Technical SEO Services

Google Search Console is your best friend and your worst enemy but it's important to remember not to shoot the messenger! Given that it is a free tool provided by Google for your benefit, it's safe to assume that the information it gives to you is critical. It is designed to help search engines like Google find the pages you want to find in order to display them in search results. People make the mistake of thinking that technology is intelligent; it isn't. Like the vast majority of technology, search engines understand what you tell them to understand.

Google Search Console will help you to submit sites for indexing using your xml sitemap, tell it which web pages you want it to crawl using your robots.txt file, and ultimately tell you whether or not the search engine can find you.

Bing offer a similar application called Bing Webmaster (Google's Search Console used to be known as Webmasters) and it offers the same functionality of crawling and indexing. This is the first step in helping you with your technical optimization.

N.B. by submitting an XML sitemap to Google Search Console you can filter out content (as well as knowingly-duplicate content) that you wish to keep on the website but make it so that a search engine won't crawl and index it (i.e. display it in search engine results). This in turn will help your technical SEO.

Page Speed is how quickly your site loads when a user tries to access it. There are lots of factors that can impact your page speed and technical SEO:

Image size (file size and image size)
Server speed
Javascript (JS) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Whether the page is mobile friendly
Caching

This is by no means an exhaustive list, however it does give you some insight to the elements that affect page speed. Handily, Google has another one of its free tools to help - PageSpeed Insights provides you with a breakdown on the technical SEO factors that have a bearing on your speed. It also gives you a score that you can benchmark your progress against. Site speed is also important as it contributes to your technical SEO (and SEO in general) and when Google is indexing your site, it will also note how long it took to do it.

Google love the internet and they want people to enjoy using it. Your website should give its users ease of access and relevant content. Around 60% of Google searches come from mobile device and so once you have the basics of what you want on the web page in place, you should consider just how enjoyable your website is to use. Some relevant areas you can factor in to this are:

Internal Links - is it easy to get one one page on your site to another?
Duplicate Content - is the piece of content you're providing to visitors displayed anywhere else?
Link Building - does your content send users to other sites that may be of interest?
Mobile Devices - is your website easy to use if being visited from a mobile device?

As mentioned above, about 60% of Google searches take place on a mobile device. Some of these are done in a browser whilst others are done via apps. When it comes to your technical SEO strategies, you should think mobile first. Google's robots will spend actively spend time crawling and indexing your domain for how well it works on mobile devices so it is crucial that you play ball. Free tools such as Google Search Console has sections that helpfully inform you about its usability and PageSpeed Insights will give you insight in to how your website performs on mobile.

Here is where a whole new area opens up, namely AMP, or Accelerated Mobile Pages. If useful, AMP is an HTML framework that can be used to create your webpage in lite or diet form. It has an upside in so far as you are likely to be bumped closer to the top of a SERP (on Google specifically) but it comes at a cost of vastly-reduced features and and a focus on content. Think of when a news article appears at the top of the article; you click through and the site loads quickly without any frills. That is an AMP.

Whilst we often consider what we can see on a website to be the most important element, with regard to ranking factors it is what we can't see that plays such a vital role. With correct code (including code included in an XML sitemap or robots.txt file) we can stop a search engine seeing duplicate content, push them on to pages we want visitors to see, and tell search engines which page or pages are the most important for them to display. Technical SEO and code implements elements such as schema markup, internal links, external links, URL structure, structured data, canonical tags, HTML, and meta descriptions and tags. In addition to this, link building relies on efficient coding and this can relate to both internal linking and external linking. Best practices rely on clean, well-placed code that is underpinned by precise technical SEO strategies. The days of keyword stuffing and vague multiple versions of content are over. Invest time in researching and implementing effective code for your domains. It will drastically reduce SEO issues and vastly improve the structure of your websites.

Google is naturally the first search engine we think of when it comes to SEO and technical SEO. Google have a 91.54% market share of the global search market and that means that when it comes to technical SEO strategies and digital marketing, Google should the search engine you're trying to please.

As you can see, technical SEO is a large subject that requires constant monitoring and management. If you'd like to know more about technical SEO and initial steps you can take right away to improve your domain ranking factors, visit the article below.