What Are the Types of Technical SEO You Should Care About?

No one can deny that technical SEO is a critical part of a company’s overall SEO strategy. If your website isn’t user-friendly and runs slower than a snail, Google (and other search engines) won’t let your content rank. Following technical SEO best practices ensures that your website is bug-free, easy to crawl, and offers an enjoyable user experience.

Okay, the importance of technical SEO is clear — but there are some technical SEO practices you can leave behind. Take backlinking, for example. Although backlinking was all the rage in the past, it’s really not all that effective when it comes to improving your overall site architecture and user experience. The risk of getting low-quality, spammy links is high and does more harm than good. And, even if you only include high-quality links, having too many backlinks raises Google’s spam alarm as well. Don’t even get us started on buying backlinks. Here’s a hint: don’t do it. Even if you do everything right with your backlinking, Google stated that the overall strength of backlinking’s ranking impact will drop over time.

Our point is, learning how to do technical SEO the right way takes more than a few shady backlinking tricks. With that in mind, DemandJump created this blog to focus on what really matters in technical SEO.

What Are the Pillars of Technical SEO?

Although we can’t teach you how to do technical SEO step by step in a single blog, we can give you a comprehensive rundown of the fundamentals. If you want to rank on search engines, there are three technical SEO factors you need to master: site structure, robot.txt, and metadata. Let’s discuss each of these in more detail.

1.) Site Structure or Architecture

This one’s a doozy, but it might be the most important part of technical SEO. At a high level, your site architecture is what helps Google navigate and evaluate your website. And crafting an SEO-friendly site structure takes more than cobbling together a few web pages and posting content. Here are a couple tips:

• Use Topic Clusters | A topic cluster is a group of content pages on your website linked together that cover a broad topic from multiple angles. The main part of a topic cluster is a Pillar Page, which acts as the ultimate, authoritative guide for a given topic. All other content pieces in the cluster (we call them Sub-Pillars and Supporting Blogs) link back to the Pillar Page and form a web of related content for users (and web crawlers) to explore. In the early years of SEO, marketers created disparate pages for their target keywords without worrying about authority, internal linking, or topic relevance. As search engine algorithms evolved, these outdated tactics became detrimental to a website’s ability to rank. Basically, creating and linking together a comprehensive network of content allows search engines to easily crawl your website and recognize your brand as an industry expert. We know that’s a lot of information, and we’ve only scratched the surface. Learn more about topic clusters and Pillar Pages here.
  
  
• Ensure Your Site is Easy to Navigate | One of the most vital components of your site architecture is the top-level navigation menu. Not only does this menu help users easily navigate your website, but it also allows search engines to better understand your site’s informational hierarchy. This is especially important for crawling and indexing purposes. One way to improve your site navigation is to create an HTML sitemap that provides links to all of the pages on your site and includes descriptions of each page’s purpose.

Ultimately, crafting a meaningful site architecture is a powerful way to help Google understand what your site is about. If you want to improve your site architecture and internal linking strategies, check out Pillar-Based Marketing.

2.) Robots.txt Files

According to Google, “A robots.txt file tells search engine crawlers which URLs the crawler can access on your site. This is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests.” These files are critical for technical SEO purposes because they help to instruct search engines and give them a proper pathway for crawling and indexing your site. For example, robots.txt files can be used to prevent crawlers from accessing certain parts of your site (like admin pages) that don’t need to be indexed or crawled.

3.) Meta Tags or Meta Descriptions

Meta tags are bits of HTML code that show search engines how your web page should be displayed in search engine results pages (SERPs). On SERPs, meta descriptions show up directly under the web page title. These descriptions are no longer than 160 characters and usually include keywords for an extra SEO boost. Meta tags are important for two reasons:

1. A good meta description is meant to be an attention grabber and attract people to read your content and visit your site. For example, the meta description for this blog is “Technical SEO is a critical part of a company’s overall SEO strategy, but what should you focus on the most? Find out here!” If that got your attention, great! If not, our writer needs to do a better job. 
2. Meta descriptions also help search engines understand what your content is related to. This ensures that your content will appear on the correct search engine results pages.

Ultimately, mastering these three factors means you are well on your way to reaping the benefits of technical SEO done right.

Rank Faster the Right Way With DemandJump

In truth, mastering technical SEO techniques is only half the battle. If you want to consistently reach the top of search results, you need to take a data-driven approach to content. Pillar-Based Marketing (PBM) is the newest cutting-edge strategy in content marketing, and it’s taking the world by storm. Don’t believe us? Discover how DemandJump achieved 91 first-position rankings in just five months here.

DemandJump's podcast, Page One or Bust!, discusses in great detail this methodology called Pillar-Based Marketing and how it is shifting the way people think about how to target their ideal customers where they are in their search journey. Check out the below clip from a previous episode, or listen to the full episode at this link.