Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website to rank better on search engines. It also includes activities to improve user experience. Some of them are submitting your sitemap to Google, creating an SEO-friendly site structure, improving your website’s speed, making your website mobile-friendly, finding and fixing duplicate content issues, etc. Technical SEO greatly impacts a website’s performance on Google.
Now let's understand the basic steps of technical SEO.
Understanding Crawling
Firstly you have to make sure your search engines are effectively crawled. Crawling occurs when search engines follow links on pages they already know about. You have to make sure that your page is accessible to all search engines.
The Google crawl budget is the number of pages on a website that Googlebot will crawl and index within a given time.
Create SEO-Friendly Site Structure
This is also called site architecture. It is the way pages are linked together within your site. This is an effective way to help crawlers find your website content quickly and easily. You have to ensure all the pages are just a few clicks away from your homepage while you are structuring your homepage.
Submitting Your Sitemap to Google
A sitemap is mostly an XML file that contains a list of important pages on your website. This lets search engines know which pages you have and where to find them. This becomes extremely important when your site contains a lot of pages or if they’re not well-linked together.
Understanding Indexing
After search engines crawl your pages, they try to analyze and understand the content of those pages. Then it stores those pieces of content in its search index in a huge database containing billions of web pages. The search engines index the pages of your website to appear in the search results. You can perform a site search to check whether your pages are indexed or not.
Canonicalization
Google sometimes doesn’t know which of the pages to index and show in search results when it finds similar content on multiple pages on your site. This is when the process of canonicalization is used. It has a tag called canonical tag (rel="canonical") which identifies a link as the original version, and tells Google which page it should index and rank.
Use HTTPS
It is a secure version of HTTP that helps protect sensitive user information like passwords and credit card details. To check whether your site uses HTTPS you have to simply visit it. You also need to install an SSL certificate which authenticates the identity of the website and establishes a secure connection when users are accessing it.