Compelling reasons why you need technical SEO on your website

In 2006 when I started in SEO, the primary focus was on on-page and link building. Back then, SEO was not as complexed, complicated as you see at the moment. As time went by, I began hearing about technical SEO and eventually I promised myself to learn the technical part and I am glad I was damn right. Really pleased I did.

However, technical SEO has become a must-have and there are no two ways out. The good news is that; you can now find many tools around that help with tackling most of the tasks related to technical SEO but you will still definitely need to your eyes in some aspects without a doubt. There are free and paid tools alike.

Technical SEO, content, keyword research, linkage and marketing strategy

As far as I am concerned, these are the most important parts and components of SEO. I am diving-in this far because with technical SEO on its own you won’t go anywhere and it’ll be a waste of your time and resources. As SEO expert or consultant with all the above skills is a force to reckon with. That is the calibre of person you want to work with. I am writing this post out of experience and as someone with more than 10 years industry experience.

I will personally start from carrying out a succinct audit. Once I have identified the issues, the next step will be to make a plan of action before I move on to something else. This is just my personal approach as an individual. There is no formal methodology to a technical SEO approach. However, you need bags of wit, tact and a great understanding of Google guidelines.

Content and marketing are completely a different ball game. These two can be split into completely two different sections, employing different individuals. As an experienced SEO expert, you definitely need both skills because even though you might not be required to implement but it is important that you are in a position to provide the best advice possible in either of the sections. Therefore, you do not really have to be technical to provide mind-blowing SEO results. This is a fact. All you need to know is what is expected from a good website to deliver on their SEO goals and objectives

Structured Data for SEO

Structured data is structured information about a website or web page. It allows search engines to better interpret and classify the content of a website, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.

Structured Data helps search engines understand the context and provide more accurate search results. By adding structured data to your webpages, you can optimize your content so that it appears in the right place in SERPs (search engine result pages). This can lead to increased visibility, better click-through rates, and improved user experience – all of which are essential factors in SEO success!

By implementing structured data markup, you’re telling the search engine exactly what kind of content is on each page so that it can be categorized and ranked accordingly. This also helps search engines understand nuances in the content that would otherwise be undetectable. For example, structured data can help search engines distinguish between a “restaurant” page and a “café” page, both of which could appear in SERPs for the same query.

In summary, structured data is essential to improving your website’s visibility in SERPs and creating an enjoyable user experience. By implementing structured data markup, you can help ensure that your content is optimized for better results and more successful SEO campaigns!

Site structure and wireframes

Having a website that users might have to spend time searching for where is what is going to kill it. Having a site with a good structure is very important for user experience. If you make users to strain before finding what they want, your bounce rate will be as high as anything. I once have a chat with an SEO Manager from the UK regarding his approach to site structure and wireframing and his thoughts were that; this particular issue could be addressed with the help of sitemap on the site. I grind. How many website users understands or knows what a sitemap is? The truth is that we all have different opinions when it comes to approaching SEO. Site structure works well for SEO and PPC

A good site architecture takes into consideration how link equity is distributed all throughout the website, making it easy for site users to move from one section to the other. Internal linking is never all about rankings, but also about keep users on your website by introducing them to various sections and pages. Some people might think that this neither technical but I promise it is. I have seen sites with internal links and if you do not move your mouse over the page, you won’t find or notice any links. I suppose it was this way because the site owner had no technical or coding experience needed to get it right.

Redirects – 302 and 301

This is pretty much easy on WordPress when using plugins designed for that purpose, but on other platforms, one will have to implement them manually. Businesses are changing websites from time to time, and technology keeps evolving. Nowadays, having a responsive website has become very important.

When overhauling or revamping websites, shit can happen, and it does. This is where 302s and 301s skill come in handy. It could also be that a website has got similar content which needs redirecting another one to the preferred version permanently using 301. 302s are useful for temporal redirects. Without technical know, playing around with this subject on a live website is a risk not worth anyone efforts.

Having your website indexed and crawled by search engine bots

This is another topic with a lot of complexity if you have to work with robots.txt. Make the least mistake and no one will ever visit the website because it won’t be indexed. SEOs without the technical knowledge still are unable to find their way around this topic. With robots.txt, you tell the search engines what you want them to index and what to leave out. Having your website indexed is very important, this is usually achieved through submitting a site using Google Search Console.

There are various site maps and you will need to decide what you want indexing. Best practice is to submit an XML or HTML sitemap;

1. Images sitemap
2. Pages sitemap
3. Posts sitemap
4. Video sitemaps.

Sitemaps tell the search engines what your site is about. However, using tools like Copyscape to determine if there are any duplicate content is of paramount importance.

Accelerated mobile pages

Without the technical know-how, you cannot implement AMP on an HTML website and some other content management systems.  Accelerate mobile pages is gradually becoming an important aspect of SEO. However, it is still under continuous development and currently works with posts. It makes your page to load faster than normal by streaming some sections of the code as required. Amp comes after the surge in mobile consumption around the world, which is why it’s targeting mobile. Because it increases the loading speed on mobile, there is no reason why I cannot class it under technical SEO. It’s an open source development sponsored by Google, Bing and Yandex. With Open source developments, there are no limitations to how you use and or expand the functionality. Technical? Great.