Technical SEO Elements

A tech company should be able to connect with its potential customers online. The approach you take with your digital marketing strategy should include a robust plan to attract customers to your website through search engine optimization. Technical SEO is a big part of this approach.

Technical SEO deals with the construction and interconnectivity of pages on your business website. This includes monitoring and fixing problems that cause site downtime and slow-loading pages. It includes enabling mobile compatibility, improving cross-platform UX and UI, creating redirects as needed, tag management, and more.

Let’s look at some of the big concepts behind technical SEO and how tech companies can leverage these concepts to grow their audience, attract more leads and fine-tune their website to drive revenue. 

Programming Languages For SEO

If you don’t have a background in computer science, programming can be an intimidating subject. However, today’s professional SEOs need some technical expertise to keep their sites competitive. From relatively simple tasks like tweaking configs in WordPress to harder jobs like editing an application to support server-side rendering and reduce client-side loads, knowing a programming language can be a huge benefit.

Search engine optimization is about creating great content (blogging) and building links to that content (outreach/backlink-building), but programming languages form the framework of everything we do online. As SEOs, we’re constantly working with developers and webmasters to implement our recommendations regarding everything from how the website is constructed to how a “code heavy” site can create a negative experience for the customer. 

Basic CSS and HTML coding is absolutely essential to SEO. From there, you can step up your skillset with something more complex. Python, for example, is well-equipped to handle SEO tasks, with plenty of libraries designed specifically for data analysis, for example. JavaScript is another robust programming found on sites that use client-side rendering JS frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular.

Whatever language your business website is written in is the one you want to start with. There’s a ton of different programming classes, including:

• Lynda (now known as LinkedIn Learning)
• Codecademy has interactive JavaScript and Python modules
• Coursera gives you more of a classroom environment for learning 

Mobile Compatibility and SEO

Are you thinking “mobile-first”? You should be, because Google certainly is.

If your site visitors have problems navigating your content, they’ll abandon your website. This in turn sends poor UX signals to Google, which in turn gets your business website ranked lower and lower.

In Google’s words:

“Mobile-first indexing means that we’ll use the mobile version of the page for indexing and ranking to better help our–primarily mobile–users find what they’re looking for.”

Mobile search optimization means optimizing things like the size of text or calls to action. It means offering a clickable, easy-to-view navigation menu for mobile users. For example, if your users can’t read any of your blog content without pinching to zoom in and read your copy, there’s a problem.

Make sure you periodically monitor crawlbot traffic to your site. You can do this in your Google Analytics account. You will notice traffic from Smartphone Googlebot. The cached versions of pages will show you the mobile version of the page. Look at these screenshots and see if there’s a problem. Take note of things like bounce rate and time spent on page, as well as click-through rates and conversion rates.

To ensure mobile compatibility, you have a few options. You might create a separate, mobile version of your site. If you’re seen a site URL that starts with the letter “M,” you’re probably on the mobile version of someone’s website. The problem here is you have to manage two versions of your website—that’s twice the work for you. Also, you’ll need to manage those versions in such a way that URL structures do not result in duplicate content.

You might also “dynamically” serve content based on the device being used by your site viewer. An adaptive site uses the same URL, but the server sends a different version based on what type of device is requesting the page. Here again, you’ll have to manage and maintain two different versions of your site.

These days, the best option for mobile-first SEO is to create a responsive design. Responsive web design automatically delivers the right content based on the user’s behavior and environment (including screen size, platform and orientation) to make sure your site looks great on all devices.

How do you know if your business site is mobile-friendly? Google’s test is a great place to start, along with good old-fashioned manual testing on your own iPhone or Android. Just remember, “mobile-friendliness” is determined page by page, not site-wide. So make sure you update your key pages (your highest converting pages) first. Google even provides tools to help you with the task.

Page Speed

Pages that take too long to load can have catastrophic consequences for a technology brand. Technology customers in particular expect websites to load within seconds. As Google reports, a ONE SECOND delay in mobile load time can reduce conversions by up to 20 percent. That’s why failing to optimize for page speed can result in a disastrous reduction in leads. 

Page speed, specifically mobile page speed, has been critical to SEO since it became a ranking factor in July 2018. That’s right: slow sites simply won’t rank as well as fast sites. The emphasis on page speed is all about giving site visitors a great user experience.

Another issue with slow page speeds? It can mean search engines aren’t crawling your site to discover new content as often as you would like. Google uses an allocated crawl budget every time it visits your website. If your site is plagued by high load times, Google can’t crawl as many pages. This means your whole site may not be crawled.

Pingdom is one tool that tests the speed of your business site. You will need to enter the location you want to test from; choose the location closest to where your site is hosted (you know where your servers are, right?). 

Google PageSpeed Insights is another powerful and free tool that gives you a score for both mobile and desktop. It also gives recommendations for improving your page speed. A few of the things it will measure include:

• Server response time (also known as the “time to first byte”): Measures how long it takes for the server to respond to the request for the page. 
• First contentful paint: This measures when the first content (images or text, for example) begins to appear on your site. 
• First meaningful paint: This measures how long it takes the most important content on the page to appear on screen. 
• Speed index: Measures the average amount of time needed to display the visual parts of your site.
• First CPU idle: The moment the user can begin to interact with the web page. 
• Time to interactive: The time to interactive looks at how long it takes for the page to be fully interactive–meaning that customers can engage with the material and the page has stopped loading.
• Max potential first input delay: The max potential First Input Delay measures the worst input delay users might experience. The FID refers to the delay that occurs between when a customer engages with something on the page and the website responds to that command.

As a rule of thumb, try to create pages that are no larger than three megabytes (MB), and smaller when possible. Remember, all your website data are transferred over a network from your host’s servers to the end user. The larger the site, the more data there is to transfer. 

Aside from sheer page size, common problems with loading speeds include:

• Too much redirection. As you restructure your site, removing pages and redirecting users (via 301 redirects, for example) is a fact of life. Be aware that each redirect will add loading time, so be judicious about creating redirects.
• Bad hosting. Don’t cut corners with your website hosting. Cheap hosting providers put your site on a server with thousands (or millions) of other websites. If you have a personal blog, that may be fine. For a growing tech business, it’s not. Shared hosting means all the technical optimization in the world won’t help slow page speeds. A premium host or a dedicated server can work wonders for your page load speed.
• Incorrect image formats. Generally, you have three main image formats: JPEG, PNG, and GIF. Always use the right one to suit your needs. Logos may be best formatted as GIFs, whereas high-quality photographs will do best with a JPEG. 
• Not compressing images. There are image optimization tools to compress your images. From Adobe Photoshop to WordPress plugins.
• Not using a CDN. A content delivery network, or CDN, will detect a site visitor’s location, then serve resources from a server that is as close as possible to that user.
• Synchronous loading. Make sure assets load asynchronously and only if the user navigates far enough down to require them to load. “Lazy loading” can boost your load speed by allowing the core parts of the site to load before loading the images and other non-core elements.
• Not implementing JavaScript or other scripts correctly. If Google’s crawler encounters a script, it has to run the script before it can parse the HTML and render the page. The problem? Some scripts are pretty big. Some contain commands for external (off-site) sources. If these have to download before the crawler can continue parsing the page, load times shoot up. Make sure you minimize any scripts that can block the HTML.
• Using the wrong content management system. Your content management system, or CMS, has an impact on site load times. WordPress has become the standard, though some themes are terrible for SEO (i.e. they’re too “heavy” and bloated on the back-end). 

These issues should all be identified as part of a comprehensive technical SEO audit at the start of your releationship with an SEO agency.

Index Status

“Crawling” is the process by which Googlebot discovers new pages to add to its index. As search bots crawl your business website, they “index” pages based on their topic. XML sitemaps make it possible for Google to find (and index) all your site’s pages. Your sitemap also tells Google when there is a new URL to crawl when you publish a piece (though you should also submit your new content via Google Search Console to speed things along).

Note: Search engines support different types of sitemaps. If you want to be listed in Google news, for example, there is a specific Google News sitemap format.

Search engine crawlers begin crawling a website by downloading its robots.txt file, which contains rules about what pages should be crawled. The robots.txt file can be used to hide parts of your site so they don’t show up in search. For example, if you have a “members only” section that’s behind a login screen, you might want those pages to not show up in search results.

Put another way, robots.txt tells Google what NOT to index and the sitemap tells Google what to index.

Google’s robots.txt tester will give you a list of pages that are disallowed. The best way to ensure Googlebot can index a page is to use Google Search Console’s Inspect tool.

Hreflang/Language Tag

If you do business internationally, your site will probably have pages in multiple languages to appeal to as many people as possible. How do you tell search engines what language and region a given page is for? Google recommends using the hreflang attribute.

Hreflang should be added to the <head> section of each relevant page to help your website get more exposure for international search queries. It’s a simple HTML markup that denotes the language or region your webpage is targeting. It looks like this:

 (rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) 

International SEO can be a challenge. For example, multiple variations of similar pages across sites can cause content duplication problems. Hreflang is the solution; search engines crawl each of the hreflang URLs and count them as unique pages. They clarify the relationship between international versions of a page, allowing you to serve the right content to the right audience without confusing the search algorithms (on whose judgement your rankings depend).

HTTP Vs HTTPS

As a technology business, you should know the difference between HTTP and HTTPS.

• HTTP: A primary protocol to encode information and transport it between a web browser and a web server.
• HTTPS: A secured extension of HTTP that establishes the website server connection over the same protocols, adding an extra third-party Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to transfer data in encrypted form. 

HTTPS is a must for ecommerce sites and websites that accept credit card payments. HTTPS is also important when your site visitors are using unencrypted Wi-Fi networks (at the library or local coffee shop, for example). Anyone on a public network can “packet sniff” to steal sensitive information about your visitors without the data encryption.

Something else to consider: Since 2018, non-HTTPS sites show as “Not Secure” in Google’s Chrome browser. This doesn’t mean there is necessarily wrong with your site. But the “warning” could leave visitors confused and less likely to trust your site.

Google favors HTTPS over HTTP and has admitted to giving a slight bump to HTTPS sites. Findings from Moz’s Search Ranking Factors survey confirms this.

Structured Data/Schema

You can give search engines information about a page to Google by including structured data on the page. There are hundreds of different markup types, but they all let you create enhanced descriptions of your content to appear in search results.

First, let’s clarify the terms:

• Structured Data refers to how information is structured to associate values with specific items or products. Google Search uses structured data to enable special search result features and enhancements. 
• Schema is a vocabulary extension supported by Google, Microsoft and Yahoo! for mark-up languages such as Microdata and JSON-LD formats. Schema markup (found at Schema.org) creates an enhanced description (rich snippets), which appears in search results.

Structured data can help with rankings by improving your CTR (click through rate). As always, you should experiment with schema markup to see how your customers respond before going all-in. To get started, go to Google’s Structure Data Markup Helper.

Canonicalization

When search engines encounter multiple pages with the same (or similar) content, they have to decide which version of the page to index and rank. Say you have the same product descriptions on multiple URLs (or even different websites), for example. Or say your webmaster screwed up and both the www and non-www versions of your site are “live,” creating a duplicate of the entire website.

By using canonical URLs (HTML tags with the attribute “rel=canonical”), you can prevent duplicate content issues and/or tell search engines which page is the most important.

Once again, let’s see what Google has to say about it: “You should choose a canonical URL to consolidate link signals for similar or duplicate pages. This helps search engines consolidate the information they have for the individual URL (such as links to them) into a single, preferred URL.”

It is ultimately up to Google to decide how your URLs will be treated, but generally, canonical tags mean links to page B will be counted as links to page A if page B canonicals to page A. 

Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source framework intended to make online content appear on the end user’s screen faster than ever. The Google-led initiative is primarily aimed at online publishers and news sites, so if you aren’t regularly producing content on your website, it may not be for you. Still, many tech retailers and other enterprise brands are using the technology to achieve faster mobile performance.

Essentially, AMP pages are versions of your page cached on Google services. Google will deliver its AMP version via its servers, making it extremely fast no matter where your reader is located.

It’s important to note (since this guide is about SEO, after all) that AMP is not a ranking factor. However, if you have both an AMP version and “regular” version of a page, and the AMP version is the canonical version, then Google will use the AMP version to determine quality and relevance for ranking. And since AMP pages are highly optimized for mobile devices, there can be an indirect rankings boost.

If you manage SEO for a website that isn’t using AMP, you and your development team should look into whether or not it can help with performance issues you may be facing. Since it’s an open-source initiative, there’s extensive documentation to help you implement AMP. 

Although it’s great for fast-loading news content, AMP requires ongoing maintenance apart from your responsive mobile pages. In other words, there’s more to maintain from a development standpoint. Also, AMP data won’t properly track in Google Analytics unless you cobble together the data from your AMP analytics and regular website analytics. You can do this by following Google’s guide to session unification for AMP.

Some site owners have said that moving away from AMP has been a huge headache for them. After all, it means giving control over your content to a third party (Google). If you are a news publisher, it may be worth it. But for most tech companies, we would argue that it isn’t.

Conclusion

As we’ve seen, technical SEO deals with how your business website is constructed, how its pages are connected, how (and how fast) it loads for the end user, and how it works on various delivery platforms. As described by the marketing software company SEMrush, technical SEO includes all of the following and more

• Site Structure (internal linking, URL structure, taxonomy)
• Site Crawling (log file analysis, XML/HTML sitemaps, mobile bot crawl behavior)
• Status Codes (3xx, 4xx, 5xx)
• Indexation (canonicalization, robots.txt, meta tags)
• Mobile Compatibility (AMP, progressive web apps, responsive design)
• SSL (HTTPS, HTTP/2)
• Structured Data (schema markup, microdata & JSON-LD, rich snippets)
• Migrations (domain migrations, relaunches, CMS changes, HTTP to HTTPS)
• Page Speed (Rich media and script compression, CSS sprites, CDNs, server speed optimization, parallel downloads and minify, caching)
• Page Rendering (Critical rendering path/lazy loading, DOM rendering, Javascript frameworks rendering)
• Content Optimization (entity optimization, duplicate content, thin content)

To sum it up: Can search engine bots find, crawl and index your page? Can they render your content to “understand” what it’s about? Are you sending search engine spiders the signals they need to classify and rank your website pages?

If you’re promoting your tech company by focusing solely on content and links, you could be leaving a lot of opportunities on the table. Spend some time on your technical SEO elements and you’ll have a much stronger, more user-friendly, more search engine-friendly site.