Technical SEO Factors to improve Website Performance

Have you ever had a website which performed well on Google, but still struggled to generate traffic? If you have, it’s likely because your site isn’t technically optimized. Technical SEO is often overlooked by many businesses, but it’s an important factor for ranking in search engines just like on page SEO and Backlink Creation for Search Engines like Google. Technical SEO factors covers everything from choosing the right domain name to creating quality content that can be crawled by search engine spiders. Here are some of the basic things you need to know about technical SEO and why they matter.

Important Technical SEO Factors

Domain and hosting

What’s the difference?

You may be wondering what the difference is between domain and hosting. A domain name is your website address, like www.example.com. It’s important to choose a domain that matches your business name to help potential customers find you online.

Hosting is the physical space on the internet where your website resides. There are different types of hosting providers, but for those just starting out, shared hosting is recommended as it’s cheaper and more secure than other options like dedicated server hosting. Other hosting providers include: cloud-based hosting (also called managed hosting), virtual private servers (VPS), and dedicated servers. Shared hosts deliver a number of different features which make them a good choice for beginners – they offer email, data storage, file management and website building tools – all at an affordable price.

A good hosting can provide your website fast speed and as website speed is a part of page experience and it is a ranking signal. You must get a high quality hosting that can provide you enough space and speed.

Robots.txt

For Search Engine Spiders

Robots.txt is the first step many businesses take on technical SEO. It’s a text file which contains information about your site for search engine crawlers. You can control what type of content can be crawled or can’t be crawled on your website by using robots.txt. This Robots.txt file is uploaded in your root directory. 

To upload Robots.txt file to your website, create a file on any note pad, use the below given code as per requirement and save the file with the name robots.txt.

If you want to block all pages on your site from being indexed, you can place the following code in robots.txt:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /

You may also choose to block certain pages or directories through robots.txt by adding this code:

User-agent: Googlebot

Disallow: /directory1/disallowed_page1/

Disallow: /directory2/disallowed_page2/

Here, * means all search engines and if you want to block any certain search engines you can enter their name just like in the second code. 

Some businesses may also choose to use the noindex meta tag in robots.txt if they are not interested in ranking for any keywords with their homepage, but want to rank  internal pages of their website. Some business owners may only want specific directories of their website indexed, while others may place all their content behind password protected directories that are not accessible to search engines without authentication or authorization codes.

A question arises that why would you want search engines to not crawl your web pages. So, one of the examples of web pages that are available in your website, but they are not for users like admin page, author page, a page which has duplicate content. This helps the search spiders to allocate their crawl budget to the important pages which are useful for readers.

XML Sitemaps

If you want Google to crawl all of your content, then you’ll need to create an XML sitemap. The XML sitemap is a list of web pages on your site that allows search engine spiders to easily crawl all the content on your site. If you have an XML sitemap, it’s easier for search engines to find everything on your website, which can help increase traffic and rankings. To create an XML sitemap, one does not have to have technical knowledge, plenty of free tools are available that easily create a Sitemap for your website. You only need to enter your website URL.

You can create an XML Sitemap through this tool.

After creating an XML sitemap, you need to add the file in the root directory and submit the sitemap URL in Google search console. Your XML sitemap URL will look like this

https://www.yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml

Core Web Vital

Core Web Vital is a part of Page Experience and now Google has declared page experience as a ranking factor, it is essential for us to improve core web vital score.Core Web Vital has many factors like LCP (Largest Contentful Paint), FID (First Input Delay), CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift), HTTPS, Mobile Friendliness. You can check all of these in Google PageSpeed Insight, GT Metrix. You will get all the details about the issue. 

HTTP response codes

HTTP response codes are an important part of technical SEO. They tell search engine spiders the status of the page when they crawl it, which helps them understand how to rank your content.

There are four HTTP response status codes:

1XX (100-199): These status codes inform that everything is ok and the user can continue with his request. 

2XX (200-299): These status code tells users that request has been succeeded

3XX (300-399): 300 Status codes inform that the request can have multiple possible responses. The common for SEO is 301, 302 and 308 that tells about the redirection of URLs. 

4XX (400-499): 400 are bad requests. This indicates that the server cannot respond to the request. 404 is quite common for SEOs. 

5XX (500): This shows server side error only. 

Content organization and structure

The content of your website is the most important part of it. It’s what your readers are consuming when they visit your site. Search engine spiders, or bots, are able to crawl and rank websites based on their content. When you design a website, make sure to organize your content in a way that makes sense for humans and search engines alike. Otherwise, it’s likely that search engine spiders won’t be able to index all of your pages properly, which will keep users from finding them when they’re looking for what you offer online.

URLs and SEO

The URL of your website is the web address that appears in a browser. It is often overlooked, but it’s one of the most important aspects of technical SEO. When you type a URL into a browser, you are taken to an individual page on that website. If you were viewing the webpage for “Bigfoot’s Teeth” and typed in http://www.bigfootsteeth.com/page1/, then Bigfoot’s Teeth would become your default homepage and Page 1 would be your default page.

One of the major problems with URLs is that they can be too long or complicated – or not unique enough – which can make it difficult for Google spiders to crawl them. In order for spiders to access every single page on your site, they need to be able to find it through a simple, easy-to-remember URL that doesn’t contain any numbers or special characters. So if you have a blog post that’s been shared 50 times by other sites, those links would not count if the URL was something like this: http://www.examplecom/blog-post#comment-id=123456789

URL rewriting

URL rewriting is an essential technical SEO practice. You’ll want to use the same URL on every page of your website so that search engines can easily index it. This will also help you avoid duplicate content problems.

Make sure to include keywords in your URLs as well as any parameters for sorting or filtering, like “?s=b”. You should also use a URL redirect for any non-relevant pages on your site, such as 404 error pages and product pages that aren’t available anymore.

Mobile optimization

Mobile optimization is usually the first thing to check when assessing your website’s technical SEO. If your site isn’t mobile-friendly, that could be the reason it doesn’t rank well in search engines like Google. Google provides a tool called PageSpeed Insights which will alert you if your website needs improvements for mobile.

Technical SEO is most underrated in all 3 SEO aspects, but it is the aspect of SEO on which we have full control and this keeps us ahead of the competition. And when cookieless world marketing is taking place, the role of SEO will be more important than ever.  So, next time when you do an SEO audit, don’t forget to check all about Technical SEO factors and work on it to improve website performance.