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The technical aspect of SEO is centered around ensuring ease of use and relevance.
This will be the last article in our Basics of Search Engine Optimization. In this issue we are going to talk about the technical aspects of Search Engine Optimization.
In our previous issues we discussed on-site optimization and off-site optimization with a lot of rave responses from our audience.
We will do our best to stay away from technical words in this issue or at least explain in simple terms what we are speaking about.
The main thing to understand and I believe I have made this clear in each previous article is relevance and usability.
Therefore the Technical aspect of SEO is centered around ensuring ease of use and relevance.
There are main aspects that need to be concentrated on:
1. Broken Links
2. Blog Page Architecture
3. Originality
4. Use of schema
5. The use of XML sitemap
Depending on who you talk with, there are other aspects that need to be addressed in Technical SEO, but we categorize these in one of our previous articles on SEO and have been covered.
We want to cover each of these points in more depth so that you can use the knowledge to improve your businesses SEO.
Broken Links
Sending a user or a crawler to a page that doesn’t exist is a sin, at least in the eyes of search engines. That is exact what broken links do.
In our experience, broken links generally occur after an update of the website. Most businesses don’t use the same marketing firm or web designer they originally used to build their website.
Things slip through the cracks and links can be lost.
The new firm building the website should do a thorough quality check before ever going live, but more often than not, things get missed.
The next reason is that a business no longer delivers that service and doesn’t want users or crawlers to see the page.
While the page itself is taken care of, the links are not. Thus you still have links sending traffic to that page and this is something you want to avoid.
Lastly would be time sensitive landing pages that just get forgotten about after they have fulfilled their purpose.
A businesses’ IT specialist or a marketing firm worth anything will know how to handle this and it should be standard operating procedure to check this after every website redesign or build and quarterly to ensure you business doesn’t have this.
Blog Page Architecture
What the hell does that mean? Exactly what it says. Duh.
Ok smart ass, then why is it so important. The simple answer is search engines.
Crawlers flow through a website based on links within the site. If a blog is improperly set up and has to flow through links deeper and deeper into the website, the less authority each page will have.
The deeper a page is in a website, the less ranking it will receive to the point it has absolutely no ranking at all.
Therefore have the architecture setup so that moving through the pages of a blog happens from the first page. Not where they have to press a previous or back link to get to the page.
I know it sounds ridiculous, and it is, but that is how the search engines work.
Originality
You would think that something on your website would be considered original. Unfortunately this isn’t the case. Many people steal things from the internet constantly. Unless you specifically tell a search engine that this is original content, you run the risk of having it stolen from you. Whoever steals it can then tag it as original content and you will be penalized for having duplicate content.
Therefore you need to ensure that your IT team or web team ensures that any content you have posted on your website that is original gets tagged with a canonical tag.
This will inform search engines that this is the original content and no one else can be indexed for it.
Use of Schema
Schema – It is something you can add to your pages to give search engines what are called “rich snippets” allowing them to understand better the context of what something is.
I could get into a lot of technical mumbo jumbo here, but I’m just going to skip it. If your IT or web team doesn’t know what this is, make them figure it out. There are a billion different articles that they can find on the internet about this.
At the end of the day, just realize you are making it easier for search engines to understand exactly what you are trying to show up. Making it easier for search engines to give the right information to their users.
XML Sitemap
This is a roadmap for search engines. You will usually find it at the bottom of websites laying out all the different pages that can be found on the website.
The main purpose of the sitemap is to ensure there is absolutely no way for crawlers to miss the important pages you want them to index.
As an additional bonus, it adds user experience and makes it easy to find the exact page they are looking for.
We highly recommend that you have a sitemap on your website.
Between the 3 articles we have released in the last week you now have the Basics of Search Engine Optimization.
We hope you have found these articles helpful and we hope you use them to improve your business.
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