Why technical SEO is a foundation to traditional on-page or off-page SEO

Introduction

Hello techies, we all know why SEO is crucial for any online business, so today I am going to discuss or take our debate forward in reference to “Why technical SEO is a foundation to traditional on-page or off-page SEO”. In this article, we are going to explain to you why technically sound web application who fulfills all fundamental site compliance are good before traditional SEO (on-page and off-page SEO) work.

If you want to do better in the SERPs, it takes more than just SEO. First, invest in website technical aspects before investing in traditional SEO.

Your website also needs to be designed well, SEO and web design work together more seamlessly than many people might realize.

Their components mingle and flow together so well that, when executed correctly, your website visitors should not actually notice anything about what you have created; they should simply start navigating through your site. So let us talk about what makes worth good web design work before SEO.

What is Technical SEO?

Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site in terms of design (UI and UX wise), site structure, crawling, indexing, and important compliance, but can also include many technical processes meant to improve search visibility.

Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from Server response times, sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.

Having poor technical SEO while the rest of your site is optimized is like driving a shiny new Lamborghini without an engine.

How Technical SEO different from traditional SEO techniques like on-page or off-page SEO strategies?

On-page/on-site SEO - refers to optimizing your content both for search engine rankings as well as for users (you want them to see you in the SERPs and be attracted to what you may have to offer).

Technical SEO can be done by developers end, and also a foundation of SEO, I strongly tell to all the clients and customers that SEO expert and SEO advisor/consultant are two different persons.

Where SEO expert can be a web developer or web engineer, and an SEO advisor can be anyone he/she could be a technical or non-technical person. So that only developers can understand what is happening under the hood in a website and how to fix that technical issue whether it is code issue or server related issue.

That's why we always focus on best UI/ UX, site structure, categorization, site compliance for "technical SEO", because its a foundation of the site and on-page/off-page SEO.

Technical SEOs need cross-team support to be effective

It’s vital to have a healthy relationship with your developers so that you can successfully tackle SEO challenges from both sides. Don’t wait until a technical issue causes negative SEO ramifications to involve a developer. Instead, join forces for the planning stage with the goal of avoiding the issues altogether. If you don’t, it can cost you time and money later. (Source: Moz.com)

What most important factors that should cover in technical SEO?

1. Site indexing and crawling by search engines. Try to make the site easily readable by search engines like a human. See this mobile-first indexing guideline from google.
2. Site speed (should be less than 5 seconds and from Oct 2019 google have started a speed report to give speed score to mobile and desktop separately - experimental).
3. Responsive design for mobile (As of 2018, Google started switching websites over to mobile-first indexing. Google has always focused on a great experience for users so this journey started in 2015 when google has announced that it will give the SEO benefits who have mobile-friendly web designs, and in 2017 they started blacking out bad design websites, so you know what I wanted to say, just for mobile-friendliness looks).
4. Site structure/architecture (and strong internal linking).
5. Structured data (Schema.org – JSON-LD format recommended by google).
6. Server load time.
7. Render-blocking scripts optimization and more.
8. Canonical URLs.
9. Proper redirect/ or eliminate bad and broken links.
10. Above the fold text content rather than images, and many more site compliance that should be followed in technical SEO or sometimes called SEO foundation.

Site speed score measured based on following aspects by google:

1. First Contentful Paint: First Contentful Paint marks the time at which the first text or image is painted.
2. Speed Index: Speed Index shows how quickly the contents of a page are visibly populated.
3. Time to Interactive: Time to interactive is the amount of time it takes for the page to become fully interactive.
4. First Meaningful Paint: First Meaningful Paint measures when the primary content of a page is visible.
5. First CPU Idle: First CPU Idle marks the first time at which the page's main thread is quiet enough to handle input.
6. Max Potential First Input Delay: The maximum potential First Input Delay that your users could experience is the duration, in milliseconds, of the longest task.

Improving your site speed from a score of 20 to 90 will not only make the user experience significantly better and reduce bounce rates, but it can act as a ranking factor as well.

Two of the top Google ranking factors today by far (that aren’t going anywhere soon) are:

1. Content quality: High-Quality Content & Strategy means Focus on writing naturally over placing your keywords all over the page.
2. Inbounds Links (or site authority): The number of unique linking domains (ULDs) to your website along with the relative quality of these links is the pinnacle of your site’s ranking potential.

How do you improve your authority?

A large array of options are at your disposal, but link building through PR, content marketing, outreach, guest posting, and more are some of your most notable choices.

Advanced schema implementation, snippet optimization, JS rendering, lightning-fast page speed, and picture ‘perfect’ site architecture are all best practice and should be used when possible, but they aren’t going to overcome a lack of quality content (along with, ideally, reasonable quantity as well) and link authority.

Other Resources:

For more info and in deep understanding about technical SEO or related to this read the following comprehensive article:

1. Top Advanced SEO techniques checklist
2. Beginners guide to seo technical seo (moz.com)
3. Technical seo on site seo rarely enough (searchenginejournal.com)

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