The Essential Technical SEO Ranking Factors Every Site Needs To Know

A while ago, technical SEO was the process of optimising your website so that it could be indexed faster by the search engines, but not anymore...

Nowadays, technical SEO refers to the process of optimising the technical elements of your website such as HTML tags and ensuring your site contains a valid SSL certificate.

We recently covered the different types of SEO that you need to be aware of, and that's why, in this post, I'll tell you the ranking factors behind technical SEO and why you need to be implementing it today.

Technical SEO Ranking Factors

There are many technical SEO ranking factors that will help you drive more organic search traffic to your website.

It's a good idea to use a mixture, if not all of them to ensure you're covering yourself at every angle.

Page speed

Let's kick off one of the first ranking factors that contribute to this form of SEO, but not just SEO.

It contributes to building and growing a website regardless of how well your site ranks.

That's the page speed of your website, or, putting it another way, the website performance.

You see, maintaining website performance as a site grows can be challenging, so it's a great idea to get a website performance tracking tool set up today, you can use a tool such as the PageSpeed insights tool to get an idea of how well your site performs.

Using a tool like this will give you a score for both:

• Mobile
• Desktop

Each of these scores will contain potential suggestions on how to improve areas which could be lacking in optimisation, it's up to you to decide what you do from that point onwards.

If your page isn't loading fast enough for a user, they're going to go to another site, they won't bother reading your content - even if they wanted to, they can't

Because your site's performance is really slow.

You can use image optimisation tools such as TinyPNG for optimising images on your site to make those load faster

Correct usage of heading tags

There's many heading tags that can be used on your website throughout that have two benefits:

• They break up long-form content to make it easier to read
• They provide a technical SEO advantage

Each page should contain just a single H1 tag, often known to be your page's title, it should be the largest of all of them, and should ideally match whatever your page title has as well.

If you have any more than just a single H1 tag, you could be confusing the search engine and preventing it from understanding what your page is about, and that's not good.

Ensure that your page contains H2 tags for your subtopic ideas, and use H3 tags to go into more detail about your subtopics.

You can use H4 tags to use for reference headings such as: "Example", or something very similar to that.

Heading tags stretch beyond this though.

What about your main content?

Well, you need to be using paragraph tags, also known as P tags for this kind of content, it's where your main content will sit and will be broken up with little gaps between each paragraph.

Responsive website design

Responsive web design is essential when it comes to building any website or digital product online today.

More and more websites are emerging than ever before, and ensuring that your website works well across a range of devices is required to improve your technical SEO ranking within the search engines.

It doesn't just mean making sure that your website scales on a phone and tablet and that's it, it's more about the fine detail too:

• Do buttons sit close together or far apart?
• Is the text the correct size on a smaller screen?
• How does the layout of the web page look?

These, and more.

Whilst phone screens are getting bigger, you can't ignore that a vast majority of people still use phones with smaller screens.

So for these users, using your website on a smaller phone screen, your website has to not only look great, but has to be great from a technical SEO perspective and website design perspective too.

So you're probably asking...

How do you test your website on a mobile right?

Well, if you're not a technical geek like me, you could opt to use a service to test what your website looks like on a smaller screen such as Browserstack.

But this could get a little pricey if you've just started your website and don't have that much revenue from your site yet.

An alternative solution is to simply set up your website on a quick free web hosting provider and see what your site looks like there before putting your changes live on your real site.

Use a website monitoring tool

Now you might be wondering what a website monitoring tool has to do with technical SEO right?

Well, since we're talking about the technicalities of SEO, I thought it would be worth mentioning that by adding your website to a website monitoring tool, you're ensuring that technical aspects of your website are monitored.

What kind of technical aspects?

I'm talking about metrics such as your website's response time, this is the time taken for your website to respond to requests by your users such as loading images and navigating between pages

Website monitoring tools, also known as domain or uptime monitoring tools typically allow you to add your website to their system and they'll ping your website at a frequency of your choosing.

That's what our tool does. So I'd recommend that you get yourself signed up to our domain monitor and add your website as a monitor.

Once you sign up, you'll need to verify your email (which shouldn't take too long to do) and after this you can add your website.

You should also add your domain to the domains section so that we can alert you before your domain name expires, if your website has an SSL, we'll alert you of SSL expiry too!

Overall, website monitoring does affect technical SEO because if your website isn't running fast enough and requests are taking too long to respond...

Your website could end up being positioned lower than better performing sites, and this is how they connect together.