Technical SEO is a term you have probably heard a lot, especially if you have a website and want it to show up in Google search results. As more businesses enter the web, the importance of technical SEO becomes more apparent. If you want to learn more about this field or enter the job market as an SEO specialist, do not miss this TURBOMAKE article.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the steps you need to do on your website so that it meets the minimum requirements to achieve better rankings in Google results. One of the important steps you can do for this purpose is to design your website structure in such a way that users can access wherever they need in the shortest possible time. Given that Google places great importance on user experience, it will show you in better positions to the audience.
Why is technical SEO important?
Is technical SEO really worth your time? Wasn’t content supposed to be king? If that is the case, then why do we need to spend time on technical SEO for our website? If you are at the beginning of ups and downs of SEO, these questions may arise in your mind. Although we will talk more about technical SEO and its tips later in this article, it is still necessary to know some basic information about it. Technical SEO, in a very simple sense, means preparing the website technically so that Google likes our site!
So why is technical SEO important? Because being at the top of Google search results is important to us. Because being more visible is important to us, and ultimately, making more money is important to us. If these things are important to you, then technical SEO should be important to you as well.
Why should we do technical SEO on the website?
In previous section, we talked a little about this topic and briefly concluded why technical SEO is so important. Let us look at this issue from Google’s perspective. The truth is that Google believes so strongly that the customer is always right! Google neither makes slogans nor jokes about this.
So, as the first point, keep in mind that Google cares a lot about the user and does its best to ensure that the user leaves the website satisfied. So it makes sense that if we want to get Google’s attention, we need to be careful about website users. So how do we keep an eye on users so that they do not get upset? One important solution is to use technical SEO services.
The difference between On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO and Technical SEO
One of the topic you need to know is the difference between On-page SEO, Off-page SEO, and Technical SEO. This is the beginning of your journey to become a SEO expert.
What is On-Page SEO?
To put it simply, on-page SEO is everything we do on our own website to rank better in Google. It can include keyword research, content strategy, internal linking, and more.
What is Off-Page SEO?
Off-page SEO refers to the works we do outside of our own website, but still with the goal of achieving higher Google rankings. For example, let’s say you have an Instagram account and you create content to further promote your products. You probably also put a link in your bio so that people who want to buy your product can do so directly from your website. This is one of the steps that falls into the off-page SEO category. You can do the same thing on blogs and other websites. There are many services that allow you to upload your content to these services for free and link to your website.
Tips for Technical SEO in WordPress
Many websites are developed with WordPress. This content management system is free and doesn’t involve you in complex coding processes. That is why many of us decide to start our own website with WordPress. Ultimately, WordPress websites also need technical SEO. Here are some important tricks that can help your website from a technical SEO perspective:
Use of SSL certificate
Suppose you wrote a private letter to your spouse and sent it by mail. You would expect only your spouse to read it. Now what happens if the person who is supposed to deliver the letter, opens it and reads it without your permission. Something like this usually happens to a website without an SSL certificate. The point is that when a user enters their information on a website, this information goes to the server, server checks it, and an appropriate response is sent to the user’s browser. Now, if someone gets in the way of this information and reads it, what a great disaster will be created!
An SSL certificate, which is one of the important factors in technical SEO, prevents this issue. Simply put, an SSL certificate ensures that all information is exchanged between server and user’s browser in an encrypted format. Now, even if a hacker gets access to this information, it would get nothing but a series of coded information that no one can read. This is very important to Google. That is why Google has officially announced that websites that do not use a valid SSL certificate will experience a decrease in traffic.
Use breadcrumbs in WordPress
It helps users to know exactly where they are and return to previous branches at any time. Therefore, the user gets a better experience working with the website, and because Google cares about this, it also affects technical SEO.
Be careful not to get hacked
Another thing you should pay attention in technical SEO is website security issue. Website hacking is a red line for Google. Therefore, it makes sense to do everything you can to prevent your server or host from being hacked. Google doesn’t care how skilled the website hacker was or why your website was hacked, this has happened and your users security has been compromised.
The following solutions are among the technical SEO services that can improve your website:
- Change WordPress admin page login address
- Change database name prefix so that it is not identifiable.
- Always use reputable hosting companies to purchase servers or hosts.
- Choose strong passwords for administrative accounts as well as the database.
- If you are using a server to host a website, close unused ports.
Make your website responsive
Do you use your mobile phone or desktop more for web browsing? Most likely, mobile phone! You are not the only one who’s addicted to your mobile phone and does everything with it; that’s the power of technology. Users like to open websites on their mobile phone, and you should respect their wishes.
Responsive website design means that it doesn’t matter whether a website is opened on a laptop, mobile phone, or a tablet. The important thing is that the website’s elements are not cluttered and are displayed correctly and systematically to the user. So design your website responsive so that in addition to improve your website’s technical SEO, both your customers and Google get satisfied with you!
Technical SEO steps
Now we need to know how to do technical SEO. For this purpose, it is better to use technical SEO checklist to make sure you have done everything correctly. Below are the most important steps you should consider in technical SEO:
Speed up your website
As it’s mentioned earlier, increasing website speed is one of the most important technical SEO tips that you should definitely pay attention to. In addition, website speed is a factor that Google attaches great importance to; it also provides a good user experience to your customers. The first step you need to do is to measure the website loading speed through various tools.
Many tools have been designed for this task. For example, you can get help from GTMetrix.com or Pagespeed.web.dev. In addition to tell you how long it takes for different parts of your website to be displayed to the user, these tools also tell you tips that you can follow to speed up your website.
Fix broken links.
Broken links refer to website addresses that do not actually exist. That means the page address is there, but it is not there! When does this happen? For example, let’s say you have a page on your website to buy a 200-page notebook, but you don’t need it right now. well, if you don’t know the technical SEO tips, the first solution that comes to your mind is: go to the WordPress dashboard and easily delete this product page. this won’t cause any problems for your technical SEO. However, if a user clicks on the link to this page, which is located in your website’s mega menu, a 404 error will be displayed. Find all broken links on your website. Write content for them or at least use page redirection tools and redirect users to a page with something to see and read!
Do not use duplicate content
This point is very important in On-Page SEO and technical SEO. Google is strongly against similar content; Now this duplicate content can be on two different websites or even one website. Where does this matter become a problem for you? For example, you have a store website and want to provide content for several of your identical products. suppose you have a 200-page notebook with gridded pages and a notebook with the same number of pages but with simple lines. The content of these two products is generally similar; but if you use duplicate content on your website, you are not following the principles and technical SEO rules! To solve this issue, you can use the Canonical tag. This tag simply tells Google which of the seemingly duplicate content is original content, and rest of them can be left unindexed.
Activate the sitemap
Sitemaps are also something that Google cares about a lot. They help Google crawlers identify and index all the pages on your website. you can enable sitemaps on your WordPress site yourself, plugins like Rank Math SEO or Yoast SEO will help you do this.
not index pages with irrelevant content
Not all pages on your website may have content that is exactly related to the main topic of your website. For example, on a shopping website, what could the invoice page or the login page have to do with your products? One of the actions you need to do in technical SEO is to find these pages and tell Google’s crawlers not to index them.
