What is Technical SEO? A Non-Technical Guide

Technical SEO a crucial aspect of SEO that often gets overlooked, but it's just as important as on-page and off-page SEO when it comes to improving your site's visibility in search engines. Let's dive into what technical SEO is and why it matters.

• Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase of search engine algorithms
• It's all about improving the infrastructure of your site to enhance search visibility and user experience
• You don’t need to be a programmer to understand technical SEO - anyone can get their head around the concepts
• You can perform technical SEO yourself if you have a very basic understanding of how websites work behind the scenes

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website for crawling and indexing. Crawling and indexing occurs when search engines send out lots of little robots to find websites (crawling) and add them to a list of all available pages (indexing).

Technical SEO is about helping search engines access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any problems. It is called "technical" because it has nothing to do with the actual content of the website or with website promotion. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of a website on the backend.

Why Technical SEO Matters

Technical SEO is crucial because it can help search engines understand your site and its content. When your site is technically optimized, search engines can more easily access, crawl, and index your site. If you make their job easier, they thank you by giving you a boost in your rankings.

What the algorithm specifically looks at and how important certain things are in the SEO mix will always be somewhat of a mystery, but we can still understand the rationale behind technical SEO. If your website is well-built, it means you pay attention to details. You’ve probably got some good quality content on there as well. If your website performs well technically, it probably means a good user experience. These all contribute to your ranking.

Because of all this, technical SEO doesn’t just improve your website for search engine robots—it makes it better for human users as well.

Tips for Improving Technical SEO

Improving your technical SEO might sound daunting, especially if you're not a tech whiz. But don't worry—there are plenty of simple things you can do to improve your site's technical SEO if you have access to your site builder:

• Improve site speed: A faster site provides a better user experience and can improve your rankings in search results. Are you loading massive images? Could they be shrunk down? If there’s a lot of content slowing down a page, could the page be split up?
• Create an XML sitemap: This helps search engines find and index your pages. Most website builders will do this for you, but double check your settings to make sure it’s there.
• Optimize for mobile: With more and more people using mobile devices to access the web, having a mobile-friendly site is more important than ever. Things like responsive sizing and break points in your code will help search engines recognise mobile states.

Conclusion

Technical SEO is a crucial part of improving your site's visibility and user experience. While it might sound complicated, even non-technical folks can make improvements that can make a big difference. Remember, a technically optimized site is easier for search engines to understand and easier for visitors to use.