5 Technical SEO Optimizations (Basically) Anyone Can Make

Intro

Technical SEO might just be the least understood of the four pillars of search engine optimization. Think about it; anyone can conceptualize some good on-page copy, sticking some keywords in page titles, and offsite guest posting, but once you start talking about 404 errors and HTTPS domains, things can get hairy quickly.

No worries - I’m no technical SEO expert myself, but I have come up with a few basic tech SEO optimizations that pretty much anyone can implement, with no coding or development experience needed.

What Is Technical SEO?

First off, in a nutshell, technical SEO is all of the optimizations that go into making a domain appealing to a search engine, behind the scenes. Things like speed, security, site structure, and structured data all impact how a search engine’s crawlers interact with and ultimately index (or don’t index) a page.

While technical SEO does have the potential to impact a website’s user experience (UX), it primarily focuses on making the website (or specific pages) easier for a search engine to crawl and index. Therefore, some of the optimizations mentioned here will not really have any UX component, but will still have an impact on overall rankings.

And most importantly, they’re all very basic.

Add Some Internal Links

This is likely to be the least impactful of all technical SEO optimizations, and since it is the most basic, I will start with this.

Add some internal links to your website, where it makes sense to do so. For instance, let’s say you have a blog or a CMS page that mentions one of your products, or a category or class of products. Link to that page or collection.

Do you have products that are often bought together? Add a link between the two pages. This will positively impact the website’s overall user experience, will produce opportunities for cross-selling, and will let search engines know that the two pages are contextually relevant to each other.

That will positively impact your SEO.

Remove Duplicate Content

While Google (and other search engines) may not directly penalize you for having duplicate content on your website, duplicate contentcan chew up your crawl budget, and any authority due to it will get deferentially awarded to the original publisher.

So, say for instance you scrubbed some copy from a manufacturer’s website and plopped it on your own. Their pages will probably rank above yours for any search terms for which you both are ranking which are relevant to the copy in question.

Moreover, and just as concerningly, copy (and pages) can chew up your crawl budget. Crawl budget is the number of times in a given window of time in which your website’s pages will get crawled. If you eat that allowance up with multiple instances of the same copy, you’re wasting opportunities for your pages to rank or improve their current standings.

The fix (in general) is easy. Anywhere on your website you have a copy that you took from another source - replace it, and don’t do it again in the future.

Optimize/Implement Structured Data

Structured data is a bit of code you can add to certain pages on your website to increase your chances of getting featured in a rich snippet.

Now, granted, simply by publishing informative, high-quality copy, you can get featured in a rich snippet. Implementing structured data is just like giving your pages a little bit of a technical SEO edge.

To be honest, this one requires a bit more technical acumen than the other SEO hacks included in this list. However, there are free schema markup generators on the internet that you can use to write the code for you - then you just need to add the code snippets to your pages.

Make Sure Your Pages Can Be Crawled and Indexed

You need to make sure that your website’s robots.txt file is implemented and configured properly to enable search engines to crawl key pages on your website. A disallow directive can prevent crawlers from seeing your pages. At the same time, there are some pages you might want to exclude from indexing that could chew up your crawl budget, such as internal search results pages.

Check your robots.txt file and make sure there is no disallow directive preventing key pages, like blog posts, CMS pages, and regular category and product pages from being crawled and indexed.

Boost Page Load Speeds by Compressing Images

This one is a big one that’s going to have an impact not only on technical SEO but on UX, because most users are completely intolerant of slow load speeds and will bounce if the page takes more than 3 seconds or so to load.

You can use Google’s PageSpeed Insights to see how your pages stack up. The reports generated break down the areas in which the URL in question passes and fails, and large image sizes are a _very _common point of failure.

There are plugins that can be used to bulk compress your images, and there are also free tools you can use to compress and re-upload your images. Doing so will improve your page load speeds, boosting both tech SEO and UX.

Find and Fix “Broken” Pages

Lastly, you’ll want to find and fix “broken” pages that signal to Google and other search engines that there are problems with your website.

A common, perhaps the most common cause of a problem page is a 404 error, which indicates a dead or “broken” link. You can use both Google Search Console and tools like SEMRush to find and fix these errors.

If using SEMRush, go to the “Issues” tab and search for “4xx” which will cover 404 errors as well as other “400 level” issues.

There are two options you have here - you can either restore old pages that were accidentally deleted, or set up redirects so Google no longer sees a 404 error.

Routinely scrubbing your website for technical errors like this is one of the most important things you can do to ensure a healthy level of tech SEO along with a good UX.

Don’t Just Stand There! Do Something!

All of the technical SEO optimizations mentioned here are fairly basic and most of them even inexperienced website administrators should be able to make.

Also, you’ll learn as you go. Don’t expect to become a technical SEO expert overnight, but as you gain experience and make optimizations a few times, you’ll learn what to watch out for, so you can optimize pages as you build them, rather than going back and having to improve them after the fact.