What is technical SEO? How to rank higher on Google

To rank well and be visible in search engines you need to work with SEO - search engine optimization. Many companies already know to continuously work with content and keywords. It can then be incredibly frustrating not to see the results you want after diligent content work. This may be because there are technical errors, often critical ones, on a website that make things difficult for Google and thereby worsen the ranking. Here we tell you a little more about technical SEO.

Roughly, SEO work can be divided into two parts:

• Content-driven SEO
• Technical SEO
  
  

In technical SEO you primarily work with source code, load times, rendering optimization and features for describing data in a structured way. Content-driven SEO is more about processing and optimizing the actual content in the form of texts and images.

To get good at technical SEO you need to become good at understanding Google and their search robot Googlebot. The goal is for Googlebot to be able to quickly and easily find all links and without problems read and index all information on the pages. The pages should also load quickly, be mobile-friendly and be free from JavaScript errors, broken links or incorrect markup. Fast, well-organized, clear and relevant.

Google looks at the user experience

Over the past few years, Google has made a number of changes in how they crawl and index websites, which has pushed technical SEO up as a prioritized area. Previously the focus was mostly on relevant content. Now the focus is both on relevant content and an optimal user experience. The logic behind this is simple: Google does not want to suggest broken, slow, hard-to-navigate or content-poor pages to its users. If Google detects problems in any of these areas on a website, the recommendation value drops dramatically and the site will as a consequence fall deep down in the search result lists where no one finds it.

One example of how Google factors user experience into its review of websites is their move to mobile-first. Since July 2019, Google indexes all new (previously unknown) website mobile-first by default. Existing websites are indexed as before but are now also monitored to see how well they meet mobile best practices. The logic behind this is simple: the majority of searches on Google are made via mobile devices. Therefore Google wants to evaluate pages based on the conditions that apply to mobile users. This means that sites that are currently not mobile-friendly will need to address this sooner or later.

Types of problems that can be solved with technical SEO:

• Pages that are poorly mobile-optimized
• Pages that load slowly
• Pages with broken code
• Pages missing important tags (both meta tags and regular HTML tags)
• Links that Google cannot follow or index
• Poorly implemented JavaScript
• Information that Google cannot interpret
• Poor or non-existent handling of pages that are missing or have been moved

What is easy to fix

The absolute easiest thing to fix is to ensure that any tags or attributes missing on pages are put in place. If they simply exist and can be edited per page, the rest is up to the person working with the content.

The tags that must be present on every page are:

• Title
• Main heading 
• Meta description
• Canonical URL
  
  

If you have this in place and use it correctly, you have taken the first step. If you have been sloppy with this previously, you will see clear improvements in visit statistics. 

What is a canonical URL?

A canonical URL is a way to tell search engines which URL is the original (the URL you want Google to index for the current page). The reason this tag is important is that a search engine treats different URLs that lead to the same page as different pages.

All of the links below lead to the same page, but Google will index them as eight different pages:

https://www.cykel.se/mountainbikes https://www.cykel.se/mountainbikes/ 
https://www.cykel.se/mountainbikes/index.aspx 
https://www.cykel.se/mountainbikes?brand=scott 
https://cykel.se/mountainbikes 
https://cykel.se/mountainbikes/ 
https://cykel.se/mountainbikes/index.aspx 
https://cykel.se/mountainbikes?brand=scott

Basically, you can think that if a URL does not match another URL character for character, the search engine will interpret it as different pages. The consequence is that Googlebot sees exactly the same content on all eight pages in the example above and thus flags the content as duplicate content. Google does not like duplicate content and you therefore lose a large part of the ranking power the page has. 

But if you add a canonical tag in the page header, Google knows which URL is the one that counts and can consolidate all ranking power to that one. Then you can link to the page more or less as you like without it being interpreted as duplicate content.

Links

The rules for links from Google's perspective are simple:

• They should be a-tags 
• They should have an href attribute 

We usually summarize it in the recommendation: no messing with links. If links do not meet these two rules, Googlebot will ignore them which is catastrophic for SEO. But if you meet the above requirements regarding your links, you can be safe.

At the same time as the guidelines regarding links are extremely simple, the area itself is quite complicated, especially when you mix in JavaScript or data parameters that are often added to links on data-driven websites. What does Google think about query strings? Is it safe to use the History API on JavaScript-driven sites? Does Google prefer flat URLs or long hierarchical URLs? Google's SEO guru John Mueller, for example, says "We don't count the number of slashes in the URLs" while at the same time we know that a keyword located far from the domain name in a long URL will not rank as highly in Google.

Images

The person responsible for technical SEO does not normally control which images are shown on the page but must ensure that those who do have that responsibility have the tools needed to be able to upload images in a way that makes Google understand what the images depict

As with links, it's not particularly hard to do it right

• Make sure the images have an alt tag that describes the image in text. 
• Name the image file itself something understandable, preferably five words or fewer. 

You might think that the image's filename shouldn't matter, but Google much prefers "mountainbike-jump-lee-collis.jpg" to "e43c34f06b8b8b93782c0db83bf472ed15.jpg".

Googlebot and JavaScript

Besides the major changes Google has made to the way it crawls and indexes pages, the almost explosive development of JavaScript-driven websites has helped put technical SEO in focus. To illustrate the problem we look at the most extreme example of a JavaScript-driven site, a so-called SPA (Single Page Application). It is a type of page/application where all pages and all content — including all links — are embedded in JavaScript code. A crawler visiting such a website would in principle only see a single empty HTML tag in the form of the root element for the application. No content at all.

This is of course something Google has thought about. Therefore they have extended Googlebot with functionality to render JavaScript so that they can also see content embedded in JavaScript. However, that does not mean you can sit back and rely on it always working. Executing JavaScript and rendering pages is time-consuming and costly, which means that Google's solution for this comes with a lot of caveats.

How does Googlebot handle JavaScript?

The model for how Googlebot crawls and indexes content on the web looks like this:

1. Googlebot crawls a website whose link is in its crawl queue.
2. It indexes the content that can be indexed directly (i.e. everything that does not require JavaScript).
3. Any new links it finds are sent back into the crawl queue.
4. If there are pages that require JavaScript to be indexed, these are sent to a separate rendering queue.
5. In the rendering queue, the pages wait to be rendered in Googlebot's rendering engine. Google promises nothing more than "best effort".
6. The rendering engine picks a URL from the rendering queue, executes the JavaScript, and renders the page.
7. Content from the rendered page is indexed and any new links are sent to the crawl queue.

As you can see in the model, Googlebot can actually handle content embedded in JavaScript by executing the JavaScript code and rendering the page. But that does not mean it's free rein to build JavaScript-driven pages and expect the same results in Googlebot's indexing as with a regular HTML page.

Rendering a page costs significantly more time and processing power than simply crawling and indexing content that is already served ready. Since Google roughly handles 130 billion pages in its search index, they have neither the time nor the processing power to render all these pages regularly. To solve this they have created this separate rendering queue where they place all JavaScript-driven pages that need to be rendered in order to be indexed. How long they remain in the queue depends on how much else Googlebot has to do and how important they judge your particular content to be for users. Google themselves say they promise "best effort", which is exactly as vague as one has come to expect from Google when trying to press them on how their systems work behind the scenes.

If SEO ranking is an important component for making your website successful (which it is for most), you ideally do not want to be dependent on Googlebot's ability to render JavaScript. We usually say you want to be in the fast indexing loop. There are solutions to free yourself from this dependency even for fully JavaScript-driven websites. Dynamic rendering and hybrid rendering are two technical solutions that Google themselves suggest. We will not describe these strategies further in this article, but they are two potential solutions we discuss with our clients when questions about technical SEO arise.

How does Googlebot render JavaScript?

We've talked about rendering, the rendering queue and the rendering engine and it's appropriate that we get a bit more concrete. What does this mean and how does it work?

Rendering is what happens when your browser interprets code and files (HTML, CSS, images and JavaScript) and renders them as a page.

There is no difference for Googlebot - it also lays out the page when it renders. And it does so with the same kind of browser that you use. Googlebot uses a so-called headless version of Google Chrome to render the pages. Headless means that it is a browser without a user interface. That is not needed because it runs via code on servers in large data centers, not by physical users.

As we have touched on, rendering pages is a time-consuming process. But Google has nonetheless judged that it is something they must invest money and resources in. For it is only when they render pages that they have the opportunity to "see" the same things that users see. And seeing and experiencing what users see and, based on that, assessing pages' quality is an extremely important part of Google's business model. In the long term Google wants to render all pages at the same time they are indexed, but with current technology they cannot handle the heavy load that would entail.

There is much more

In this article we have focused on a handful of basic things such as links, images and JavaScript. If you want to work with technical SEO in depth, however, it encompasses much more.

Some examples of areas that we work with and have carried out special audits for on behalf of our clients are:

• Optimization of load and rendering times. Compression, caching, web server settings, page structure, etc.
• Implementation of CDNs (content delivery networks), e.g. for image-heavy websites.
• Guiding Google on how the website should be indexed in the form of sitemaps, robots tags (noindex, nofollow) and global indexing rules (robots.txt).
• Insights and suggestions for actions based on what is seen in the source code, in Google Search Console and other specialized tools that we have at our disposal.
• Handling of content in the form of lists, e.g. product lists. How do you get Google to find and index all your products in the lists? How do you want Google to index the list pages themselves?
• Structured data using schemas and data in JSON-LD format. Google Knowledge Graph.
• Transfer of ranking power from old to new pages when redesigning or building a new website. How do you handle pages that are not found (404)?
• Strategies for creating good URL structures. This is especially important on extremely large websites with many pages and consequently potentially long URLs.

All of this affects how Google views your page and how high up in the search results Google considers it should rank. Technical SEO alone cannot compensate for poor or irrelevant content, but flipping the perspective makes it clearer: good and relevant content can be dragged down by poor or non-existent technical SEO. And in our view that is the most tragic thing — having spent a lot of time and effort creating great content that no one then sees simply because you were sloppy with code and technology.

Google has 95,88% of the search engine market in Sweden (90.46% globally). Ensuring that you are visible on Google is therefore considerably more important from a business perspective than polishing details on your own homepage.

The business aspects of technical SEO

If you put the practicalities aside for a moment and consider what technical SEO means in purely business terms, it becomes even more interesting. You probably have an image of what your website’s homepage looks like. We argue that it isn’t your real homepage. Your real homepage is https://www.google.se/. That’s where the majority of your potential customers start looking. Google has 95.88% of the search engine market in Sweden (90.46% globally). Ensuring you are visible on Google is therefore far more important from a business perspective than polishing details on your own homepage. Given that insight, it’s astonishing how few digital agencies talk about technical SEO and structure and prioritize their projects accordingly.

Limetta takes SEO very seriously — both technical and content-driven. That means, among other things, that we include requirements for technical SEO right from the start in projects and that we work systematically with quality documents, diagnostic tools and checklists to ensure the requirements are met. If you need help with content-driven SEO work as well, we can do that too and have the tools to work on it effectively.

Also read