9 Best Practices for Technical SEO (And Best Rankings)

Technical search engine optimization (SEO) is as important as the content you publish, especially for ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs). That is why many SEO agency experts have focused more on educating website owners on features like snippets.

Thankfully, keeping up with these developments does not have to be overly complicated.

This guide covers using technical SEO best practices to boost SERP ranking, including:

• A brief review of technical SEO and its uses
• Nine SEO practices you need for best ranking

There’s a lot to discuss, so get ready to take notes.

Let’s go!

Watch this video to learn how Digital Authority Partners tackles Technical SEO!

Understanding Technical SEO and Your Website

Technical SEO refers to anything that happens on the backend. It covers all elements that users do not see, such as codes and website speed. It may also cover more challenging SEO practices, such as a well-used crawl budget and structured data.

Needless to say, technical SEO is what keeps your website running consistently and smoothly. Without it, you might not even have a single web page to show for all your hard work since troubleshooting and managing your website’s security and backlink profile fall under this category, too.

Even website crawling and indexing are parts of technical SEO concerns. In sum, it is impossible to overstate just how much this branch of SEO benefits your ranking on SERPs, whether you know it or not. That is why actively using technical SEO practices is crucial to succeeding online.

How Technical SEO Affects Your SERP Ranking

As laid out above, technical SEO concerns your website’s general upkeep and function, which impact your ranking on SERPs. Why are they important? For starters, all search engines heavily emphasize a smooth user experience (UX) for website visitors.

Following technical SEO best practices, including responsive design and backlink building, can help you overcome major SEO hurdles. While it does not resolve all of your website’s performance issues, this branch of SEO is still a major foundational element for ranking higher on SERPs.

Do not feel bad if you are having difficulty visualizing this. Understanding technical SEO’s value is near-impossible without seeing it for yourself. Written examples only go so far in simplifying this topic, but luckily there are beginner-friendly technical SEO practices that you can try.

9 Technical SEO Practices That Boost SERP Ranking

Basic technical SEO concepts, such as internal links and external backlinks for improved SEO and major faux pas like content spinning, are most likely familiar to you already. However, that is only the start of what it teaches you. In fact, SEO experts come up with new techniques all the time.

So, it is time to discuss some techniques that will dramatically boost your ranking. Some might be common, and others are bound to be new to you. Either way, the list below shows a mix of technical SEO practices that should cover different bases and skill levels.

• Schedule Regular Site Audits: Part of technical SEO’s responsibilities is maintaining your website. Naturally, website audits fall under this type of SEO, from finding security threats to minor errors. Google Search Console is an excellent (and free) tool you should be using for this purpose.
• Maximize Your Crawl Budget: Your pages cannot rank on SERPs unless search engine crawlers index them first. This is hardly an issue for small websites, but larger ones need to focus on how they use their crawl budget. It uses an XML sitemap and robots.txt file to direct site crawlers.
• Use Responsive Web Design: One of the best things about technical SEO is that it keeps up with current times—for instance, a recent shift centers on the rapid development of mobile devices. As a result, SEO has turned towards a mobile-first strategy by pushing for responsive web design.
• Switch to Using Topic Clusters: A well-linked website containing both internal and external links is technically optimized. While you should limit the latter, having many internal links positively impacts SEO, and there is no better way to build them than by executing an effective topic cluster strategy.
• Take a Minimalist Approach: When it comes to websites, minimalism is definitely the way to go because unnecessary plugins, add-ons, and extensions weigh down your website. Take marketing websites for films as an example. They are often slow and struggle to load all the media they contain.
• Add Meta Tags to Rich Media: Given the above, if you want to add rich media files such as images and videos to your content, remember to optimize them, too. Add alt tags and captions to make them “readable” for search engine crawler bots, screen readers, and other accessibility apps.
• Invest in Website Accessibility: Accessibility is one SEO concern that website owners often overlook unless it features prominently in their target audience. However, people with disabilities are not the only ones who care about this. Today, hands-free browsing is seeing increased usage.
• Learn to Use Structured Data: Google recently updated its SERPs with ‘continuous scrolling,’ which allows websites beyond page one to be more competitive at the cost of being lost in the crowd. Knowing how to make rich snippets with structured data will be crucial for better ranking.
• Aim for High-Quality Backlinks: Put together a solid strategy to attract backlinks from reputable websites such as news outlets. Start with a site audit, then compose high-quality original content that other writers find irresistible. You can also get backlinks by giving others good news material.

Summing Up

Technical SEO is one of the more challenging aspects of SEO because it includes so many topics and tactics and loosely connected factors that affect your website’s ranking. For example, while crawling and indexing always go together, they are actually separate topics.

Optimizations for crawling are different from those for indexing. They are, however, still related to one another and similarly impact your website’s SEO – particularly SERP ranking. Best practices are too numerous to realistically cover in one place, but following the ones here is a good start.

Need help selecting the best technical SEO practices to boost your ranking? Contact us to learn what we can do to help.