Everybody wants a higher Google ranking right? We outlined 5 Technical SEO optimizations which help you with that.
A lot of people who are not active in the world of Online marketing are not yet familiar with more than content creation and the optimization of content through specific keywords. But…. there is much more than that which is called technical SEO.
So what the hell is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is most of the time the stuff that nobody understands and what is really important for search engines to access, interpret, crawl and index your website without any problems. In the world of online marketing we call it technical SEO while the main goal would be that we want to optimize the infrastructure of the website and make it possible that search engines can crawl and index our website as easy as it is.
You’re fully SEO optimized when:
- The search intent of the searcher is matched to your high quality content.
- You provided the crawlers that crawl your website the right signals to understand your structure of your website.
- The search engine can trust you and then rank you higher than your competitors
- The search engine is able to access and index your website without experiencing any troubles.
- The search engine spider understands the meaning of your content
So now that we have a good understanding of what SEO means lets dive in the technical SEO optimizations to get better Google rankings.
Technical SEO Optimizations top five
1. Crawl optimization
Crawling what is that actually mean? It means that the search engine spiders spend as little time as possible on crawling the correct URLs on your website.
Why is this important? Because every website is bound to a crawl budget. You do not want the crawl budget to be wasted on less important URLs (crawl waste). It is desirable that the most relevant and important pages within a website are regularly crawled.
According to Dawn Anderson, crawlers have a crawling schedule. This scheme consists of three grades:
- Real-time crawling: the URLs that are classified in this rank are visited several times a day by the search engine crawlers
- Daily crawls: in this rank the URLs are crawled every day or every other day
- Basic crawls: all URLs covered below are divided into different segments. These segments are then crawled in turn.
Here the list is finished per segment, when the end is reached the crawling only starts again. It differs per website which URLs fall under which rank in the schema. For example, the main URLs of a website may fall below the first or second rank, but the minor URLs below rank three. Anderson also said that if a new URL is found, the crawler does not immediately crawl the new page, but first classifies it and then comes back
2. XML Sitemap optimization
To ensure that the crawlers spend as little time as possible on crawling the wrong pages, the XML sitemap is a good move. Make sure that the XML sitemap contains only URLs that are ‘final’. Minimize 301 redirects and other status codes that are not 200. Test which URL contains a lot of crawl waste. This can be added to Google Search Console through multiple Sitemaps and this toe. In GSC can be much indexed.
Is there a big difference between this? Do you see 20,000 sent and 11,000 indexed here? Then it is important to continue to look at those pages for so much waste. If you wish, URLs are indexed, then the status codes of all pages. It can happen that too many 301 redirects are too many broken pages (404 status code). A handy tool that we use is Screaming Frog. View in an overview of all status codes of the website.
3. Unique Content
It is so important that your pages are crawled regularly by Google, and that she can access and index changes on the website immediately. To do so you constantly need to create new, good and unique content.
Each page should be created in a unique way and therefor try to avoid automated created content. When you have a webshop this can take a lot of time but in the end it is worthwhile.
There are indications that pages with automated content on it are being crawled less frequently bu GoogleBot
4. Optimize paginated content
This goes for a lot of webshops while the oftentimes sell a a lot of products in one category. We take a webshop of soccer shirts for example: In total this webshop sells one-hundered shirts of brand X in one category. This hundred shirts has divided the webshop into fifty shirts on the first page and fifty shirts on the second page. This is also called paginated content.
Familiar? This goes for a lot of webshops and oftentimes this costs a lot of crawl waste, because many pages are created that the crawler must visit. You can reduce crawl waste by these tips:
- Show more products on one page
- Use the rel = “next” & rel = “prev” tag instead of a canonical tag
- Block the sorting parameters, such as sorting the price, in the robots.txt file
This sounds quite technical but this can help you with optimizing your pages and making crawling more efficient.
5. Optimize filtered pages
If we continue with the above example of a sports webshop there is another optimization possible. Check what filters add value and which do not. Websites with filters for example: color / size / brand etc. forget to optimize these for crawlers. Determine which filtering options have added value for the visitors and make this a static page.
Imagine a webshop selling shoes. A subcategory is leather shoes. With this subcategory it is possible to filter on a yellow color. Create a static page for this filter option and optimize this page using the on-page factors. This page will then start to rank better for the term yellow leather shoes.
The filters that do not have added value can best be blocked in the robots.txt file. Another option is to add a rel = “nofollow” tag to the filters. In this way the crawl budget is optimally used.
In a nutshell
Technical SEO is SEO that stands between on-page and off-page SEO and has the main goal of optimizing the infrastructure of the website and make it possible that search engines can crawl and index our website as easy as it is. Now that you understand the definition of technical SEO you are also able to optimize your website by reducing crawl waste, having a good XML sitemap, create unique content, optimize your paginated content and optimize your filtered pages. If you want to know more? Always reach out to us and we will further help you.
