Optimize Your Website for Google with Technical SEO

A Beginners Guide to Technical SEO: Optimizing Your Website for Google

 

What is Technical SEO? The branch of search engine optimization focuses on the technical side of things. Technical SEO encompasses your website’s crawling, indexing, and caching process. Google is updating its algorithm to weed out spammy websites, increase user trust, and reward those with high-quality content. To achieve these objectives, Google has introduced many new search ranking factors. These are “secret” algorithms because their details aren’t public. Even so, every website owner needs to know about them to avoid getting penalized by Google.

 

What Is Technical SEO?

 

Google has introduced new algorithms to rate websites. The good news is that website owners can take steps to optimize their websites. This is what we call technical SEO.

 

How Important is Technical SEO?

 

We all know that content is king, but how many of us follow this in practice? As we’ve already mentioned, Google’s algorithms have evolved over the years, affecting how websites rank in the SERPs. As a result, improving your website’s technical SEO has become significant over time. More than ever, Google is rewarding websites with great content that offer a great user experience and are fast loading. Therefore technical SEO is so important.

 

Which Factors Matter the Most for Technical SEO?

 

The major technical SEO factors include – originality, content length, keyword research, user experience, and website speed. –

• Originality: Google wants every website to be original. This means that content needs to be unique to your website and not copied elsewhere. This includes images and video.
• Content length: Google wants search results relevant to users, so the best content length is around 1,500 words. Anything shorter than that can be misleading; anything longer is often too detailed.
• Keyword research: When writing content, it’s essential to research which keywords to target. This is because Google ranks websites based on the most popular keywords.
• User experience: Websites that are easy to use rank higher with Google. This means optimizing user experience, website speed, website navigation, and producing quality content.
• Website speed: Google has introduced a speed rating for websites called a “Speed” rating. How fast does your website load?

 

What Is a Good User Experience?

Google’s algorithms have evolved to reward websites with a good user experience. The essential elements of user experience are:

1. Loading time: The average user expects a website to load in 2 seconds or less. If yours takes longer, you’re likely to lose that visitor.
2. Bounce rate: Google measures how many people visit your website but don’t stay long enough to read your content.
3. Website structure: Google wants users to find what they want, so it’s essential to have a structured website.
4. Website security: Google has several tools that help it identify if there are other security concerns.
5. Page layout: Google expects websites to have a basic page layout. This includes:
6. Title tags: The first thing Google crawls is your title tag. It also appears in search results and is one of the most critical elements of your website.
7. URLs: Google wants to understand what your website is about. So, optimizing your URLs for the most important keywords is essential.

 

What Is High-Quality Content?

 

Technical SEO impacts whether you have high-quality content.  Google’s algorithms have evolved to reward high-quality content. High-quality content must include these 8 B’s below:

• Be accurate: Avoid making false claims or inaccurate information to boost your rankings.
• Be comprehensive: Google rewards websites that are comprehensive. Thus, covering all the main topics you research is important.
• Be ethical: Avoid being unethical, and make sure you don’t violate Google’s terms of service.
• Be original: Avoid copying and pasting existing content. Instead, write your content.
• Be succinct: Google rewards concise writing, so make sure your content is informative and short.
• Be unique: Avoid plagiarism because Google will penalize your website.
• Be well-researched: Make sure you’re using credible sources and avoid using content that is too promotional.
• Be well-structured: Ensure your content is easy to read and well-organized.
• Include images and videos: Google loves visuals and encourages using pictures and videos in content.

How to Improve Website Speed?

In 2018, Google introduced a new algorithm that measures website speed. Website speed was one of the first algorithms ever presented. The problem is that many website owners didn’t know about it until it was too late. The good news is that every website owner can improve website speed by following a few simple steps.  They were utilizing technical SEO best practices, and the actions below will help you optimize your website speed.

 

First, you can install a content delivery network (CDN): Google prefers websites to be served from servers closest to the user. So, a CDN gives you the option to host your content remotely.

Then, use Gzip compression: Google recommends that every website uses Gzip compression to speed up loading time.

Also, reduce page load time:

• Use an analytics platform to track your page load. When it exceeds 2 seconds, make changes to speed up the loading time. Use HTML and CSS: It’s essential to use HTML and CSS to cut load time.
• Avoid too many redirects: Redirects can add significant loading time.
• Use server-side language: Server-side languages such as PHP, Python, and Ruby are quicker than other languages.
• Use fewer resources: The more resources (like images) your website uses, the longer it takes to load.
• Reduce requests to the server: Google recommends keeping the number of server requests below 10.

 

Summary

 

Google has introduced several new algorithms to rate websites. These include originality, content length, keyword research, user experience, and website speed. All these factors are important for improving technical SEO. To achieve these objectives, optimizing your website for these algorithms is essential. This will help you to get more organic traffic from Google. We hope you have learned from this article that technical SEO is necessary for Google. You will get more organic traffic from Google by improving your website’s technical SEO. Your website will also rank higher on Google’s search engine results pages.