What is “Technical SEO”?
Introduction
To someone that hasn’t got a clue about search engine optimisation, well, they may just evaluate a company website on how it looks. That’s to say they may find the homepage impressive; it may have a slider for example which automatically changes, updating the customer on a special offer.
There might be YouTube videos embedded into the page, introducing the company, stating a bit more about its brand, and generally, the design may well be good, from a customer’s perspective.
However, sometimes there can be a ton of glitches which are much less obvious, for example, the page may well be very slow to load, that’s to say a Google Page Speed test might show you that on mobile, well the websites very slow, which causing a high bounce rate.
Then you may spot that certain product pages have broken links, that some pages can’t be indexed by Googlebot, that there’s also a mass of duplication problems, for example you find that nearly all of your product pages have duplicated content, which will render that page as a low-quality page, for more on this, you need to read about the Google Panda updates, and why Google’s algorithm is built to demote work that’s copied.
For example, let’s say you sell coffee machines, you have over 300 models, and every product description is duplicated, well, this isn’t going to help your companies seo one bit.
So, what is “technical SEO”? Well, as you might already know, especially if you’ve invested in search engine optimisation for sometime now, that is that Google, and other search engines use a lot of “ranking factors” to work out where a business should be ranked.
This means, its not based on one thing, or a few things, nope, if its Google you are optimising your company website for, to rank higher, then you must know that there’s hundreds of ranking factors, and some of these are what are called “technical” ranking factors.
Now, because some websites are so vast, for example, an e-commerce website that sells lets say shoes, well, there might be over 1000 product lines, the websites likely to be vast, and therefore a large seo agency might be needed, now because there’s so much work to do, sometimes at some agencies, say in Bristol, you might have people working at the agency that have set seo roles, for example, to build backlinks, a copywriter to write the content marketing, a social media person, and you might have a technical seo person, and there job is to make sure the technical aspects of the seo are improved.
So, without further ado, lets talk about some of them now.
Google’s algorithm
Okay, for your company, whether it’s based in the centre of Bristol, or you own a business is somewhere else in The South West of England, if you want your company to appear in Google’s results, which we as an seo agency refer to as the SERP’s, then the page or the post needs to be indexed, this means for this to happen Googlebot needs to be able to index the page, this means that you should work with your seo company to make sure each page can be “indexed” and to make sure that Googlebot can then crawl and index the page.
Googlebot
Googlebot needs to be able to crawl your website, for it to appear in Google’s results (SERP’s), your seo company should therefore see if there is any technical problems with your website, stopping it from getting indexed, there could be many reasons for this, some as simple as the “no-index” tab being left on, when you didn’t want it switched on for example.
Are all pages working?
So you’ve just had a brand-new e-commerce site built, it sells over 100 products, yet when you click around the site, you see that various links do not work, in matter of fact, you get a lot of “404 page errors” now this is not ideal for your seo, and not ideal for your customers, as when they click on a product, they don’t want to see a 404 page error, so this should be part of the technical seo work, to make sure that you don’t have any page errors.
Sitemap
Your chosen seo companies should help to create a sitemap.
Works correctly on mobile phones
So many company websites don’t work correctly on smartphones or on tablets, common problems can be main menus that are difficult to use, not being responsive, slow and many more problems, your agency should carry out testing, to make sure that they make your mobile version of your website easy to use.
Test all buttons
Let’s say on an e-commerce website, let’s say a company that is owned and run in Bristol, that sells coffee here in the U.K and globally.
Let’s say in total there are over 1000 internal backlinks, which are in the footer of the website, on the main pages, in the main menu and more, such as in the links in blog posts, your agency should check for broken links, and that all of the anchor text is written in a “white hat way”, following Google’s WebMaster Guidelines.
Test on different operating systems
Does your company website work correctly on smartphones? Or does it take a real long time to load, if so, then this is an seo issue.
Is there are duplication problems?
Let’s say that you’ve just launched a brand-new company, right in the heart of Bristol, you’ve designed and manufactured your own electric bike as well as selling hundreds of other electric bikes, and your company premises is near the harbourside in wonderful Bristol, yet there’s a problem.
That is although you signed-off the website in terms of that you were happy with the design, that the web design company had created, now handing it over to a local seo company, well, you’ve noticed there are literally thousands of words which are duplicated, which have been taken from the bike manufacturers website, which now cause Google Panda issues, the website also appears spammy, as it has so much copied text, so, you guessed it, what we are trying to get at, as part of the technical seo work, that your agency does, you should make sure that you get rid of duplicated content marketing.
Instead the written work should be original, it should be well-written, and every bit of it must follow “Google’s WebMaster Guidelines”, in that it must be white hat, it must be top quality.