What is technical SEO?

Technical SEO can be a very confusing topic.   Most people who have a website are not web site developers and so they don’t understand all the pieces that work together to make a nice website.  There is the server that hosts the website, the data connection to the server, the transfer protocol, the coding and several other factors.   You may know a few of these or maybe none at all.

 

Why does technical SEO matter?

In today’s competitive web market the search engines are looking for every way possible to find the best sites for their customers.  After all, if you get the best sites from their search engine you will probably come back and use their search engine again.  With so much information on the internet and so many different opinions, the search engines look for other factors to determine if your site answers the question of the search better.

While technical SEO is not the only factor it is an increasingly important one and one that can’t be ignored.   When the difference between customers seeing your website in searches or not seeing it comes down to a few places you need to do everything you can to make sure you are at the top of those search results.

 

So what are some technical SEO Examples?

Browser Caching

Setting up your webserver to cache pages so that it can show them to users faster.   Caching is the process of keeping a copy of the page stored in memory or locally so that you don’t have to send a request back across the internet to get a copy of the page.

Image optimization

If you create a beautiful large image for your website it will take a long time to download.   This makes the page slower to load and makes the user wait on the page.  When you optimize the image you make sure it is the correct size and then do any compression you can on it.  This makes the actual image size a lot smaller, which causes it to load faster, which gives the user a better overall experience. It is important to find the balance between a quality image and small file size.

Loading scripts at the bottom of the page

When you look at a website you may not realize all that is happening on that page.  It is really a page that is made up of a bunch of scripts and images and a bit of code.   These scripts, called javascript, css or others, can often be loaded at the end of the page so that the page will load faster.

Other Examples

There are many other examples of technical SEO work.   Mobile optimization, UI navigation, server side caching, changing programming language, and many more.   There is no one technical SEO factor that will sky rocket you to the top of the search results.  Search engines are looking for sites that pay attention to quality content that is unique, good site structure, and good technical SEO.