Making technical-SEO accessible to everyone

OnCrawl has launched a guide to ‘Technical SEO for non-technical thinkers’ to help you understand how technical SEO works and how it can help your business.

Search engine optimization is all about getting your website at the top of the rankings to promote your business. You may have experimented with on-site optimization in the past by tweaking titles and keywords.

But how about the more technical side of things? Don’t worry, you don’t need to be an (Read more...). All you need is an understanding of how it works to improve your performance.

Here are the key questions answered from OnCrawl’s guide:

Content created in partnership with OnCrawl.

What do search engines need to access to create a search listing?

Technical SEO ensures that Google has all the details required to make a search listing.

Here’s what a search listing includes:

Title tag

The title tag is providing the title to the search engines. It’s the heading of your search listing.

Your title shouldn’t be more than 50-60 characters long and it should be appealing for users to click on it.

Technical SEO can tell you the length of your title tags, whether it fits your content and whether your pages are missing title tags.

URL or slug

The URL or slug is the link that directs users to your website. It gives you a quick idea of what the website is before visiting it. It is the confirmation that you’re clicking on what you were promised to check out.

Your URL should be easy to remember, short, and simple.

Technical SEO can tell you whether any of your pages have missing URLs, whether they contain any words or even the length of your URL.

Search listing text

This is drawn from the meta description of your text. It should explain what your content is about in approximately 160 characters.

Technical SEO can tell you whether your content matches the description, what the length is and also whether any of your pages have a missing meta description.

Additional elements in the search results page

Google has expanded beyond search listings that consist of URLs to improve the user experience during a search.

The search elements can include knowledge graph, how-to snippers, video and image carousel, news, etc.

Technical SEO can tell you whether your page can be used in additional page elements and whether the formatting is correct for this particular use.

How do search engines find your page?

You need to let Google know that your page exists in order to rank.

XML sitemaps and backlinks are the best ways to help Google discover your page.

Technical SEO is helping Google make the discovery easier.

For example, you can use technical SEO to create XML sitemaps, submit XML sitemaps to search engines, count the number of incoming links on your site, etc.

How do search engines evaluate your page?

Google uses many factors to evaluate your page and where it should land on the search results.

Some of them include:

• Google needs to be able to reach your page. Googlebots discovering and evaluating pages so it’s important to make sure that they can access your website. Technical SEO can tell you whether Googlebots are reaching your website, whether your site blocks bots or whether the site structure affect Google’s evaluation
• Your site needs to be reliable. Slow servers can affect your page ranking as they might seem unreliable to search engines if they can’t access your content. Technical SEO can help you keep your site safe and address critical issues that may affect your website.
• Your site should be authoritative. The quality of your content can affect your site’s authority along with the links you’re earning from credible websites. Technical SEO can help you monitor the sites that link to your website, the pages that receive backlinks while it can also help you improve your site’s authority.

How do search engines know which search queries to show your page for?

Google uses semantic understanding to highlight the pages that are most relevant to every search query. Machine learning are helping them spot the keywords and the relevant topics along with the context that match the search intent.

Technical SEO can help you improve your chances of ranking higher on search results. It can tell you the keyword density on your pages, the search terms that you are ranking but also details such as the page structure and the best strategies to understand Google’s tactics.

What other goals can we accomplish using technical SEO?

It can be useful in many ways to improve your understanding of technical SEO.

It can help you improve your ranking but also prevent problems that could affect your website’s performance.

Here are a few examples of making the most out of technical SEO.

• Saving time by automating repetitive tasks. There’s no need to repeat time-consuming tasks if you can automate them. Technical SEO can help you, for example, generate title and meta descriptions for product pages to improve your e-commerce success while saving time.
• Creating data-based predictions. If you’re working on testing your SEO implementation, technical SEO can help you predict its impact and how your theories can roll out in action. Projections around data and the prediction of traffic can help you be more efficient.
• Improving website code. Technical optimization can help you improve your site’s code to address critical issues that might not be discovered in other ways. You can discover pages that affect your page speed, your loading time or even your overall SEO to fix them before it’s too late.

To find out more about technical SEO, how to use it and how to access the best tools to meet your needs, read OnCrawl’s guide here.