Technical SEO: The technical optimization of your website
Intro
Technical SEO, like on-page and off-page SEO, is a subset of search engine optimization. The technical optimization of a website ensures that content can be reliably recorded and processed by search engines.
Thus, technical SEO can also be understood as a prerequisite for high-quality content to be crawled by search engines at all. can be indexed and achieve good rankings.
In addition to basic topics such as crawling and indexing, server problems, source code, security, loading speed and rendering are also important aspects in technical SEO.
How to master this and other technical challenges in SEO, we explain to you in this article.
Table of contents
Crawling & indexing of websites
AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages)
Codes
Featured Snippets
Structured data
Page speed optimization
Security: SSL encryption
Robots
Crawling & indexing of websites
The crawling and indexing process describes the identification of publicly accessible websites and the inclusion of these websites in the index of the search engine. Behind this is a special software that supports this process. In search engine optimization, crawling and indexing is an essential component, because this is the only way a website appears on the search results pages of the search engines. So it is very important that both the crawl of a website and the indexing work smoothly to give it the opportunity to rank. For
Website operators should consider efficient crawling control in the structure of the website so that all relevant content can be crawled as well as indexed and can exploit the crawl budget. In our morefire blog article Crawling and Indexing of Websites: Theory and Practice you will not only learn what crawling and indexing are all about, but also how crawling can be controlled and thus the indexing can be influenced and how you can find out whether your website is indexed.
What does AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) mean?
Due to the increase in mobile traffic, the topic of loading time is becoming increasingly important. Slow websites can cause users to cancel the page visit before a page has fully loaded. In addition, high data consumption on mobile devices is still comparatively expensive. Accelerated Mobile Pages consist partly of classic HTML elements, but some also have their own element types, all designed together in such a way that the pages can be displayed as quickly as possible on mobile devices. The marking of AMP pages is comparatively simple, for CMS systems such as WordPress there are even plugins that convert normal HTML pages into AMP.
In addition to the correct page markup, the linking of HTML and AMP pages (and vice versa) is also important so that the AMP page can be indexed at all. For finished AMP pages, there is an AMP validator from Google, with the help of which you can check the pages for errors, but you can also get hints via the Google Search Console. You can find more information about AMP in the video or in our very extensive blog article on amp.
What are HTTP status codes and what are they available?
The three-digit HTTP status codes not only play an important role in web development, but also as AN SEO you have to keep an eye on them in order to be able to optimize websites holistically. The five status classes can be distinguished by their meaning and function, with the first digit of the status code always determining the class. There are various HTTP status codes, but some of them are particularly important in search engine optimization. These include codes of status class 3xx (301, 302, 307, 308), 4xx (401,403, 404, 410) and 5xx (500, 503), but also the status code 200.
What are Featured Snippets?
Featured snippets (formerly called position 0) appear under paid ads and even before organic search results. Thus, they occupy a very prominent place in the SERPs and it is quite advisable to take this into account in search engine optimization. Depending on the search query, featured snippets can be displayed differently in the Google Answer Boxes, especially in the informational search. Text snippets, lists or tables with or without images, but also videos are possible. Since Google itself decides,
Which website is played out in the featured snippet, it is not possible for website operators to simply create a featured snippet or to mark one on their website. Nevertheless, it is possible to optimize for featured snippets. You can find out everything about the optimizations, the formats and the influence on SEO in our blog article Featured Snippets: Conquer rankings in the Google Answer Box.
What is structured data?
Under structured data, you can imagine a markup type in the source code of a page that gives Google more information about the URL. In turn, Google can visually highlight you on the search results pages (SERPs). It is important that the structured data reflects the search intention of your visitor.
Examples of structured data
Figure 1: Event award with structured data
Figure 2: Product award with structured data
If you don't have any contact points with the topic yet, just imagine the following: You are new to the city and would like to get an idea of the local events. Or you would like to buy a specific sneaker and want to find out about it first. So what do you do? You do mobile research on Google and will find, for example, the following results:
Benefits of structured data
Here you can already see an advantage of structured data: While the first screenshot lists more detailed information about events, on the second screenshot you will find detailed information about the product (including reviews, product price and stock). For you as a website operator, this is interesting because you can already distinguish yourself from the competition on the search results pages. Ask yourself: Would you rather click on a result that gives you little to no information or on a result that already gives you everything you want to know? By the way, you can read more about the types of structured data available in our Structured Data Guide.
Distinguishing structured data
Behind such information is "structured data", a kind of marking of the elements in the source code. Your elements must be described in either HTML or JavaScript (JSON-LD) and <head> <body> inserted anywhere in the HTML document. Depending on what information you have on your site (e.g. products, recipes, events, jobs, questions & answers), there are other awards. For a larger page with many different page elements, it is also a good idea to have an audit for structured data carried out by a technical contact person.
Check structured data
Maybe you already have structured data on your website? You can use tools such as the structured data test tool and see how you have already awarded something on the page. Here you can also see if there are errors or warnings that do not visually highlight your result on Google. Whether your page elements are ultimately highlighted on Google depends on many factors. First and foremost, it is important that you fulfill the search intention of the user (e.g. buy or inform) with the excellent elements. So there's no point in simply awarding something and hoping that Google will highlight it. It is also important that the elements are really on the page. Google is getting smarter and smarter and usually recognizes such tricks very quickly.
Page speed optimization for fast web pages
The attention span of digital media users has dropped significantly over the years – everything has to be available at all times and immediately. Accordingly, the demands on fast websites are high, which do not make the visitor wait long.
The effects of loading time on user behavior and sales of a website are shown by a study by Akamai on the effect of loading time on online shops. This shows that a delay of 100 milliseconds results in a 7% decrease in the conversion rate.
From an SEO point of view, optimizing the loading speed of your website is important. In May 2020, Google introduced the Core Web Vitals, which will influence the ranking of your website in Google as ranking factors from 2021. So for these two reasons, you should act now.
You can find out how you can significantly improve the loading speed of your website and ignite the performance boost in our detailed article on page speed optimization. You will learn how to correctly measure the loading time of your website, which free tools you can use for this and which 5 optimization measures you should definitely implement so that your website loads really fast.
Security: SSL encryption
SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer and is a key component of web security. Its main feature is the encryption of electronic communications on the Internet. In particular, website owners use SSL to encrypt the communication between their website (server) and a user (browser). This is done by applying SSL to the HTTP protocol, resulting in the famous HTTPS.
In addition to security, SSL has been considered a ranking factor by Google since 2014. As a result, the incentive to switch from HTTP to HTTPS is quite large for those who want to rank better in an increasingly competitive SEO landscape. In parallel, Google announced that Chrome will begin penalizing websites that deliver so-called mixed content by blocking their HTTP resources. Therefore, it becomes crucial that every single web resource is delivered over HTTPS.
Although it was still a challenge a few years ago, enabling SSL on a website has now become quite a simple process. It is enough to install an SSL certificate on the server that hosts the website. In addition, many hosting providers now include an SSL certificate as part of their packages. This makes the process of SSL activation much easier for website owners, especially non-technicians. However, the certificates offered by hosting providers usually come with certain limitations, such as limited domain coverage or low validation requirements. Therefore, many website owners prefer to purchase their SSL certificates from a certificate authority such as DigiCert or Sectigo.
Finally, SSL can be quite helpful in complying with data protection regulations such as the GDPR or the general Brazilian data protection law. Since the cost of activation is often close to zero, it remains one of the cheapest measures to ensure data security.
What is a robots.txt?
robots.txt file for SEO A Robots Exclusion Protocol – or robots.txt for short – should be an integral part of every website, because with the help of this text file crawlers (bots) of a search engine can be "directed". The robots.txt file is a plain text file that is created on the domain root (e.g. https://www.domain.de/robots.txt). Here, pages, directories or parameters can be excluded from crawling. Web crawlers look at this file before crawling and get hints about possible excluded pages. A link to the XML sitemap can also be stored in this file. In order not to exclude important pages in the application or to make sensitive content accessible,
You use the robots.txt file wisely. This is especially important for search engine optimization in order to give crawlers access to all relevant pages, because this is the only way pages can be included in the index and played out on search results pages.
You can get a detailed insight into the application and structure of the robots.txt file in our blog article on robots.txt blog article on robots.txt. Here you will also learn a lot about the different user agents and how you can check the robots.txt file via the Google Search Console.
0 Comments