ranking is the order in which search engine result pages are displayed. It is critical for a business website’s success and survival. It provides you the opportunity to embrace huge potential traffic and gives you a competitive edge over competitors. Website ranking enhances your visibility thus improving your chance of getting traffic, doing business and generates sales. It helps you differentiate form competitors.
When a search engine presents more valuable and relevant results than other search engine, people are more likely to use that and recommend it to others. So, search engines seek ways in which to display search results that are most useful to users and serve their purpose.
The process of ranking takes place in milliseconds. It starts with a user entering a search query and respond by crawling, indexing, rendering and browsing their index. The most relevant results are chosen based on their high-quality content and on user related factors, such as their browsing device.
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Website Architecture:
Website architecture refers to the structure and hierarchy of a website. It is showcased through the internal linking of a site. The website’s hierarchy should be user friendly, easily findable and able to be readily searched by engine crawlers to let them understand the pages’ mutual relationship.
This hierarchical structure plays an important role in attaining and retaining users and boost conversions. Applying a suitable website structure lets you design the website for a better user experience. The most useful and valuable content will turn useless if it is not find able by users and will make them turn to competitor’s sites.
Normally the hierarchical structure looks like the branches of a rooted tree. The root is the home page and other pages that are linked to it are its branches. They have additional branches connected to it. These pages should be easy to browse and load.
Why is website structuring important?
An effective architecture braces your website’s user experience. When you structure your website smartly, users can effortlessly find the desired information. Better user experience will lift your search engine ranking and user’s stay time due to better linkage.
A fruitful website architecture lets search engines to:
- Promotes deep and easy site navigation between pages
- Equally distributes page authority
- Efficiently crawl your website.
- Improves current authority by strengthening internal and external linkage
Final Takeaways:
Technical SEO is important for successful functioning of a website. Crawling, rendering, indexing, ranking and website hierarchy are important elements of technical SEO. Firstly, crawling finds desirable, online content via web crawlers. Rendering helps in its optimized display. Indexing evaluates and stores the suitable content in the search engine’s indexing database. Ranking displays the pages in an order thought to be most appropriate based on search engine’s multi-factored ranking algorithm. Finally, Website architecture determines how a site’s page are arranged and linked together in way that gives maximum ease to users.