10 Key technical SEO factors
Whether you want to get to grips with the basic principles of technical SEO, or develop your existing knowledge and learn some technical SEO ranking factors, you’ve come to the right place. This blog will provide a short summary of 10 key factors considered by the technical side of search engine optimisation to improve a website’s performance.
But first things first… Why is technical SEO important?
The main point of technical SEO is to ensure the important parts of a website can be discovered, understood, and stored in a search engine’s system. Ultimately, if your website is found and stored by a search engine when a user enters a query (or keyword) into Google and your content is relevant and matches that term, it will appear on the search engine results page (SERP). However, how high a website appears on the SERPs depends on a wide range of SEO ranking factors, some of which will be covered in this blog.
We understand that all the technical terms used can be confusing, but don’t worry, this blog has simplified things so its easier to understand. After reading, you will hopefully have a better understanding and can read more of our SEO blogs to expand your knowledge even further to inform your SEO strategy.
As you read through, if you are still unsure, it may be useful to have our glossary of terms open alongside to check any definitions.
1. Robots.txt file
A robots text file (also referred to as robots.txt) is the first thing a search engine bot will they discover and crawl a website). Essentially, this file tells bots which parts it should and shouldn’t look at and store in their system (also referred to as indexing) by using ‘allow’ and ‘disallow’. Bots have a limited crawl budget and can’t spend forever on a site, so it’s useful to include a Robots Exclusion Protocol and ‘disallow’ pages such as thank you, payment, or login pages as these bring no SEO value so do not need to appear in the SERPs.
If you do not have a robots.txt file, Google will assume that everything on your site is of equal value and that it should all be crawled. This is not SEO best practice as it wastes your website’s crawl budget, and means important pages may be overlooked.
2. Sitemaps
A sitemap contains all the important pages in your site and is a great way to make sure both humans and bots don’t miss them.
An HTML sitemap is written for a human – you can check out Varn’s HTML sitemap as an example of what one should look like. It’s really useful to include in a website because it enables a user to easily find what they are looking for on your site.
An XML sitemap on the other hand is a piece of code written for bots. Within this, you can provide additional tags such as <priority> to highlight the more important pages. <changefreq> can also be added, and tells search engines when content on specific URLs is expected to change, and therefore when bots should revisit and crawl that page again. It is also SEO best practice to link your sitemap in the robots.txt to increase the efficiency of crawlers.
An XML sitemap is typically submitted to Google’s Search Console to improve the crawling and indexing process.
3. Website architecture
A website’s architecture refers to how a site is structured and organised. Imagine it like a hierarchy, with the homepage at the top with sub-pages branching off such as ‘services’, ‘about us’, ‘contact us’, and ‘blogs’. Here is an example structure:
Homepage > main topic pages > sub-topic pages > posts
Here is an example of this SEO blog article:
Varn homepage > Blogs > Technical SEO > Top 10 factors of Tech SEO
Ideally, you want to have a relatively flat website architecture, with content up to 4 clicks away from the homepage. This improves user experience (UX) and makes it easier for search engine bots to discover content on your site. As search engines such as Google put the user first when crawling your site, you need to keep this in mind.
Breadcrumb navigation is a good reflection of website architecture and improves UX by allowing users to go to previous pages they visited without having to keep pressing the back button. It’s worth noting that if a user can’t easily navigate your site and gets frustrated, they may click off and go to one of your competitors, so it’s important to improve your website’s architecture.
4. Internal linking
Internal linking goes hand in hand with website architecture and should reflect this. For example, your homepage is at the top of the hierarchy and should therefore have the most internal links pointing to and from it. By doing this, you are telling search engines which pages have the most authority or ‘link juice’, which can be passed on to other pages to show their importance.
It is SEO best practice to link all of your pages together because, if not, you risk creating orphan pages which users and search engines cannot access. As a result, key content may be missed.
5. Canonicalisation
When you have two pages that have the same or very similar content, you don’t want search engines to crawl and index both versions because they will end up competing with each other in the SERPs. To solve this problem, designate one page to be the ‘master’ page which is crawled and indexed – this will have a self-referencing canonical tag. The remaining pages with similar content will still contain a canonical tag, but instead point to the ‘master’ page.
Every page should therefore have a canonical tag, either self-referencing or canonicalised.
If there are missing canonicals, search engines will choose which URL they believe is the better version, or will try to rank both. This can make you lose control of the ranking of website pages.
6. Response Codes
HTTP is the reserver software used to retrieve webpages. When you click onto a website, your browser will make a request to the site’s server which will then return a 3-digit code (the HTTP status code) to show the status of that request.
There are many response codes but here are some key ones:
- 200 – the browser was able to retrieve the page. Ideally, all pages should be 200s.
- 301 – permanent redirect. These are useful to put in place if you are moving content or domains to keep authority.
- 302 – temporary redirects. These are useful if you are making fixes you certain pages and don’t want them to be viewed.
- 404 – page not found. This means the server couldn’t find a client-requested webpage. These should be fixed to be either a 200 or 301, or removed from the site.
It is SEO best practice to have as few redirects as possible because too many can slow down a site. If a crawler comes across 404s, they are missing other important content on your site. If a user comes across a 404, this disrupts their experience.
7. Site speed
Humans don’t have much patience. The average load time for a web page is 2.5 seconds for a desktop and 8.6 seconds for a mobile. But in reality, our attention spans are a bit shorter, so you want to decrease your load speed wherever possible to avoid users getting frustrated, and clicking off your website.
Some factors that affect a website’s load speed include: image sizes, code efficiency, plugins, and large file sizes. So an easy way to improve web speed is to compress images, minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, and reduce the amount of redirects.
In particular, although images are a great feature of a website, they can often slow down a site if they’re more than 100 KB. This issue often arises when using JavaScript for moving elements on a page. nt content on your site. If a user comes across a 404, this disrupts their experience.
8. Metadata
About 65% of web traffic to websites comes from search engine results pages. Your metadata, the short description of your website users can view on the SERP acts as a shop front to your website. Therefore, your metadata needs to be enticing.
A meta title should be between 55 and 60 characters and include the brand/business name and should read like a headline. A meta description is between 155 and 160 characters and should provide more context about that page. It’s SEO best practice to include relevant keywords in metadata to your website relates more to search queries.
If you don’t include metadata, or if the meta data you have does not accurately reflect your page’s content, the search engine may generate its own summary. This isn’t the end of the world but it is a missed opportunity to optimise your SERP space.
Keywords are particularly important in the meta description as Google will often put them in bold, depending on the search query, thus drawing a user’s attention. This also means that your metadata needs to match a user’s intent.
9. Page Structure
When talking about page structure, we’re referring to all the headings and main body of text on a page. When a user arrives on a webpage, they are likely to just skim over the content first to see whether what they’re looking for is on that page. Here, headings play an important role as they have larger text size and are usually bold, and provide context of a page’s contents.
A page should only have one H1 heading which is unique, containing the primary keyword for the content on that page. It should ideally be within the same character count as the meta title (55 to 60 characters) because sometimes this can be used as a meta title if a search engine doesn’t like the one you provided.
H2 headings live further down the page, break up content, and are used to give more context about a page. You should aim to have between two and ten H2s, ensuring each is rich with keywords. But remember, the user will be reading these briefly so don’t make them too long.
If you need to break up your content even more, use H3s. But avoid using these where you can because they can make a page’s hierarchy more complex and hard to follow.
10. Schema Markup
Schema markup is a tag that can be added to a page’s HTML code. It helps a search engine understand a page’s content better, so you have more leverage over how you appear in the SERPs. Google may use this structured data when producing rich results, which make a website more appealing.
There’s hundreds of different types of schema including, article, event, movie, FAQ, How to, and video schemas. The more coverage a website has on SERPs, the higher the click-through rate (CTR), which may influence how the site is ranked in the next search. It’s like a positive feedback loop.
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