What is technical SEO?

[Ononivami]

Technical SEO is the optimization of a website's underlying infrastructure, such as its code, hosting, and server configuration, to enhance its visibility and ranking in search engine results pages (SERPs). Technical SEO is a mandatory aspect of SEO because it helps search engines understand and crawl a website effortlessly allowing them to index and rank its pages correctly.

Some common technical SEO techniques include:

• Site architecture: Making sure that a website has a logical structure and is easy to navigate for both users and search engines. This includes using a clear hierarchy of header tags and organizing content into categories and subcategories.
• XML Sitemap: Submitting a sitemap to search engines that lists all of the website's URLs and their hierarchy. This helps search engines expeditiously discover and crawl new pages.
• Robots.txt: Creating and submitting a robots.txt file that tells search engines which pages or sections of a website should not be crawled.
• Canonicals: Using rel="canonical" tags to indicate to search engines which pages on a website are the preferred version to be indexed.
• Redirects: Implementing 301 redirects to properly redirect old URLs to new ones, avoiding 404 errors and maintaining link equity.
• Mobile optimization: Ensuring that a website is optimized for mobile devices and can be easily navigated and consumed on small screens.
• Page speed: Optimizing the loading speed of a website's pages to improve user experience and reduce bounce rates.

 

[Dilip]

There are a lot of areas where common sense works. But in SEO, there are specific fields where you are bound to your technical skills to solve the problem. For example a fast loading page needs a lot of server level optimisation, which are highly technical in nature.

 

[Ononivami]

There are a lot of areas where common sense works. But in SEO, there are specific fields where you are bound to your technical skills to solve the problem. For example a fast loading page needs a lot of server level optimisation, which are highly technical in nature.

It is very crucial for web page to load very quickly within 3 seconds because it's the first optimisation technique that must be adopted. If a web page loads very slowly, it is going to turn users away.

 

[Dilip]

I would say load your web page under 60 seconds. People are so impatient these days. They have a lot of things to do, hardly got time to wait.

 

[Arantor]

load your web page under 60 seconds.

I recently fixed a WordPress that took 60-70 seconds to load a page. The rule over in e-commerce land is 'for every second after the first 2-3 seconds, you lose another 10% of your audience'. 60 seconds is an astronomically large amount of time to allow.

 

[Dilip]

Nice to know.

For regular blogs or forums, how much do you recommend? With shared hosting, 60s is not a big deal.

 

[Arantor]

With shared hosting, 60 seconds is still ridiculous. Anything over 10 for a normal page should be unacceptable - there will always be exceptions for 'big' pages or reports or downloads but normal blog posts or forum topics shouldn't take that long, they just shouldn't.

I don't remember them taking that long 15 years ago in the age of not even having broadband!