The world of search engine optimization (SEO) has experienced countless changes over the past two decades. Yet, it’s relevance in digital marketing strategy has only continued to grow. More than half of web traffic originates from organic search engine query results. Now more than ever, SEO is more than just crafting catchy content, sprinkling a couple of keywords, and inserting a link or two to authority sites. The technical aspects of SEO matter too.
Site architecture, security, and formatting heavily contribute to whether your web pages will be ranked highly. As competition for the first position on SERPs has intensified, so have the number of technical SEO indicators that Google and an SEO company will look at. The following technical SEO elements are crucial in this regard.
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1. SSL Certificates Are No Longer Just a Good to Have
While the overwhelming majority of website owners have now heard of SSL, not all of them understand what purpose it serves. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer. Together with its successor, TLS (Transport Layer Security), it’s a protocol used to establish authenticated encrypted communication between a web server and the end user’s browser.
In the past, SSL was considered a nice-to-have. The few websites that chose to implement it only did so on pages where sensitive information was likely to be submitted. That has since changed. From mid-2018, leading browsers such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, and Opera started showing a ‘Not Secure’ warning for pages that lacked an SSL certificate.
This warning to users led to a gradual decline in visitor traffic for sites that failed to deploy SSL. Remember that Google incorporated HTTPS in its ranking algorithm from 2014, so that alone is reason enough to conform.
2. Think Through URL Structure
Your website’s permalink structure should be simple, clear, descriptive, and SEO-friendly. As much as possible, your URL should include the page’s category as well as keywords of the post name. It should be easy for both a human reader and search bots to understand what the target page is about. Exclude redundant conjunctions like ‘the’ and ‘and’.
Don’t add dates to the URL structure. Whereas Google prioritizes content authority over the publishing date, the content’s currency is a big part of search ranking. Search bots will assume the content relates to an event that occurred around the date in the URL.
Overall, the structure of your URLs determines not just user experience but search ranking as well.
3. Create and Submit XML Sitemap
It’s crucial that your site has an easy-to-understand and well-structured XML sitemap. The sitemap is a vital guide for search bots as they crawl, assess, and index your site. By simplifying the work for Google’s crawlers, the search engine may reward your pages with a favorable ranking.
The XML sitemap ensures your most important pages are given the highest priority during ranking. For example, you wouldn’t want the homepage to be outranked by a low priority press release.
4. Go Mobile
Smartphones currently far outsell personal computers. This has implications for SEO. Traditionally, websites and SEO strategies were developed with PC users in mind. Nowadays, the average visitor to your site is likely to be using a smartphone to do so. Yet, the desktop version of your website may not be compatible with mobile devices. It’s probably too slow or buggy.
You have to make your website friendly to mobile users. It’s not just about improving the end-user experience but also improving your search ranking. Site speed is a ranking signal. A website that loads slowly on mobile devices may see its pages gradually pushed lower on SERPs.
Technical SEO Does Matter
Whenever SEO is discussed today, there’s heavy emphasis on the quality of content, backlinks, and keywords. While these are certainly critical components of a successful SEO campaign, websites that disregard technical SEO will be selling themselves short.
Embed these four aspects of technical SEO in your digital marketing strategy and you are more likely to see consistent sustainable search ranking success.
