Introduction to Technical SEO

In this SEO bootcamp from Conductor, we're covering an introduction to technical SEO. We'll walk through what it is, why it's important, and its four key pillars.

Technical SEO refers to any technical website optimizations that make it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and render your site more effectively. Where your content shines at center stage, Technical SEO is all about the critical behind the scenes structural elements that define your website's health and performance. This includes things like website architecture, page speed, schema, and more technical.

SEO's important because it affects Google's ability to add your website and content to its index and ultimately displayed on the SERPs. If your website's technical health and performance are poor, Google won't be able to discover, crawl properly, index, or rank your content well. That means it's unlikely to be found by your target audience and you won't receive much organic traffic.

In addition, your technical SEO affects user experience. UX is a significant consideration for your website because it's how your customers interact with your brand online. It's essentially your brand's reputation. If your website performs slowly, poorly, or some combination of the two, then that affects how much users will want to use it and how they perceive your brand as a whole. Google Way's user experience is one of its primary ranking signals promoting sites that offer better, faster, or more robust user experiences.

In short, your technical SEO strategy can make or break your website's organic presence.

There are essentially four key pillars of technical SEO.

The first is discoverability, which represents a search engine's ability to find your content amongst all of the other content on the internet. Optimizing for discoverability is all about improving a search engine's ability to navigate to and find your website. The key elements to consider when optimizing for discoverability are your site architecture, internal link structure, and XML site map and using index Now, and Google's indexing API.

Next is Crawlability, which is how easily a search engine can access your site and pages through content it's already discovered. To improve your crawlability, you'll need to increase the likelihood that your content is linked to a page that Google has already discovered and indexed. Basically, make it as easy as possible for search engines to navigate to the right pages through links. The key elements to consider when optimizing for crawlability are creating an SEO friendly site structure, improving crawl budget, avoiding duplicate content, improving site speed, and avoiding crawler traps.

Our third pillar is index ability or a search engine's process of adding new or recently updated content and pages to its ever expanding backlog of content. Many factors can affect your site's ability to be indexed, and like anything else with Google, we don't know all of those factors for certain. However, it is clear that you have a lot of power to improve and detract from your index ability. The key Elements when optimizing for index ability are schema, JavaScript, SEOH, Ang tags, heading, structure and canonization.

And lastly, user experience or UX refers to how a user interacts with your website and how the site responds. Optimizing your UX involves improving site speed, mobile responsiveness, and intuitive navigation, ensuring a seamless user-friendly experience that search engines reward. The key elements when optimizing for UX are core web vitals and accessibility.

No matter how great your content might be, if your technical SEO strategy isn't optimized, your pages won't rank well if they even get indexed at all. But a strong technical SEO strategy ensures your website's content and pages reach their full potential, bringing high on SERPs and avoiding penalties so your site can thrive and achieve the success it serves.