Technical SEO

Introduction

Technical SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the strategy which involves creating and optimizing your website so that search engine crawls and indexes your website quickly. Technical SEO is just one part of the whole SEO.

Many website owners use technical SEO to improve their ranking on SERP (Search engines results page). So now you know how necessary technical SEO is for your online business.

Importance of Technical SEO

Here is the thing, even if your content is excellent, it has a chance to convert your website and visitors into regular customers. But after having great content on your website, imagine your page is not crawled on google. Then, all your hard work will go waste. That is why technical SEO is essential.

Even after having great content, if the programming is terrible and there are broken links, your website won’t pass the GoogleBot and eventually won’t rank on google. So this is why you have to focus on your overall website. Not only focus on the content.

As we have seen, the technical SEO will help google find, crawl and index the page. So let us know what you can do to crawl your website on google. However, before that, let us first look at how crawling works.

How Crawling Works?

Crawling is where a search engine grasps content from pages and uses the links in them to find more pages. There are a few methods that you can use to control what you want to crawl on google from your website. Some of them are mentioned below:

Robots.txt:
Robot.txt will tell the google search engine not to crawl certain pages on your website. The major search engine will recognize the request of robot.txt whenever it wants any page not to be indexed on google.

Access Restriction:
Sometimes you want users to visit certain website pages but don’t want search engines to crawl them. Here is what you can do. There are three options. You can choose one of them to restrict the accessibility of the search engine:
IP allow listing. This allows the specific IP address to access certain pages.
Some type of login system.

HTTP Authentication (You need a password to access the pages).
This will not allow the search engine to access those pages. And also, only a few users can access those pages. It is also suitable for members-only content, internal networks, development or testing of the sites.

How We Can See Crawling Activity

You can see what google is crawling on your website. In addition, you can look into the “Crawls stats” report in the Google Search Console, which will provide information about your website crawled.

If you want to see the crawling activity of your website, you have to log into your server logs and use the tool to get accurate information. But if your website has a control panel, you should have access to raw logs and a few aggregates like Webalizer.

Adjustments of Crawling (Technical SEO)

Each website has a different crawl budget. It is the combination of how much google wants to crawl your website and how much crawling your website allows.

Pages that change consistently and popular or well-linked pages get crawled quickly. And pages that are not well-linked, remain the same, or are not popular will take time crawling, or sometimes they get crawled.

If the errors keep interrupting while crawling, the crawlers will stop crawling your page till the issues are not solved.

Indexing

Once the crawling is done, the next thing that happens is your page moves to get indexed. So let us dive in and briefly see what indexing is and how it works. This is technical SEO. We will help you how you can index your page and also check if it is indexed.

Robots Meta Tag
A Robot meta tag is the HTML snippet that informs search engines how to index the pages. It is placed in the head section of a web page.

As we have seen how to crawl and index pages, let us know how you can see the page’s indexing. You can check the indexing report of your page on-site audit. You can see the pages that are not indexed and the reason for it.

What are Technical SEO Tools?

Now, as we have seen about crawling, indexing etc., let us look at the technical SEO tools. What they are, and we can use them to rank on google.

Google Search Console
The most common tool used by website owners. It is basically a free service provided by Google that will help you monitor your website’s search results. You can find and fix website errors, see structured data issues, submit sitemaps etc.

Google search console is entirely free of cost. You can index your page there and see if the page is indexed or not. If the page is not indexed, what are the errors stopping the indexing of the page?

Page Speed Insight
Speed page insight another tool you can use to check your page’s loading time, and also it provides the page’s performance score and shows you the errors that slow the page’s loading time.

Google Mobile Friendly Tool                                                                                This tool checks how quickly the users can use your website page on mobile. This also helps you find errors on the website that are causing mobile users, for example, the size of the text or the use of incompatible plug-ins.

The other tools that you can use are the Ahref toolbar and Chrome DevTools. These also help you improve your page performance.