Put simply, technical SEO refers to the process of honing various technical elements of a website with the aim of improving its search rankings and organic traffic.
Technical SEO is designed to support successful crawling, indexing, and rendering, and is crucial for helping search engines and online users understand and find your content.
Is technical SEO difficult?
Fortunately, the technical SEO basics aren’t too hard to understand. However, more complex aspects of technical SEO shouldn’t be attempted if you’re only interested in technical SEO for beginners.
Making changes to your site’s technical SEO without the relevant knowledge or experience could have a negative impact instead of having the intended effect.
If you’re unsure how to best carry out a change to an element of your technical SEO, it’s always wise to contact a professional agency.
Understanding the basics of technical SEO
Unsure where to start? There are many technical SEO changes you can make to a website, but all the changes you make will ultimately be assessed by search engines and their process of crawling, indexing, and rendering.
We explain these technical SEO basics in more detail below.
Crawling
Crawling refers to the process of a search engine’s bots or crawlers finding and being able to properly access a website’s content. Put simply, if they can’t find and understand your content, then it’s never going to rank.
Text, images, and videos can all be crawled, so ensuring this content is accessible is an essential part of any technical SEO strategy.
Indexing
The stage after crawling, indexing ensures any website content that is crawled is then properly stored and organised in the search engine’s database.
This allows the search engine to quickly find and serve your content to online users following a relevant search query. It’s therefore just as important to ensure pages are being indexed.
Rendering
Used to understand the layout and structure of your website, rendering involves search engines accessing your pages, running your site code, and assessing the website architecture.
This helps them to figure out how your website is laid out which, in turn, determines both how and when this content is displayed and indexed.
As a result, dynamic rendering is vital for minimising crawl time for each page and ensuring each page is correctly indexed and displayed in the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
Checklist for implementing technical SEO
It’s clear that in order for your website to appear in the SERPs for relevant search queries, search engines must be able to crawl, index, and render your site as quickly and easily as possible.
To achieve this without becoming an expert in SEO, there are various elements you should be regularly checking as well as some relatively easy technical SEO alternations even beginners can make.
To discover more about technical SEO for beginners, simply carry on reading or get in touch today.
Conduct an audit
Using an SEO tools like Screaming Frog, Ahrefs, Semrush, and Google Analytics, you should always start your technical SEO journey with a full audit.
This will help you to identify which technical areas need improvement and which are already fully optimised for search engines and online users. These tools are all user-friendly and therefore great for beginners trying to learn more about the technical SEO basics.
Improve page speed
When it comes to indexing your website’s content, slow-loading websites aren’t top of the list for search engines. They know that their users want quick answers, so they’ll often prioritise faster-loading sites.
Page loading speed can be improved by compressing site images (such as brand logos as well as product images), reducing HTTP requests, and resolving JavaScript issues.
Implement a backlinking strategy
With website quality and popularity influencing how quickly a site is indexed, it makes sense to build a backlinking strategy. The more backlinks (that are credible and not situated on spam sites), the higher your website’s ranking signals are likely to be.
You can therefore encourage speedy indexing by creating both high-quality content and reaching out to relevant, reliable sites for backlinks to this content. This will increase your site authority and help to drive more organic traffic to your website.
Don’t neglect internal linking
While backlinking is important for encouraging speedy search engine indexing, internal linking (links made from one page on your website to another page on the same site) plays a role in the rendering process.
This internal linking is ideal for helping searching engines to understand the overall hierarchy and structure of your website content.
Identify and rectify duplicate content
Duplicate content can be problematic for search engines as they don’t want to rank the same pieces of content and prefer pages with distinct information.
To prevent duplicate content from hurting your rankings or impacting organic traffic, you can remove it using the relevant canonical tags.
Experts in technical SEO
Regardless of whether you want to increase the amount of organic traffic finding your website or improve brand awareness, it pays to understand the technical SEO basics.
At our award-winning digital marketing agency, you’ll find technical SEO experts that can implement basic and more complex changes to support the success of your site.
Following a comprehensive audit of the technical SEO on your website, our team of SEO professionals will identify any issues and use their extensive experience and knowledge to swiftly rectify any elements that could be having a negative impact.
For more than 10 years, we’ve helped countless businesses across the UK to connect with their customers using our technical SEO know-how.
Our services cover key locations including Yorkshire, Leeds, and Sheffield, but no matter where your business is based, we can help.
Keen to learn more about technical SEO for beginners or the various ways that we can help your business grow online? Contact the Aqueous Digital team today to uncover a wide range of technical SEO tips, strategies, and services.
To discuss your requirements and existing SEO strategy in more detail, please feel free to give us a call on 0800 285 1424.
Alternatively, you can also get in touch via email by sending your enquiry to hello@aqueous-digital.co.uk, or filling in and submitting our convenient online contact form.
Once we’ve received your enquiry, our team of technical SEO professionals will conduct a free website health check and book you in for a no-obligation consultation.
