As professionals already know well, optimizing a site for SEO is not an easy job, because it requires numerous steps, and in this sense, technical SEO is a very relevant step.
A perfectly optimized website, but lacking technical optimization, will be deficient and unsuitable for ranking well on Google’s SERP.
If what you want is to position your site in the top spots of the SERP, you must be particularly good at giving the right attention to every phase of the optimization itself, including the so-called technical SEO.
Don’t want to handle it yourself? We can do it for you. You just need to request an SEO consultation from us!
But let’s start by clarifying what technical SEO is.
What is Technical SEO?
By technical SEO we mean the “set of activities useful for optimizing a site in search engines, through a series of interventions on it. It’s often seen as a subsection of on-page SEO, but, in reality, it’s like a separate branch, because it deals with optimizing the”website architecture and not the actual content.
Technical SEO improves the user experience by ensuring an “effective internal organization and providing smooth site navigation. All this, on one hand, allows for better navigation, but on the” other hand, it is necessary for the bots (called crawlers) that examine the site’s contents and work for positioning the site on Google’s SERP.
A technically well-optimized site will be evaluated as valuable and high-quality by Google’s algorithm, which will reward it by showing it high in the search results.
The so-called crawlers are the bots present in search engines that analyze numerous SEO-related factors to decide whether a site can be considered valuable or not. The “optimization of these factors involves the” implementation of an integrated SEO strategy: their analysis through crawlers helps pages to rank high in Google’s SERP.
The technical optimization of a site requires different steps that are necessary to make it navigable for users and scannable for crawlers.
Why is Technical SEO So Important?
Google favors content that guarantees a good user experience for the user, and various elements of technical SEO are useful precisely in this sense. Among these, we have usability through mobile devices or loading speed. Also, a structured and coherent internal architecture of a website will be considered quality by Google.
A user who encounters a slow site, with technical errors or not automatically accessible, will tend to leave to turn to a more deserving one. This will lead your website to be poorly positioned on the SERP and therefore less visible to users.
Which Elements to Focus on in Technical SEO
Technical SEO is very vast and there are numerous factors to analyze and optimize:
- SSL Certificate
- Robots.txt File
- Site Map
- Website Speed
- Responsiveness and Mobile-First Factor
- URLs and Metatags
In this section, we will analyze metatags.
Metatags in Technical SEO
Meta tags are small fragments of HTML code used by search engines as guidance, as they provide numerous pieces of information about our page. For example, they indicate how it should appear on the SERP, or suggest to browsers how they should display it to users. Meta tags must be optimized from a technical standpoint because they contain important information, although their optimization is often included in on-page SEO.
All pages have meta tags, but we can only see them through the HTML code. The most important meta tags for SEO are: Meta title, Meta description, Meta charset, Meta robots, Meta viewport, and Meta refresh redirect. Let’s analyze them together.
Meta title
Meta titles are the page titles that major search engines display in their results. We have all certainly noticed that Google doesn’t always show the title we’ve given to the page, but something different.
Meta titles are important in SEO because they provide critical information through which users get an idea of the content, as well as the reason why a result matches their query.
Often, titles are the most important elements because they lead the user to click, which means that using high-quality ones on our pages is crucial.
To create effective meta titles, you must write a unique title for each page, be descriptive and concise, use a maximum of 60 characters, avoid being generic and vague, use capitalization to start a sentence or the first letter of each word, include the keyword when it makes sense, consider the search intent, and finally, create content that is worthy of clicks and not clickbait.
To insert a title tag in the page, you must use your page’s code:
<title>Tag title: come ottimizzarlo per la SEO on page</title>Common errors
You need to be good at finding and correcting common errors in title tags, which are:
1. creating titles that are too long and complex or too short;
2. giving a title to every page;
3. putting more than one title on each page and risking that Google shows the wrong one;
4. inserting duplicate titles across different pages, as it’s important to have one for each.
To check the first 2, you need to enter the URL in the free tool SERPSim; if it can’t detect a title for each individual page, let’s put only one; if the length in pixels is red, we need to shorten the title.
You can find multiple or duplicate titles by doing a crawl of the website on Ahrefs’ Site Audit. Here you will find the on-page report and check for potential errors such as “Multiple title tags”, which you will resolve by removing one of the titles from the pages where they are present. Then, you will go to the Duplicate Content report to exclude the presence of “Bad duplicate” errors, which you will eventually resolve by rewriting the titles on the specific pages, making them unique. With this report, you will also see pages without titles, with titles that are too long or short.
Meta Description
The meta description is shown by Google in the preview of search results and is the description and a brief summary that, indeed, describes the page. Search engines display it in the preview in search results, and if it’s not displayed as we set it, it will need to be rewritten.
The meta description is important for SEO because it creates interest in the user through a short but interesting summary related to the contents of a page. It’s like a script that convinces people to visit the page. However, descriptions are not direct ranking factors.
You can write a “unique description for each page summarizing the content and avoiding generic descriptions. You need to encourage people to click by capturing their” search intent and being careful that the first letter of the sentence is capitalized, while including the keyword if it makes sense, and finally, keeping it within 160 characters.
To add the meta description to the page, copy and paste the page code:
<meta name="description">
The four common errors you can find and must solve are:
1. creating titles that are too long, risking truncated previews, but also too short;
2. Do not ensure that each page has a description;
3. Create multiple descriptions that could confuse Google;
4. Do not diversify the description on each page.
In the first two cases, we can use SERPSim or Yoast: perform a crawl on the site using Ahrefs Site Audit and check the On-page report to check the first 3 errors on all pages simultaneously.
Then check the Duplicate content report to find duplicate descriptions on various pages and resolve the errors exactly as you did for the titles.
Meta robots
The meta robots tag suggests to Google how it should behave regarding the crawling of our pages.
If used incorrectly, the meta robots tag seriously damages the site’s positioning on Google, which is why it’s really important and should be used properly.
The values we can assign to the tag are:
- index which suggests to bots to index the page;
- noindex, suggests instead not to index the page;
- follow indicates to bots to crawl the links found on the page, taking into account the responsibilities;
- nofollow indicates not to crawl the links on the page;
The above-listed values can be combined in different ways with each other, or you might not set any meta robots tag at all, in which case it would correspond to index, follow.
For the search engine, “nofollow” are mere suggestions and not directives.
In addition to these, there are also noarchive, noimageindex, nosnippet, etc…
You can use meta robots tags exclusively if you want to limit Google’s crawling on a given page and to not block them with the meta robots tag in the robots.txt file.
To add robots tags, copy and paste the appropriate code from those mentioned above in the head section of the page.
You can find other examples here.
Meta viewport
The meta viewport tag is used to set the visible area of a specific page and is used to suggest to browsers how they should render it based on screen size, i.e., whether it’s desktop, tablet, or smartphone.
It’s an important meta tag because it indicates to Google that the page is mobile-friendly and the search engine ranks pages that have it higher in search results.
Use the meta viewport tag on all pages and the “standard” version of the tag.
To add it, copy and paste the code in the section of the page.
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1" />Meta charset
The meta charset tag is used to set the character encoding of a web page and suggests to browsers how to display the text of a page.
There are hundreds of character encodings, however, the two most common are: ISO-8859–1 Character encoding for the Latin alphabet and UTF‑8 Character encoding for Unicode.
For SEO, the meta charset is important because using the wrong character encoding could create problems in how the browser displays the text.
An error of this type can lead people to not link the page, cause Google not to understand the content of the page, and result in a high Bounce rate, which equates to low time on site and dwell time.
Use the same meta charset tag on all pages and use the correct syntax at the HTML level and finally, UTF‑8.
To add the meta charset tag, copy and paste the code on the page’s section:
<meta charset="UTF-8"> Use HTML4 or an earlier version.
Meta refresh redirect
A meta refresh tag suggests to the browser to redirect a user to a different page after a given time interval.
This tag is important for SEO and should not be used carelessly. Avoid meta refresh tags whenever they are not necessary, preferring the classic 301 redirect instead.
To add them, paste in the section of our web page:
<meta http-equiv="refresh" content="4; URL='urlredirect.it/'" />
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