It is tough to talk about SEO without mentioning Technical SEO. This is because the web pages have to be both indexable and crawlable in order to acquire a decent chance for a successful ranking. However there are several other aspects and activities as well that have a mild impact when compared to the links and the content. So, what is meant by technical SEO? Let us take a look:
Technical SEO
Generally technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website to be able to assist the search engines to locate, understand, crawl and index your pages. It helps in increasing display and rankings in search engines. Now, it is also important to understand that technical SEO can also be quite complex and tough to understand. Let us take a look at some of the terms within the Technical SEO process:
The Process Of Crawling
The process where the search engine collects content from the web pages and utilizes the links within them to discover more pages is known as ‘crawling’. Let us take a look at some of the ways in which to control what can be ‘crawlable’ for your website:
The Robot.text
This is the file type that directs the search engine where it is possible to go or not to go within the website.
The Crawl Rate
Did you know that there is a crawl-delay directive available that can be used within the robot.txt that is used by most crawlers? Its main function is to set you on how often the page is crawlable. However, bear in mind that this is not supported by Google, because then you will have to change the crawl rate within the Google search console.
Access Restriction
When you want the page to be accessible to certain users except for the search engines, then you need to opt for any of these three choices:
- A certain kind of login system
- The HTTP authentication
- IP Whitelisting; as this only allows certain IP addresses to be able to access the page.
This is the kind of setup which is the best for aspects such as the internal networks, member-only-content, test, staging or development sites. This way it makes it possible for a certain group of users to be able to access a page; except for the search engine that will not be able to access the page and will not index it.
To View the Crawl Activity
This is specially for Google, where the easiest way to observe what is being crawled is using the ‘Crawl Stat’ reports. This is located within the Google Search console, which offers you more information about how the process of crawling is done within your website.
If you wish to check out all the crawl activity that is being done within your website, then you need to access the server logs and also to use the tool for a better analysis of the data. This can get quite advanced, however if you have a hosting that comprises control panels such as cPanel, then you can have access to raw logs and also various aggregators such as Webalizer and AWstats.
The Crawl Adjustments
Every website comprises a certain ‘crawl budget’. This is a combination of how often Google wants to crawl on a site and the kind of crawling that is allowed by your site. Here the more popular pages and those pages that are usually crawled and those pages that are not all that popular will be crawled far less.
However, if the crawler finds a sign of stress when crawling across a certain website, then they will generally slow down or even stop crawling altogether, until the conditions have improved. Once the pages have been crawled, they will be rendered and sent over to the index. Here, the index is basically a master list of pages that can be easily returned for quick queries.
Prioritization on Technical SEO
Prioritization is one of the toughest aspects when it comes to technical SEO. While there are a couple of recommended practices, however, some changes will cause more effect on your ranking as compared to the others.
The Technical SEO Tools
There are certain tools that help improve the technical aspects of your website:
The Google Search Console also known as Google Webmaster Tools
This is basically a free service from Google that assists in monitoring and troubleshooting the appearance in the search results. One can use this to locate and fix the technical errors, check out the submitted sitemaps, check out the structured data problems and much more.
The Google Mobile Friendly Test
The Google mobile friendly test check shows how easily a certain page can be used by a visitor on their mobile device. It also helps recognise certain mobile-usability problems such as text which is too small to be read, using the incompatibility plugins and more.
CONCLUSION
This is all that we have at the moment on The Importance of Technical SEO. Was this article useful? Do let us know in the space below and we would love to hear from you.
MG Technologies