Technical SEO is a crucial element of any successful digital strategy as it checks that your website complies with search engines’ requirements. Although sometimes less apparent, technical SEO plays the most crucial role in ensuring that the website’s structure is Search Engine friendly and capable of being crawled and indexed by search engines. This comprehensive guide will help you understand the major elements of technical SEO that are the key to improving your site’s performance and its ranking on search engines in 2024.
In this article, we’ll explore the different sides of technical SEO - which is the process of optimizing the various aspects of your website that are not related to the content. These technical components and their subsequent updates are critical in supporting search engines' ability to properly crawl, index and "understand" your content the way you intend. Key areas include:
Key Areas of Technical SEO
- Site Security (SSL/TLS): Let’s be honest, with all the user data being stolen left and right, as well as search engines like Google pushing HTTPS as a standard, it is now imperative to make sure that your website is secure and has the HTTPS in its URL.
- Mobile Optimization: Mobile traffic is now greater than the desktop traffic, and having a mobile optimized website is mandatory. This entails, amongst others, use of responsive design and optimization for mobile-first indexing because this is how Google indexes and ranks content.
- Site Speed and Performance: This is the speed, which is a direct ranking factor. Optimizing images, coding and faster server response time are some of the ways through which you can improve on your site’s performance thus improving on the user experience and ranking.
- Structured Data: Using schema markup increases your Search Engine Optimization because search engines do not only crawl but also interpret your content. This can also assist your site to be displayed in rich snippets and other forms of enhanced search results.
- Crawl Efficiency: Controlling the manner in which the search engine spiders your site is very critical. This entails enhancing your robots.txt files to avoid bots from wasting their time on irrelevant or duplicate pages as well as to effectively manage crawl budget.
- Error Management: Checking on the links often and repairing the links that have become broken or non-existing, the 404 errors and the redirect chains ensures that the site is healthy and easily navigable.
Why You Should Pay Attention to Technical SEO
Technical SEO accounts for and addresses a significant portion of search engine ranking factors. It is a fundamental aspect of your site, that requires attention, thoughtfulness, and maintenance. If you lack a technically sound website and hygiene strategy, you will inevitably leave a lot of organic traffic opportunities on the table - even if your on-page content is excellent.
Advanced Technical SEO Updates You Should Implement in 2024
- AI and Machine Learning: Strategy use of these technologies can help you anticipate user’s actions and enhance their overall experience with your website. This is likely to have a positive influence on your SEO since the updates are mindful of your end-user.
- Voice Search Optimization: Due to the development of voice-controlled home assistants, focusing on the so-called ‘voice search queries’ that are usually longer and phrased like a conversation is crucial. Even though the focus here has waned, I predict we'll see it's relevance increase over time.
- International SEO: For companies with a global approach, it is important to use hreflang tags and make sure that the targeting is correct in terms of languages in order to increase the visibility of the website in different regions. Use this in conjunction with a sound information hierarchy (including your URL structure), to ensure you're communicating to Google what content to serve based on location and/or languages according to your visitors' preferences.
Technical SEO is also an important component of overall SEO strategy, not least because it improves website’s functionality, crawlability, and indexation. Make sure your website is properly developed and managed from the techical perspective to ensure you're not hindering your rankings on search engines - and more importantly - your experience to the users.
