Top Technical SEO Factors For Search Engine Ranking

The major search engines—Google, Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Baidu, etc—are endeavouring to provide highly customized, relevant, and personalized user experience in the form of the results shown on the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) as a response to the users’ queries in real-time. There are many factors that the robots of these giant search engines look for while crawling and evaluating web pages. Usability and user experience can have a positive influence on search engine ranking success and help increased search visibility and ranking.

Some of the major techinal SEO factors are the following:

• User Experience
• Structured Data
• Pages Load Time
• Robots.txt
• Sitemap
• Mobile Usability

User Experience

The search engines are continuously striving to improvise query search results for the users. The search engines have become quite sophisticated in offering pages and sites that are quite relevant, authentic, and satisfactory for their searchers. And user experience (UX) has gained an immense significance in the past few years. The websites with the best usability score must have the following attributes:

Structured Data

Structured data helps Google crawlers understand the nature and purpose of the content of a page for a given website. Structured data provides meaningful clues and suggestions about the content and it is a standardized format for providing information about a page and classifying the page content. Google SERPs results are diversified based on different search features for which the website content need different treatment as Google Search uses structured data to enable special search result features and enhancements.

Pages Load Time

Page speed is accounted for one of the prominent factors for getting more organic traffic and better search engine ranking. Google has also introduced PageSpeed Insights (PSI) tool that the web developers can use to identify the areas that can help—if fixed—increase the website page speed for different devices. PageSpeed Insights (PSI), in fact, reports on the performance of a page on both mobile and desktop devices and provides suggestions on how that page may be improved and optimized for a better speed score. A score of 90 or above is considered fast, and 50 to 90 is considered average. Below 50 is considered to be slow.

Robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file that the web developers use to provide instructions to search engine bots—crawlers, robots, or spiders—how to crawl and index website pages. A robots.txt file is placed in the top-level directory of the website so that crawlers can access its instructions and guidelines right away. Robots.txt files can be used to exclude certain directories, categories, and pages from the access of the robots. It is essentials for all the web developers to know how to set up and use a robots.txt file and meta robots tags.

Sitemap

A sitemap includes all the links and their locations which a website wants the crawlers to index in search engines. The sitemap is a file providing information about the pages, news, articles, videos, and other files on a website, and it also highlights the relationships between them. The crawlers can read this file to crawl a website accurately. The sitemap also tells the crawler which files are important in the website and provides valuable information about other files. We can also use a sitemap to give information about specific types of content on the web pages, including video and image content.

Mobile Usability

Mobile usability has gained immense importance as Google is giving a great weight in terms of search engine ranking for those web pages which are extremely optimized for mobile devices. Mobile devices, as constrained by display and screen sizes, require a different approach, techniques, and content strategy for mobile users. Web developers are facing a daunting challenge to provide an optimum user experience for mobile users as a myriad of unique screen sizes exist across different devices—phones, tablets, desktops, game consoles, TVs, and even wearables. Screen sizes are always changing, so it’s important that your site can adapt to any screen size, today or in the future. Google has changed its search engine features for mobile users, and the web developers need to develop content and provide a layout that can suit.

Benefits of Technical SEO

Technical SEO has multiple benefits. It helps boost search engine ranking for organic search results. It enhances user experience. It increases website speed and reduces page load time. It also helps establish a strong link with the crawlers through robots.txt and sitemap files.

Some of the above-mentioned technical SEO factors are interrelated as the user experience and web pages load time is. If a web page doesn’t load fast, the users get frustrated and put a negative impact on the overall experience. The other technical SEO factors are all related to content on the website. The sitemap should be configured and formatted properly to facilitate the crawlers in crawling the website.

The robots.txt file is also crucial as it directs the crawlers to which parts of the website are open for being crawled. The structured data also helps the crawlers what the content is all about and what it is all about.

The onus lies on the web manager to help the crawlers understand the structure and architecture of the website by improving the technical aspects for search engines. If all is done properly, you might be rewarded with higher rankings or even rich results in SERPs.

You may have to pay a higher price if all these technical aspects are not dealt with professionally. Yes. The serious technical mistakes can hamper your website indexing and crawlability. For example, if you don’t configure your robots.txt file properly and block the content from crawling for search engines, your website will be lost and invisible in search engines.

The bottom line is you need to focus on creating a better user experience and solid technical foundation for search engines. A website should function well, with optimum page load time and easy to use, for your users in the first place. Creating a strong technical foundation often coincides with a better experience for both users and search engines.