What is the difference between technical SEO and SEO? Not much more than focusing on optimization for website crawling and website indexing in general. The whole purpose of technical SEO is to improve search engine spider’s website crawl efficiency so search engines like Google can index ALL webpages on a website and not just some. As looking webpage indexing, can cause a drop in keywords and thus overall organic web traffic.
So what exactly are the technical SEO factors that if optimized can help search engine bots crawl a website better?
- Url Structure
- Meta Titles
- Internal Linking
- Content Relevancy
- Anchor Text
- Webpage Load Speed
- robots.txt file
- .htaccess file
- 301 Redirects
- 301 Redirect Loops
- 404 Pages
- Website Heading Code
- Meta Robots Tag
- Historical Penalties
The above technical SEO factors are also on page SEO factors, since a website owner has direct control over optimization and can fix any problems as needed. The way technical SEO interacts with search engine bots varies, but the main point is to provide a clear path to crawl the website, full of rich, relevant content, allowing via meta robots tags, the indexing of each webpage.
Some SEO Issues Boil Down To Technical SEO Mistakes
Believe it or not, there are websites that still vanish overnight, at no fault to anyone else, than someone who didn’t understand the purpose of a NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW meta robots tag. What that particular meta robots tag tells search engine bots, is to no index the webpage and don’t follow any links on that webpage. That’s the website killer tag right there, and shouldn’t be used unless someone doesn’t want a certain webpage to be searchable, like a private policy page for example.
There are only three types of meta robots to really worry about:
- NOIndex and Index type – Tells searchbots to index or not to index the webpage.
- NOFollow and Follow type – Tells searchbots to follow or not to follow the urls on the webpage.
- A variation of the two –
- For Example:
- index, nofollow – tells searchbots to index the webpage, but don’t follow the urls on the webpage.
- noindex, follow – tells searchbots to NOT index the webpage but follow the urls on the webpage.
- For Example:
Not optimizing meta titles for search engine bots is one of the biggest technical SEO mistakes around, this is by far one of the most important factors in SEO. It’s one of the most important factors because it’s a key point in how search engine bots determine keyword relevancy. Not having a properly targeted keyword in meta titles, is often why a website doesn’t rank for the targeted keywords. The meta description isn’t used by Google, it’s more of a marketing point to your potential costumers, entice them by including well crafted CTAs.
Overall technical SEO isn’t really different from SEO, the overall goal is the same, to rank keywords better, gain more organic traffic so the goal conversions can take place! If you’re having trouble with your website traffic, consider a technical SEO audit to peek under the hood and make sure there are no potential issues preventing indexing and keyword ranking. Contact SEOByMichael for an technical SEO audit today!
