What does technical SEO mean?

Introduction

SEO is such a broad subject area, that is why most digital marketing agencies split SEO into broad categories.

That is why you often hear SEO being split into “offsite” and “onsite” seo.

Sure, you could make further groups such as using social media, but let’s just stick to onsite and offsite seo for now.

So, what’s technical seo, well this is a form of onsite seo and we like to think of it as getting your websites foundations right.

So, what do we mean by this?

Well so many companies, and also seo agencies just jump straight into trying to build backlinks and writing new blog posts for your website, but in reality, we think the business should often pause for a second, then think about how their businesses technical seo can be improved.

So we would recommend a business thinks about the following:

Pages

Often a business will offer more than just one service, and if you retail products, well, you may retail thousands of different products.

Now it often goes without saying that often an e-commerce businesses will have separate pages for each product that they sell, yet this is sometimes not the case for businesses that offer services rather than products.

So let’s look at an example, let’s say you are a dentist, and you are having a new website designed for your dental practice.

Now sometimes website designers just think of a website in terms of making it look impressive, so for instance the website may load and you are greeted automatically with a video walking around your dental practice.

Great, but then all of the business’s services are then described on just one page, the home page, even the contact us details are listed at the bottom of the homepage.

Now may sound a good idea, but from an seo perspective its not a good idea, as often most agencies would recommend that you split the different services out onto separate pages.

So for example a separate page for teeth whitening and then another separate page for teeth straightening services.

Why should a business do this?

Well, the answer to that is rather simple, and that is it makes implementing seo easier.

For example each page can have its own description of that service, its own meta title and meta description and also your digital marketing agency can build links to different pages.

So for example, perhaps there’s a really good blog which discusses teeth whitening here in the U.K, in which case your dental practice may have a blog post published on this website, and therefore you could obtain a backlink which is sent to your teeth whitening page.

Crawling and indexing (Googlebot)

Again, you may have a website that looks good, that’s to say it accurately depicts what your business offers, yet with that said if it can’t be crawled and indexed, well it’s not much use.

For example, Google uses Googlebot, it’s Googlebot’s job to crawl and index websites, which simply means that Googlebot reads websites.

This is needed to spot changes that a business has made to its website, but also to evaluate how good that company’s SEO is.

So, in a nutshell if the business hasn’t got a website that can be crawled and indexed, well the business isn’t going to rank in Google.

So, for example, let’s say you run a family law practice and your business specialises in the area of divorce. Well, if your website cannot be crawled and indexed it’s not going to show up for important business keywords, such as “divorce solicitors”.

So how do you fix this issue?

Well, it could be something as simple as the website designers leaving the “no-index” tab left on, so what you need to do is speak to an seo agency for help.

Reduce the number of 404 errors your website has

The reason is that some pages on your business’s website may have high seo value, so for example that service page you were thinking of deleting that described all the various divorce services that your business offers, well it may just have many good quality backlinks leading to that page.

So by deleting that page you may well be throwing away all that seo work, so speak with your seo company first.

Duplication

Here’s a golden rule of SEO that you shouldn’t forget in a hurry, that is don’t use duplicated work.

And what we mean by duplicated work is don’t copy text from your website onto another page on your website, and don’t copy from other websites.

So for example you may retail electrical goods online, let’s say you sell washing machines. Now your website designer may believe they have found a really good time saving idea, that is to copy and paste the product description from the manufactures website- this isn’t a good idea!

In matter of fact it could result in your business incurring a penalty, such as a Google Panda penalty.

So don’t use duplicated work, instead your business should create your own written work. So whether that’s a blog post or a product description, we would recommend writing your own written work.

Many more things that your business should consider

There’s so much more to think about when it comes to improving a businesses technical seo, that ranges from how fast your company’s website loads, right through to having a XML sitemap.

If your business requires further help with its seo, then why not give us a call?