Technical SEO Best Practices: Enhancing Website Performance

According to OddBall, 47.8% of all web traffic comes from organic search. However, effective SEO goes beyond keywords and backlinks. It requires a solid technical foundation. Your website must be fast, secure, and easily navigable by search engines. This article will explore technical SEO performance.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a process of improving a website’s technical side to make it easier for different search engines to crawl and index. It includes optimization of site architecture, page speed, mobile adaptivity, etc.

Implementation of technical SEO gives you more chances of being highly ranked as it results in the following:

• Proper page crawling and indexing by search engine robots.
• Enhanced user experience.
• Secure website.
• Increased page load speed.

All of these factors directly or indirectly affect your website’s rankings in SERPs.

Fundamentals of Crawling & Indexing by Search Engines

Source: SE Ranking

Before discussing indexing, it is important to remember the purpose of any search engine. The main task of the search is to answer the user’s query. The more accurate and better the answer, the more often users will use the search engine.

The search engine looks for relevant information in its database, which sites get after their indexing. This means that only correct indexing can provide a hit in the output.

The process can be divided into three stages:

• Crawling
• Indexing
• Ranking

Crawling is the process by which search engine robots (spiders or search engine crawlers) traverse a site and load pages in order to identify internal links and content.

After crawling, search engine bots add the pages to the search index. Indexing itself is a process in which search engines organize information before searching to ensure the fastest possible response to a user’s query.

When users perform a search, the search engine quickly references this index to find and rank the most relevant results, making it possible for people to find information online efficiently.

Each of the steps is important to monitor, as any errors can critically affect the indexing of pages.

Technical SEO Best Practices to Get Better Website Performance

To understand what you need to focus on and prioritize technical SEO issues, it’s important to conduct a technical SEO audit. This way, you will be able to know where to dive deeper and what reduces your website performance.

Of course, you can manually explore Google Search Console or Lighthouse Page Speed tool to analyze different aspects. You can also use a specialized website audit tool by SE Ranking that can save you time and find all the issues divided into groups with fixing recommendations. SE Ranking provides expert-level insights on all the technical SEO issues we discuss in this article.

Website Architecture Optimization

Architecture and performance are interconnected. Website architecture represents how you categorize, structure, and internally link the pages on your website. It helps users understand and navigate the website better and allows crawlers to crawl the necessary pages. This is why site architecture must be paid attention from the start.

Make URL structures simple

URL optimization means all URLs on the site must be human-readable URLs. They should correspond to the structure of the catalog http://example.ua/cars/maserati/ghibli/

Additional recommendations:

• Adhere to the same format for all page addresses.
• The hyphen “-” should be used as a word separator in the URL.
• All characters should be lowercase.
• Only Latin letters should be used.
• There should be no spaces in the URL.

The presence of a keyword in the URL may improve the ranking of the site for targeted queries.

Work on functional internal linking

Source: Sitecentre

Your links should be divided into different topics (clusters), which include hub pages (pillar content) and connected to more detailed pages on related topics/products/services. Organize all the groups in the logical hierarchy using descriptive anchors, text, and categories.

Make sure users can get to your pages in several clicks from the homepage (fewer clicks must be made to the important pages, more – for less necessary). Based on this, create a navigational and understandable menu and search bar with filtering if necessary.

Use XML sitemaps

Source: SE Ranking

For fast site indexing, you need a sitemap in XML format (called sitemap.xml) with a list of all the site’s pages. Sitemaps demonstrate to search engines how pages are connected to each other. Pages that should not be added to the sitemap include:

• Closed for crawling in Robots.txt
• Closed for indexing using a robots meta tag
• Technical pages of the site (pagination, filtering, sorting, authorization)

XML sitemaps will speed up indexing for a project with a large number and/or high nesting level of pages. The sitemap.xml file should be placed in the root directory on the server, and the list of pages should be automatically updated.

Create a Robots.txt file

Robots.txt is an instruction file for search engine bots. It specifies which pages of the site to visit and which ones not to visit. Example of Robots.txt file:

User-agent: *

Disallow: /default/linking

Sitemap: https://example.ua/sitemap.xml

User-agent: Google

Disallow: /default/linking

Sitemap: https://example.ua/sitemap.xml

Host: https://example.ua

Use the robots meta tags

Robots meta tags provide granular control over how search engines interact with individual pages. The primary directives include index, noindex, follow, and nofollow:

• Use noindex to stop search engines from indexing particular pages, such as duplicate content or internal search results.
• The nofollow meta tag demands search engines not to follow links on the page, which stops the indexing of low-value pages.

Add canonical tags

Canonical tags are HTML elements used to prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the “canonical” or preferred version of a webpage. For example, you may have multiple pages with similar or identical content. Placing a canonical tag in the HTML head of each duplicate page shows search robots what page must be indexed and ranked by search engines. 

Website Speed Optimization

Website speed is one of the ranking factors and a part of user experience optimization. Site speed optimization can prolong users’ time on the page and impact bounce rate and overall usability. 

Google calculated that slowing down search results by just 1/4 of a second could result in 8 million lost daily searches.

Optimize site for Core Web Vitals

Source: PageSpeed Insights

Core Web Vitals is a set of 3 metrics designed to measure the user experience of a website. CWV components include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP). It is measured in seconds during which the largest element is loaded on the first screen.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP). It shows how many milliseconds are required for the user to start interacting with the content on the site.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). It is the number of unexpected shifts of content blocks on a site page on load.

In general, the results for the three metrics should be within the green zones. Outside of the green zone, Core Web Vital scores may result in different page rankings.

Optimize images saving their quality

Large files, such as high-resolution photos and videos, download slowly and can negatively affect website speed. The solution is compressing.

For file types like GIF, JPEG, and PNG, there are quite a few ways to compress them. To save your time, perform bulk compression. It’s best to choose files like PNG. They retain higher quality when compressed.

Minimize render-blocking JavaScript and CSS files

Render-blocking resources delay the rendering of a webpage. To minimize these, defer or asynchronously load JavaScript files, ensuring that they do not block the initial rendering of the page. Inline critical CSS directly within the HTML to allow the browser to render content immediately, and load non-critical CSS asynchronously. This reduces the time to first contentful paint and improves overall load times.

Leverage Content Delivery Network

Source: Nexnet Solutions

Content Delivery Network (CDN) reduces the transfer of data between the CDN cache server and the user. Because it takes less time to move a file, download speeds become faster.

However, a CDN can work with poor effectiveness. If you don’t configure it correctly, download speeds can be reduced. If you have installed a CDN, test your download times with and without it using gtmetrix.com.

Reduce the number of plugins

You can easily add any number of plugins to your site. But the more of them there are, the slower the page performance will be. You can speed it up by removing unnecessary ones.

Real-time tests will help you understand how disabling certain plugins affects conversion rates. For example, disable the subscription plugin and see how it affects your subscription rate.

Use cashing

Caching stores a version of your webpage in the user’s browser, enabling faster load times on subsequent visits. Implement browser caching to store static resources locally, server-side caching to reduce server processing time, and object caching for database query results. Tools like Varnish or plugins like W3 Total Cache can help manage caching effectively.

Mobile Optimization

Google uses mobile-first indexing, so it checks your website’s mobile version to crawl, index and rank it. To work on mobile-friendliness, consider the next steps.

Responsive web design to adapt your website to mobile

Adaptive web design is the design of web pages that will ensure the correct display of the site on devices with different screen sizes. Here is why has responsive web design become a necessity:

• Increase in the number of devices with Internet access. Today, there are many innovative devices that are used to access the Internet. These devices vary in screen size, resolution, and how website pages are displayed on them. This is why it is important that your website displays perfectly on any user’s device.
• The rise in popularity of mobile devices. Access to the Internet from a smartphone or tablet has become available to almost everyone. Therefore, each of the users must be comfortable on your site, otherwise – they will simply stop using it.
• Fast information. The fast pace of life dictates new scenarios of user behavior. Now, there is nothing surprising about making purchases from a cell phone or searching for the contact information of the nearest store, service, or restaurant.

You should avoid using pop-ups as they interfere with the user experience. Make clear navigation and use convenient fonts.

Other tips for technical SEO optimization

These are complimentary tips for your technical SEO.

HTTPS security

HTTPS is a better version of the HTTP security protocol that provides data protection for your website and the users who visit it. Set up a 301 server-side redirect from all HTTP pages to their corresponding HTTPS pages. For example:

• 301 redirect from http://example.com/ to https://example.com/ 

But make 301 redirects only after switching to HTTPS!

Structured data markup implementation

Rich snippets are improved search listings that provide additional information, such as ratings, prices, or event dates. To implement structured data:

• Identify the content types on your website that would benefit you, such as articles, products, or events.
• Choose the appropriate schema from schema.org.
• Integrate the structured data tags into your HTML using a recommended format like JSON-LD.
• Validate your markup with tools like Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool or Rich Results.
• Test to ensure correctness.

Structured data markup leads to improved SEO performance.

Summary

Technical SEO is not a one-size-fits-all process. There are technical aspects that are important for some sites but not suitable for others. This will depend on your audience, intended user experience, customer experience, business goals, and more.

Once you understand the basics of technical SEO strategies, it will be easier for you to create pages that users and search engines like. You will also be able to perform your own technical SEO audit and understand professional practices.