8 Technical SEO Factors That Decide Website Success
By: Moss Clement
Tags: Google Ranking, Technical Seo, SEO, Marketing Strategies, Digital Marketing

Photo by Webaroo.com.au on Unsplash

What elements of technical SEO are the deciding factors of a successful website? Since the race for higher rankings on Google’s first page is a continuous game, every marketer wants to upscale their SEO strategies frequently.

This approach will help to improve search engine ranking. Note that your website ranking position is dependent on many factors, including On-page SEO and off-page SEO techniques.

It makes technical SEO even more critical to the success of a website. It is the underlying force that becomes the base of the growing super-structure of your blog.

However:

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO implies optimizing your website to help Google bot understand your site content and possibly increase Google search engine ranking. This technique of SEO helps search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively.

It also improves organic search rankings and boosts site traffic. We will discuss some of the components in a moment. But first, let us understand why technical search engine optimization is vital to your digital marketing strategy.

Why Is Technical SEO so Important?

Applying SEO techniques into your digital marketing strategy is primarily to drive traffic and earn money. So improving the website user experience (UX) will help you accomplish your objectives.

Nonetheless, Technical SEO is not there only search engine optimization marketing tactics to boost your SEO goals. You need more marketing tactics to succeed. But an on-point technical SEO makes everything else easier for you.

Moreover, although search engine crawlers are getting smarter at crawling, understanding website information, and indexing web pages, these machines are not flawless. Even humans make mistakes.

So if Google crawlers are unable to determine your website content, the search bots will pass without showing your pages on search results. Also, when considering how to implement technical SEO, you must keep in mind the website category too.

Since there are technical SEO factors that are solely responsible for ranking websites, functional SEO elements will help to enhance website optimization and improve user experience. It ensures that your site provides an appropriate setting for Google crawlers that offers optimum performance.

Now, let us look at:

8 Technical SEO Factors That Decide Your Website’s Success.

1.Crawl Error

Google does not rank web pages; it cannot access. Crawl errors create trouble for the site in its appearance on the SERP. If the search bots are unable to crawl and find your website, then you must check for crawl errors.

Due to these technical errors, the audience might be unable to reach your website. Moreover, if there are any crawl errors, a user who typed a search query cannot find the information on the SERP.

The crawl error report comprises of mainly site errors and URL errors. A DNS error will occur if the DNS server goes down. However, people commonly forget to update the robot.txt file when launching their website.

Let Google bot crawl all your pages, or you can block the pages on your website. You must perform a thorough audit of the robot.txt file of your website. Many crawlers and audit tools can help you launch your site free of crawl errors.

You can use Fetch as Google tool in the Google Search Console to check your website.

2. Optimize Website for Technical SEO

As mentioned earlier, if Google spiders cannot understand your content or access your website adequately, the possibility of appearing on search results becomes slim — meaning that you will not rank on Google.

So it is vital to optimizing your site for technical SEO if you want your website to be successful. That said, you can watch this video to learn how search engines work.

Video material via Reliable Soft.

3. How Good Is Your Site Loading Time?

Site speed is a crucial factor in the success of a website. Google Search Console picks up blogs with good website speed for ranking. If the bounce rate of your blog or website is high due to slow loading time, it can create a negative impact on the ranking as well.

The slow loading of the page also affects the crawling, and consequently, it’s website indexing. A small delay can also make you lose a massive number of readership. So if your website is taking time to load, especially on the mobile platform, it may not show up on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

But with optimal site speed optimization, you’ll get fantastic results in organic search. You can check your site speed on the tools available online, such as Google PageSpeed Insight.

The tools will assist you in improving website speed by analyzing your site content and provide useful data on how to make your pages load faster.

4. Website Security (HTTPS)

Website security is a critical ingredient in Google ranking. The HTTPS is the etiquette where information gets conveyed through web browsers and websites securely. The HTTPS protocol protects web users against man-in-the-middle attacks.

This type of attack can happen on sites that are not secure. From there, hackers can attack your site in different ways, including:

Brute force attack

XSS attack

SQL injection

Identity theft

Crash your site

Steal valuable data

So the HTTPS is so helpful because it defends user data and web communication from prying eyes. That is why Google considers it an incredible technical SEO factor. If your blog or website is not secure, ensure to upgrade it to HTTPS.

5. XML Sitemap

You must submit a correct XML sitemap to Google Search Console so that it helps Google crawler to locate web pages and rank them on the search result page accordingly. Webmasters use a sitemap to form website structure in a way that makes Google index your site faster.

Hence, your website architecture should be correct, as it helps the user to navigate through the site easily. So your sitemap must follow the XML sitemap protocol.

6. Meta Description and Tags

If you want to make your SEO strategy effective, then optimizing title tags, Meta tags, and Meta descriptions for SEO is the key to success. Thorough keyword research and strategic placement of the keywords help in optimizing the meta description and tags.

But, please do not overload your metadata with keywords. It might get penalized by Google. So, it is better to write your meta description carefully.

Speaking of metadata:

What Is Meta Data?

Metadata is information that gives details about other data. It describes and summarizes information about data. Note that there are types of metadata, including:

Descriptive metadata Structural metadata, Administrative metadata Reference metadata Statistical metadata

Nevertheless, they all provide facts about other data. Therefore, the length of the meta description should be within the character limit. Google does not show up lengthy meta descriptions on the Search Engine Results Page (SERP).

So it will not consider ranking your website it the MD is too long. Title tags help in informing the search engine about the page and hence affect the ranking. Moreover, the metadata must be alluring enough to make the user click on it.

7. Is Your Website, Mobile-Friendly?

According to statistics, the United States accounts for 65% of mobile clicks on paid Google search results.

Further study reveals that there is a steady growth of mobile organic search in the United States from 2013 to 2019 on Google. The data shows that Google maximized 95% of the total mobile searches within that period.

Thus, it is all the more mandatory for you to make your website mobile-friendly. As Google has moved to mobile-first indexing, it is necessary to make your site mobile optimized.

And because Google search index ranks the website mobile version first, building a mobile-friendly website is necessary to remain at the top of the game. You may observe a drop in the ranking as Google goes by mobile-first index.

So, it is always better to run a mobile-friendly test to audit your website. Other technical SEO factors you may want to evaluate are broken links and duplicate content. Error 404 or broken link can severely affect your site crawling and indexing on Google.

The negative impact can also affect your website’s credibility because it decreases the flow of web traffic to your site. So, do a mandatory check for 404 error pages to ensure no such issues occur.

Duplicate content is another technical SEO factor you need to fix. Firstly, it decreases the reliability of the website — creating a lack of trust with your audience. Secondly, if there are several duplicate contents present on your website, Google Search may penalize your blog.

8. Website Domain Authority

Is domain authority an essential technical SEO factor? Yes, it is! Google uses domain authority as a deciding component in determining the quality of a site and what blogs to show searchers.

It constitutes how influential a website is depending on the quality of links referring to the site. Moz does the estimation of a site’s authority from a scale of 0–100. Moz also decides a site’s domain authority by its age. This approach means that older domains receive Google ranking favors and rank higher on searches.

However, with the right approach and SEO strategies, you can heighten your rankings. For example, if you add a blog to your site, it can improve your possibility of higher ranking by over 400%. How is that possible?

By regularly publishing informative content on your blog — content pieces, your readers, and Google love, your blog will help to enhance website user experience. Web UX, as you may already know, is a top priority for Google.

Therefore, add a blog to your site if you don’t already have one, then apply other SEO best practices to grow your website.

Wrapping Up Technical SEO

Technical SEO elements are as essential as any other SEO ranking factor. Over the years, SEO experts have devised new formulas for website optimization. But some basic rules always apply when creating a new website.

If you want to be ahead in the race for ranking your blog or website, then you must do a detailed website audit before launching the site. And, if you are looking for some SEO advice, feel free to ask our experts.

This article first appeared at Moss Media