Technical SEO: Changes to Improve Rankings

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing a website’s underlying code and infrastructure to make it easier for search engines to crawl, index and understand site content. A number of technical adjustments affect how search engines rank and evaluate websites.

Fixing Crawlability Issues

Thankfully, making sure search engines can properly access a website’s pages stands as one of the most important technical SEO tasks. This involves eliminating:

• Outdated redirects from broken links,
• URLs of pages that no longer exist,
• Server and robots.txt errors blocking bots,
• Repeated duplicate content across pages.

Once search engine crawlers can access all existing pages easily, technical SEO work can continue.

Improving Page Speed

Site speed significantly impacts rankings. Slowly, websites lose visibility in search results because they offer poor user experience. Consequently, reducing load times through:

• Minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript files,
• Optimizing images,
• Reducing page redirects,
• Leveraging a content delivery network.

boosts SEO. In fact, Google has explicitly stated page speed as a ranking factor.

Implementing HTTPS

Google now considers websites that do not use HTTPS as less secure and somewhat lowers their rankings. Thus, transitioning an entire domain to HTTPS improves its technical SEO health and security. Sticking with HTTP can negatively impact a website.

Resolving URL Issues

URL problems including:

• Having multiple URLs pointing to the same page
• Using session IDs in URLs
• Employing URL shorteners
• Too many URL redirects

confuse search engines and lower SEO. Thus, resolving these issues correctly helps optimize a website technically.

Additional Technical SEO Optimizations

In addition, there are a few other important technical optimizations that can be made.

• Firstly, structuring pages with proper heading tags (H1 – H6) helps search engines understand the topic and key sections of a page.
• Secondly, using descriptive internal linking between pages passes relevancy and importance between internal content.
• Thirdly, optimizing images by compressing and resizing them correctly reduces page load time while still providing high enough quality for users.
• Also, reducing JavaScript and CSS files by combining and minifying code also makes pages load faster.
• As well as, ensuring all content is unique and not duplicated across pages helps avoid Google seeing the site as “thin” or low-quality.

Conclusion

In summary, tackling technical SEO factors like crawlability, page speed, security and URLs serves as a foundation for success in on-page and off-page SEO optimizations. A website structured technically sound allows search engine rankings and organic traffic to ultimately improve.