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Advanced Technical SEO Fundamentals and Strategies

A website audit is the first step of the technical SEO process to optimize the website for search engines and to improve user experience. From the data collected, we know what needs to be improved in order to make the website run properly and with quality in information delivery and access speed when visited.

Is Technical SEO Important and What the Strategies?

As explained above, technical SEO can impact the performance of a website in Google search. Publishing quality content is useless if the website cannot be reached by searchers and is not listed on the search site. Technical SEO focuses on how to get the site listed on search engines and improve the quality of the website to avoid errors on page or slow loading of web pages.

Website Security

A website with qualified security is also one of the success factors of SEO, where the site has implemented HTTPS. As argued by John Mueller, an SEO expert active in providing education and information about Google Search Central, HTTPS is not a factor in determining whether a page will be indexed or not. Still, John Mueller from Google has tweeted that this is a "lightweight ranking factor" and "having HTTPS is very good for users." So websites with security problems, such as sites containing malware, phishing sites, and so on, will be ignored by Robots.

Website Performance and Speed Score

What is a website page speed score, and does it impact the ranking of a website? With Google's tools, a web admin can find out the elements of the website that need to be optimized and improved. Ensure that the website has a good performance with a good score of 50 - 89, categorized as medium, or if you can get a score of 90-100, it will be even better. There are 4 essential elements in the Lighthouse report:

  • Performance
  • Accessibility
  • Best Practices
  • SEO

Mobile Friendly

The high number of smartphone users has significantly changed a user's background. Websites that have adopted mobile-friendly views become one of the factors of success in website optimization. So making a website must prioritize smartphone users so that website pages can run and display correctly when accessed via smartphones. The presentation of images and responsive content follows the screen size and font selection and adjusts the font size so it can still be read correctly.

SEO Friendly URLs Structure

A good URL structure is a URL that is easily understood and readable by both search engines and users. Always keep the URL structure as simple as possible. Use hyphenated words (-) for readability instead of applying ID parameters to URLs. Use UTF-8 encoding if necessary, especially for websites that use Japanese, Chinese, Arabic, German, or other country languages, and it is not recommended to use non-ASCII characters in URLs.

Sitemap

A sitemap is another fundamental element that must be considered because the sitemap provides information about web pages, images, videos, and other files on your site. Generally, robots will browse this file first to crawl the site pages that are allowed and considered necessary for later indexing.

The general sitemap contains information about the page's creation date and when the website content was last updated. Then is a sitemap required? According to data from Google Search Console, if the site is relatively small and the links from each are well-linked, Robots and web crawlers can find it. But if the site is relatively new and has few external links, the sitemap is vital.

Avoid Duplicate Content With Canonicalization or Canonical

In essence, canonicalization serves the purpose of minimizing website page duplication. Crawl robots choose canonical as a marker and validate the actual URLs, thus avoiding the duplication of URLs that search engines may index. If multiple URLs with the same content are found, URLs outside the canonical will be ignored. For example, for yourdomain-name.com?color=red and yourdomain-name.com/color/red, the search engine will choose one URL as the canonical to display to users.

Metadata

The excellent implementation of HTML tags for page metadata is enclosed within the HTML tags " ". Which HTML markup elements are considered valid and not within metadata implementation? According to the HTML document, if an invalid element is found within the element, Google will ignore any elements that appear after that invalid element, such as using and iframe elements. The supported HTML tags within the element are title, meta, link, script, style, base, NoScript, and template.

Structured Data Markup

Search engines like Google would work hard to understand a website's content without structured data. Adding structured data to website pages with relevant information helps search engines quickly understand the content of the web pages. The Google search engine already supports at least 32 types of structured data markup websites.

There are some example of popular schema markup for website are:

  • Local Business
  • Logo
  • Product
  • Reviews snippet
  • Images metadata
  • Recipes
  • Course
  • Job Posting

Robots.txt and .Htaccess File Configuration

Why do we include robots.txt as an influential factor in improving the SEO ranking of a website? Robots.txt has no connection with internet users. However, the configuration within this file can assist search engines in crawling website pages and inform them about which pages do not need to be crawled. Additionally, it is necessary to configure the .Htaccess file, which serves the following purposes to communicate with search engines:

  • Configure a permanent redirect from old URLs to new URLs.
  • Web protocol redirection from HTTP to HTTPS.
  • Friendly URLs configuration.
  • Cache configuration to store data from previously visited websites, eliminating the need to load all website elements such as scripts, stylesheets, image files, or videos.
  • Enabling gzip on your website using mod_gzip or mod_deflate.

Technical SEO covers a wide range of topics that are very complicated and sometimes confusing. We've created this guide to help web developers understand how complex technical SEO implementation can be on a site.