![\"Technical](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Technical-SEO-definition.jpg\")
<\/p>\nWhat do technical SEO and weeding a garden have in common?<\/p>\n
SEO strategies can be broadly categorized into two types: those that actively boost your site’s rankings and those that remove obstacles to your site’s performance.<\/p>\n
Technical SEO primarily falls into the latter category. Just as weeding a garden eliminates factors that hinder a plant\u2019s growth, technical SEO helps your site get it’s full potential by creating an environment where your SEO efforts can thrive. Removing weeds allows search engines to crawl, index, and rank your site better.<\/p>\n
This post is a no-code guide to improving your rankings with technical SEO.<\/p>\n
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Technical SEO involves optimizing a website’s architecture and its technical aspects to address issues that might hinder its ranking on search engines. This typically leads to a higher ranking because the site:<\/p>\n
Technical optimization is crucial because it directly impacts how search engines access, interpret, and rank your content. If search engines can’t properly index your site or access your content, it won’t rank \u2013 directly affecting your online visibility and earning potential.<\/p>\n
Also, technical aspects of your site significantly influence user experience. The Google leak of 2024 revealed that user metrics can indeed affect rankings, further emphasizing the importance of technical SEO.<\/p>\n
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![\"Three](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Three-elements-of-tech-SEO-1024x536.png\")
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There are three aspects to technical SEO:<\/p>\n
1. Improving<\/b> linking structure<\/b><\/p>\n
A well-structured site is essential for both users and web crawlers. For users, an intuitive site structure<\/a> makes it easy to find information. It also facilitates efficient indexing for web crawlers. Pages that crawlers can’t find won’t be included in search indexes, rendering them invisible in the search results.<\/p>\n 2. Increasing user experience<\/b><\/p>\n User experience is critical from both user and search engine perspectives. According to webfx.com<\/a>:<\/p>\n From a search engine perspective, in 2021, Google\u2019s Core Web Vitals<\/a> became a part of its ranking algorithm, measuring:<\/p>\n 3. Reducing errors<\/b><\/p>\n A site with technical errors provides a bad user experience. In our current digital landscape, with competitors lurking around every corner, having a bad user experience is likely to result in diminishing users and lost revenue.<\/p>\n Furthermore, since Google is always looking for ways to improve its user experience, reducing errors makes simple sense from a business perspective. By reducing errors, you are aligning your content with Google\u2019s business goals, and the more you do that, the more likely your content will rank in search results. User experience is evident in many of its updates<\/a>, including:<\/p>\n As technical SEO strategy is a broad topic, let\u2019s break it down into small steps. Here are eight technical optimization best practices:<\/p>\n In order for your content to appear in search results, you must ensure that search engines can find it. Search engines do this by systematically crawling the web by following hyperlinks in order to discover new or updated content. If your site is not crawlable, it is not accessible, and an inaccessible site will not be indexed.<\/p>\n The next step after crawling is for the search engine to render your content. This means it takes the page built on HTML, CSS, and JavaScript and turns it into a visual representation of that page. The search engine looks at things like JavaScript to see what the final version of the page looks like. This rendering process allows the search engine to evaluate the content and structure of the page accurately.<\/p>\n The best way to improve your site\u2019s crawlability is to ensure you have completed these 8 steps:<\/p>\n By following these best practices, you can help ensure that search engines are able to easily crawl and index your site, making your content more visible in search results.<\/p>\n The easiest way to audit your site\u2019s crawlability is to use the Similarweb Discoverability report<\/b> in the Site Audit tool<\/a>. This tool will help you analyze:<\/p>\n Use the Discoverability Errors tab to see a detailed breakdown of all of your crawlability errors.<\/p>\n Simply click on the errors tab to see all of the individual errors affecting your site\u2019s indexability. This report will give you a detailed breakdown of all of your indexability errors as well as an explanation of how to fix them.<\/p>\n In the previous step, you ensured that search engines can find your content. But finding the content isn\u2019t enough. For your content to show up and rank in search results, it needs to be indexed. If your pages are not indexed properly, they will not appear in Google\u2019s search results. When you type a query into your favorite search engine, you are not searching the web, you are actually looking through the search engine\u2019s index of the web.<\/p>\n To index content, the search engine needs to process and analyze the content. This means:<\/p>\n It\u2019s important to audit your pages to see if they are indexed correctly. One of the best ways to do that is to use the Google Search Console Indexing report<\/b>\u00a0(Google Seach Console > Indexing > Pages).<\/span> The report will help you quickly see how many pages are indexed and how many are excluded from Google\u2019s index.<\/p>\n To ensure that your content is indexed correctly, follow these 6 best practices:<\/p>\n You can easily diagnose and fix any indexing issues with the Similarweb Indexibility report <\/b>in our all-in-one Site Audit tool.<\/b> The Indexability dashboard will give you a general overview of your site indexability, including:<\/p>\n Click on the errors tab to see all of the individual errors affecting your site\u2019s indexability. This report will give you a detailed breakdown of all of your indexability errors as well as an explanation of how to fix them.<\/p>\n SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) creates an encrypted connection between a web server and a browser when visiting a website. This encryption:<\/p>\n Having SSL is crucial if your site collects any data, including email addresses. This is something easy to do. You can purchase an SSL certificate from your domain provider. In fact, most web hosting services now offer free SSL certificates through services like Let’s Encrypt.<\/p>\n To check if your site has an SSL certificate, look at its address. If it starts with ‘https:\/\/’ it\u2019s secure, or ‘http:\/\/’ it\u2019s not secure.<\/span><\/p>\n During 2021, Core Web Vitals<\/a> became a ranking factor. These metrics are part of a group of user experience metrics that Google measures.<\/p>\n The Core Web Vitals consist of three key measurements:<\/p>\n Given that Core Web Vitals are now incorporated into Google’s ranking systems, optimizing your website based on these metrics has become important for improving your SEO performance.<\/p>\n You can quickly identify your site’s speed issues using Similarweb’s Page Speed report<\/b>. This report provides a comprehensive breakdown of your Core Web Vitals metrics, highlights important issues, and offers guidance on how to address any performance problems.<\/p>\n Having multiple versions of your site is a form of duplicate content that you must avoid, as it can negatively impact your site.<\/p>\n This includes:<\/p>\n Multiple site versions happen more often than you would imagine. For instance:<\/p>\n The best way (but not the only way) to solve this is by establishing the primary pages as canonical<\/a> and then setting a 301 redirect from the multiple URL versions to the main URL. You can establish pages as primary by adding the rel=canonical <\/i>tag to the HTML head section of your page. Your canonical tag should look like this:<\/p>\n <link rel=\u201dcanonical\u201d href=\u201dhttps:\/\/www.example.com\/preferred-page\/\u201d \/><\/b><\/p>\n Pro tip: <\/b>While canonicalization and redirects are essential for managing existing duplicate content, it’s even better to prevent multiple versions from occurring in the first place. You can achieve this by setting up proper rules in your server configuration to redirect users:<\/p>\n This will resolve most of your technical duplication issues and prevent them in the future.<\/p>\n You can audit your canonical tags with the Similarweb Canonicalization report<\/b>. This report gives you a list of canonical tag issues and errors, including:<\/p>\n Duplicate content<\/a> is when your site includes identical or very similar content that appears on multiple URLs, either within the same site or across different sites. This can negatively affect your rankings because search engines will struggle to figure out which version should be indexed.<\/p>\n Will the search engine pick the right one?<\/p>\n This might result in:<\/p>\n You can audit your content for duplicate content with the Similarweb Uniqueness report<\/b>. This will help you find all kinds of duplicate content on your site, including:<\/p>\n Looking at response codes will help you identify error pages that need to be corrected. Although there are many response codes, you don\u2019t need to know what all of them mean. The main ones to focus on are response codes that represent errors, including 4xx<\/b> and 5xx<\/b> response codes<\/a>.<\/p>\n The most popular response codes are:<\/p>\n The Similarweb Availability report<\/b> will give you a list of availability issues. This includes two reports that analyze response codes, including:<\/p>\n By uncovering the pages with these response codes, you can quickly fix any issues to ensure everyone can navigate your website properly. This is a report you will want to use frequently to keep your site error-free.<\/p>\n Search engines have sophisticated systems designed to understand content created by people. These systems interpret:<\/p>\n This is a heavy lift for search engines as they have to convert non-structured human language and convert it into machine-readable structured data.<\/p>\n Adding schema markup<\/a> is a way to add a machine-readable, structured data layer to your web content. Implementing this will help search engines understand your page and content and will often lead to rich snippets in the search results.<\/p>\n With Similarweb’s Site Audit tool, you are able to <\/b>comprehensively analyze all the key technical SEO aspects of your website \u2013 as well as any competitor website. That includes detailed insights into:<\/p>\n Google Search Console <\/b>is a free tool that analyzes technical SEO aspects of your website, providing:<\/p>\n Another excellent tool is Google PageSpeed Insights<\/b>, which provides detailed Core Web Vitals metrics for your website. This tool offers both performance analytics and actionable recommendations to enhance your site’s speed and user experience. It highlights metrics that need improvement on both desktop and mobile.<\/p>\n Technical SEO is one of the most important aspects of search optimization and is often overlooked. It impacts almost every aspect of your SEO efforts and can make or break your ranking opportunities. The key to getting your technical SEO right is to regularly use the right analysis tools \u2013 and act on the insights you uncover.<\/p>\n \n
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Technical SEO best practices<\/h2>\n
1. Make sure your site is crawlable<\/h3>\n
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Auditing your site\u2019s crawlability with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
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![\"Similarweb](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Similarweb-Discoverability-dashboard.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Crawlability](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Crawlability-errors.png\")
<\/p>\n2. Make sure your site is indexable<\/h3>\n
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How to check if your pages are indexed<\/h4>\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Google-Search-Console-Indexing-report.png\")
<\/p>\nIndexation best practices<\/h4>\n
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Auditing your indexing issues with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
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![\"Similarweb](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Similarweb-Indexability-Overview.png\")
<\/p>\n![\"Indexability](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Indexability-errors.png\")
<\/p>\n3. Make sure your site has SSL<\/h3>\n
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4. Optimize site speed<\/h3>\n
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Auditing your site speed with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
![\"Similarweb](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Similarweb-Page-Speed-Score.png\")
<\/p>\n5. Ensure your site has one version<\/h3>\n
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Auditing your site\u2019s canonical tags with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
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![\"Canonical](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Similarweb-Canonicalization-Overview.png\")
<\/p>\n6. Avoid duplicate content<\/h3>\n
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Auditing duplicate content with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
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7. Oversee response codes<\/h3>\n
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Auditing your response codes with Similarweb<\/h4>\n
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8. Pro tip: Add schema markup and structured data<\/h3>\n
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Tools to detect technical SEO issues<\/h2>\n
Similarweb<\/h3>\n
![\"Similarweb\"](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Similarweb-1024x531.png\")
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Google Search Console<\/h3>\n
![\"Google](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Google-Search-Console-1024x397.png\")
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Google Page Speed Insights<\/h3>\n
![\"Google-Page-Speed-Insights\"](\"https:\/\/www.similarweb.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/09\/Google-Page-Speed-Insights-1024x727.png\")
<\/p>\nTechnical SEO: The bottom line<\/h2>\n