SEO - Search Engine Optimization - is essentially about increasing the likelihood of ranking high in search engine results.
To succeed in SEO, there are several different elements you need to work on. Content is always at the centre and is the foundation of successful SEO, but the influence of backlinks and technical SEO cannot be ignored.
In this blog post, we will go into more detail about what technical SEO means and how you can work with technical SEO to be more successful in your SEO work.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO is primarily about optimising the underlying code of a website so that a search engine can better understand what the page is about and rank it accordingly.
The way a search engine works is that it searches through all the websites that exist and ranks each individual page based on thousands of parameters in order to give the best possible results when someone searches in a search engine. A search engine's primary goal is to provide the absolute best result for the query asked in a search engine and therefore a search engine wants to find the absolute best answer to that query.
When a search engine crawls websites (crawling is when a search engine searches websites), they don't see what you see when they look at a website. Instead, they see the underlying code.
The first image below shows what you see when you look at a website and the second image shows what a search engine sees when it crawls a website.
If you want to see what the underlying code looks like on a specific page, you can right-click on the page and then select "View page source".
Because a search engine doesn't see what we see when we visit a website, technical SEO is important. Text has become relatively good for search engines to interpret and get an idea of what it's about, but images, video and audio are still relatively poor for search engines to interpret. This is when technical SEO really needs to be worked on in order for a search engine to get an idea of how the content should rank.
The main elements of technical SEO
For those of you who have ever conducted an SEO analysis, which often focuses on technical SEO aspects, you will know that the number of parameters assessed is very high and may be difficult to understand at first glance. There are some parameters that are more important than others and that we at Contitude have found make the most impact when it comes to achieving SEO results.
The 5 most important parameters for technical SEO we consider to be; Meta description, Page title, URL, Page speed and Internal linking.
Meta description
A meta description is an explanatory text about what the specific page is about. The description appears in the search results under the page title. in the image above, the meta description is highlighted in red.
There is no limit to how long a meta description can be, but it is trimmed to match the space available at any given time. The tip is therefore not to save the most interesting part until the end when it can be cut off. The recommendation for the length of a meta description is usually around 160 characters plus or minus a little depending on who you ask.For a meta description to serve its full purpose, it should contain the search term you want the page to appear on and be a helpful interesting preamble to what the page is about.
Page title
The heading you see in the search results of a search engine is the page title. In the image above, it is highlighted in blue. The most important thing about the page title is that it should be as close as possible to the exact search phrase you want the page to appear for. One of the most common mistakes made when it comes to page titles is to name them according to the menu bar, e.g. "Home". This is vague and doesn't provide good information for a user looking for information in a search engine. It's better to use your company name and possibly what value you deliver.
URL
URL stands for Uniform Resource Locator and is the unique web address that leads to your specific page. It is highlighted in green in the image above and for best SEO results should contain the search term you are looking to rank for.Here you can also build hierarchies of URLs that show depth within a particular topic. An example would be to have URL /seo/ and then /seo/technical-seo/ and /seo/backlinks/ etc to build a so called topic cluster around SEO.
Page speed
One of the factors that drives most visitors to leave a website is the speed of the page. Search engines know this and will therefore reward websites that load quickly. The reason a website loads slowly can be anything from the server where your website is hosted being slow to your images being high resolution and therefore very heavy to load. Google has a great tool to check your page speed: Google Pagespeed
Internal link
If you have a website with many pages, internal linking helps a search engine figure out which pages are really important and which pages should rank for which keywords. An internal link is a text that has a hyperlink to another page on your website, such as this link to our SEO packages page . When you make these types of internal links, you show that the page about SEO packages is important and is about SEO packages. Then a search engine will take that into account for raking that page when searching for that specific term.If you want more explanations of technical SEO terms, we have put together a glossary of SEO terms that you can find here: SEO Glossary
Is technical SEO for me?
If you are going to work with SEO and want to get a lot of organic traffic, the technical aspect of SEO is important. It's a bit of a hygiene factor where you have to reach a certain standard to be able to rank really well. The important thing to remember is that technical SEO doesn't help rankings without having content that can be indexed. Technical SEO is about getting search engines to better interpret the content you have produced and therefore technical SEO tends to be more relevant when you have a lot of content or plan to produce a lot of content.
How quickly do I get results from technical SEO?
There is no exact answer to this question, but if you have a lot of content already and have not worked with technical SEO before, you can get a big return within 2 - 3 months. What also affects is how often your website is crawled and this depends on how much activity you have on your website.
What does technical SEO cost?
It varies greatly between suppliers but you can expect hourly rates between 700 and 2000 SEK per hour. Many tend to set it up as a monthly subscription from 10 000 SEK and upwards and then do as much as they can. What you should keep an eye on is getting a specification of what they do with the time they spend and what results are actually achieved.In this article we go into a little more detail about pricing on all elements of SEO:What does SEO cost?
Tools for technical SEO
If you are actively working with technical SEO, an SEO tool is recommended. It allows you to run reports on what needs to be improved. There is a wide variety of tools that have their advantages and disadvantages, but they often measure the same parameters. At Contitude, we use Ahref, which is a good tool but costs a lot. Screaming Frog is another tool that is free and provides great insights.If you would like a free consultation on technical SEO analysis of your website then book a 45 minute meeting with us at Contitude through this link:BOOK MEETING
Summary
Technical SEO is about making your content understandable to search engines.Working with technical SEO can give relatively quick results if you have a lot of content that is not optimised today. The important thing to remember is that technical SEO has no real impact if you don't have any content.There are lots of different elements to work on when it comes to technical SEO but the 5 most important elements according to Contitude are: meta description, page title, URL, page speed and internal linking.
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