Featured article by Dumitru Midon, Independent technology Author
In simple terms, technical Search Engine Optimisation refers to making a website more visible on search engines by making it compatible with search engine guidelines to get it indexed and ranked for keyword searches.
Web developers have the responsibility of performing SEO functions that have been pointed out by marketers. Technical SEO is done intermittently as opposed to ongoing efforts like link building. Nevertheless, it must be done right, otherwise, site ranking gets negatively affected. A website can have great content but if this content is not visible, the site cannot perform as expected and does not pull traffic as expected.
For a new website, doing technical SEO is pretty straightforward. An existing website needs technical SEO analysis which identifies gaps that need to be fixed. Search engine algorithm updates will also necessitate a review of SEO.
What is involved?
Technical SEO ensures that the site architecture encourages regular crawling by search engines. This involves making a website as horizontal as possible, by ensuring web pages do not go more than 4 levels deep.
Technical SEO also involves categorization. This is more so for e-commerce sites. It is categorizing different products and assigning URLs to these categories. This makes these products more visible to web engine crawlers. Other issues that are addressed by technical SEO include:
• Using appropriate subdomains
• Formatting of URLs
• Applying correct parameters for dynamic content
• Submitting the sitemap to search engines (including mobile and video)
• Give instructions to search engines using a ‘robots’ Meta tag with the robots.txt file (to give instructions to search crawlers, such as ‘do not index’)
Canonicalization
This involves choosing a preferred URL from among several choices. This is more so for a homepage which visitors may input in different formats e.g. http://www.happy.com and http://happy.com. This is done using tags and redirects for search engines.
Pagination
This is done for e-commerce sites where multiple products could look like duplicate content. Meta tags are used to rank paginated content
Reviewing content cannibalization
This is ensuring that content on the same website does not compete with each other which would affect ranking negatively. This involves prioritizing content and determining the appropriate internal linking and subdomains.
Redirection
This involves delivering the appropriate content to the right viewer depending on location, language, and device.
Speed optimization
Website loading speeds are optimized in different ways includingminifying code, caching solutions, content delivery networks, asynchronous loading and the use of Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML.
HTML markup
HTML is deployed to instruct web crawlers. It is also used to format content. Some of the HTML tools used include:
• Twitter Cards
• Open Graph – used to instruct Facebook crawlers
• Language tags
• Structured data markup
• Title, description and header tags
Technical SEO involves a lot more than this. Google, for example, uses more than 100 metrics in site ranking. Web developers must do technical SEO audits from time to time to identify where a website needs to improve to follow search engine guidelines which change every 2-3 years. This ensures that a website remains visible and ranks highly.
