SEO, or search engine optimization, can be broken down into numerous techniques that work together to help get your web page the most exposure possible. It’s about understanding the way a search engine works and how real humans browse the web and interact with content. From off-page SEO, like getting backlinks and keyword research, to on-page seo, like content optimization and technical SEO practices, there’s a plethora of tactics you can put to use to make your page the most appealing and relevant to a search engine.
In order to get started with SEO, you need a web page that you want people to visit. And while building that web page, there’s a lot you can do right from the start, without backlinks or keywords or any of the off-page stuff, to get your page noticed by search engines. Web pages start with codes, and those codes are how they communicate with search engines. So without further ado, we’ll dive into how you can use technical SEO to make the code behind your web page stand out to search engines, and thus get you more exposure in SERPs (search engine results pages).
Table of Contents
What is On-Page SEO?
On-page SEO is exactly what it sounds like: it’s SEO techniques used on your webpage rather than using the other parts of the internet to get exposure. It’s about a blend of the actual content that’s on your website, the vocabulary used, and the codes behind each part of your website that make it look and function the way it does. You can manipulate all of these things (yes, even the coding) to make your web page more visible to search engines.
What is Technical SEO?
As we just mentioned, there are different tactics that fall into the category of on-page SEO, and technical SEO is one of them. Technical SEO is about making the code behind your webpage to stand out to search engines. Search engines don’t see web pages as the organized collections of images and fonts and writing that we see. Instead, search engines see the web pages in their own language: code. And while the idea of manipulating the code behind a web page may seem intimidating to the average person without a background in computer science, there are a few fairly basic lessons one can understand about codes and search engines that can at least get you started.
HTML: Hypertext Markup Language
Ok, the words “hypertext markup language” sound pretty techy and complicated. But all you really need to know is that HTML is the standardized code used to build web pages. It’s the language that search engines speak (primarily). HTML code for a website is full of instructions for web browsers to help that browser make a webpage look the way that we see it as humans. It tells the browser about the page layout, the locations of files, the colors and sizes and menus and fonts and more. There are several ways you can alter the HTML coding so that your webpage will stand out more to search engines.
Sitemaps for Search Engines
One way to optimize technical SEO is to create an HTML sitemap or an XML (extensible markup language, another type of code) sitemap right off the bat. When a search engine is crawling the web and discovering new pages, it’s clicking on every link possible to index that page’s content. So to make things easy for the search engine, you can create a sitemap that provides the engine with links pointing to all the various pages of your website with important content. Both HTML sitemaps and XML sitemaps are helpful to search engines; the difference between the two is that an HTML sitemap is something a human browsing the web can use, while an XML sitemap is in a special format that’s just for the search engine to understand. Ultimately, though, when it comes to search engines, they serve the same purpose: both kinds of sitemaps provide links to all of the important parts of your website, all of the content, so a search engine can easily work through it and discover it all.
URLs
Most people know a URL as the website’s address, the words and letters that come after “www.” But there’s a little more to a URL, or Uniform Resource Locator, than that. And – you guessed it – you can manipulate your website’s URLs to optimize technical SEO.
Each different page on the internet has a unique URL, and the structure of that URL can say a lot about your website. Your URL will have a general structure (for example, facebook.com), and then what comes next is what differentiates the content on one page of your website from another. However, sometimes there are extra letters, numbers, and symbols tacked onto the end of a URL, and these may end up confusing search engines. Sometimes those extra characters are related to content, but sometimes they have nothing to do with the content on the page and could just result in a duplicate URL.
In order to help the search engine out and tell it which URL to index for content, you can use rel-canonical metatag. In short, that’s a coding trick that tells the search engine that no matter what extra characters are showing up in a URL, there’s one main URL that matters for content and that’s the one the search engine should index. There are various websites that can help with this if you’re not a coding expert.
Using redirects when content has been moved from one location on your website to another is another way to keep the search engine on the right track. There are temporary and permanent redirects that tell a search engine whether it’s a short-term switch or whether the engine should change its index and get rid of the old URL completely.
Microformats
If your website contains special sections within a web page that might have their own format, you can use microformats within the coding that help search engines identify what’s going on in these specific chunks of your webpage. For example, a food recipe. The layout of a food recipe, to a search engine, is confusing. It’s short, choppy sentences that don’t have much meaning to a search engine trying to scan a page for content. So using specific metadata tools, you can tell the search engine what’s going on there, so it has a deeper understanding and will show up in search results when prompted.
Other times where a microformat might be used are product reviews, embedded video or other multimedia, event details, resumes, and more.
Servers and Cashing
Search engines are going to prioritize your website if its pages load in a fast and reliable manner. The key to this is having a good, reliable server, which ultimately is just a computer that’s helping fuel your entire website and make it accessible to anyone who visits it. It’s important for your web server’s physical location to be in an area of the world that’s geographically near or central to most of your site visitors. If it’s on the opposite side of the world, it may load slowly. If you get visitors from the entire world, there are hosting solutions that can help spread the work out and keep your pages loading quickly.
A final tip related to servers and speed is cashing. When a website is visited, your web server has to interact with your database of all its information. So a browser has to contact the server, which then contacts the database, just to load anything at all. With cashing, your server saves a copy of the database for a period of time after its first contact. That way it doesn’t have to contact the database every time just to load a page; the information will already be saved, and the process will be sped up.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO is the behind-the-scenes work of SEO. If you’ve set up your webpage in a way that optimizes technical SEO, then you’re already one step up before you’ve even started working on your content. Your web page will exist in a language that’s made for search engines, using metadata and coding that make it an efficient experience for a search engine to index the content of the webpage. The faster a search engine can crawl and index your web page, the more it understands about it, and the better it will rank your page. And while on-page SEO doesn’t end with technical SEO, if you can make your web page more search-engine friendly, you’ll already be steps ahead of the competition out there that’s failed to do so.
