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SEO is done to optimize the organic search traffic of a website. It is achieved by doing small modifications to certain elements of the website as well as backlinking the sites (inbound or outbound). The SEO marketers leverage two techniques for this purpose: On-site optimization Off-site optimization Your web page is constructed with elements such as HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. SEO experts configure these elements to make the website SEO friendly. The process is known as “Technical SEO,” and it is a part of on-site optimization. It focuses on improving elements on your website to get higher rankings. Now, let’s dive deeper into the Technical SEO part. What is Technical SEO? ( Image source: business2community) Technical SEO is a process of optimizing your website elements in such a way that it becomes easy for search engines to crawl and index them. It means you allow search engines to access, crawl, interpret and index your website without any friction. Let’s skim through the role of crawling and indexing. ( image source: elbongultom.com) Crawling: When Google bots visit your website and scan the site thoroughly for the content requested by some users. The bot that visits your site is known as Google’s Spider crawler. The crawlers look at webpages and follow links on those pages in search of the content. It is not necessary that every site that gets crawled gets indexed. Indexing: Once the crawling is done, the results get splashed on Google’s index (i.e., web search). Generally, it is observed that websites with high page authority and traffic have an excellent crawling rate. But if there are any technical issues with your site, then such pages don’t get indexed. From, SEO point of view, it is essential to fix these technical issues besides the non-technical ones. There is often confusion over technical and non-technical SEO. Here is the image that draws a clear line between these two. ( image source: searchengineland.com) The key elements of technical SEO Use HTTPS: Google likes a website with “https.” Secure website with an SSL certificate to ensure it has “https” in it. XML Sitemap: XML sitemaps are the preferred format of most search engines. To enhance the crawling and indexing rate of your web-page, ensure your sitemap is formatted correctly in an XML document. For bigger sites, use dynamic XML sitemaps. Register your sites: Register your sites with Google search console and bing webmaster tools Add structured data mark-up: Implement structured data correctly. Structured data mark-up assists search engines to index your site more effectively and provide more relevant results. Prevent indexing for spam content: Prevent search engines from indexing a page by using the meta “noindex” tag on a webpage. Enable AMP: Mobile-friendly site has more advantages from an SEO point of view. Use one CSS style sheet: Webpage loading speed is an essential factor and using one CSS style sheet throughout the webpage eventually optimizes the speed. Use Canonical tag: To stop search engines from indexing multiple versions of a single page, Google suggests having a self-referencing canonical tag on every page on your site. Keyword cannibalization: Keyword cannibalization occurs when a bunch of website pages targets the same keyword. To avoid keyword cannibalization, implement variations of the keywords, and link back to the canonical source for the specific term. This way Google would know which page is relevant to search and pick accordingly. Site’s robots.txt file: robots.txt file is a part of the robots exclusion protocol (REP). It tells whether web crawlers can or cannot crawl parts of a website ( with “follow” or “do follow”). Meta description length: Ensure your meta description length is not exceeding the standard format. Duplicate metadata: Though duplicate meta description won’t get you penalized, the SEO good practice says -use unique meta-title and meta-descriptions for every page. As mentioned above add a Canonical URL to indicate which page search engines should index Broken links: Any broken link that sends a signal of a low-quality website to search engines is bad for SEO. Audit outbound links to ensure that you are not sending people to a broken page or a dead end. 301 directs: Set up the 301 redirect code from the old URLs to the new URLs. In simple words, irrespective of their versions like “http://site.com,” “https://site.com,” or “http://www.site.com,” ensure that they all redirected to the correct version. Important Notes: If you use CSS to hide links and content, then you may be penalized and removed from Google’s index SEO software for website optimization: There are many SEO tools available that help in implementing your SEO strategy flawlessly. Here is the list of best SEO software for website optimization. SEO Panel SEMrush Ahrefs MOZ Pro Meta Forensics cognitiveSEO DeepCrawl WebCEO AgencyAnalytics RankActive Final Thought: SEO is an ongoing process. Each day millions of websites go live on the internet, and they all race to get listed on the search engine top page. In this cut-throat competition, a smart SEO expert who has in-depth knowledge of technical SEO can crack the code for the page ranking. Overall, technical SEO is a key factor for the SERP, and a regular audit can pave the path for SEO success.