With the help of basic knowledge about technical SEO will help your Website to establish credibility with developers and optimize your Website for Search Engines.
On solid keyword research, you have crafted valuable content, it’s necessary to make sure it’s readable by both search engines and humans.
The Amazing Part is that you don’t need any technical understanding of these concepts, but it is necessary to remember what these technical assets do so that you speak intelligently about them with the developers. You will need probably them to carry out some of your optimizations that why speaking to your developer language is important. They will not likely prioritize your asks if they cannot understand your request or see its sigficantance. You can start to remove away the red tape which blocks often crucial work from getting done when you start establishing trust and credibility with your devs.
Knowing technical optimization for SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is important if you want to ensure that your web pages are properly structured for crawlers and humans. We have divided this chapter into 3 sections:
- How websites work
- How search engines understand websites
- How users interact with websites
The performance technical structure can have a very big impact on its performance, so everybody needs to understand these principles. To share them as a guide with your content writer, programmers, and designers it may be a good idea to share them with them so that everyone is on the same page.
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How Websites Work
SEOs need at least a basic knowledge of the thing they are optimizing SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the process of website optimization.
We have outlined the journey of the website from purchasing a domain to its state rendered in the browser. The rendering path is an important component of the website’s journey which is the process of turning the browser turning a code of website code into a viewable page.
Knowing about these websites is necessary for SEOs (Search Engine Optimization) to know a few reasons:
(1). The process of assembly of a webpage can affect the loading time and speed of your page. These factors are important for both search engines and users and will affect your rankings.
(2). Like JavaScript Google renders these resources. Without JavaScript Google will Look at the age, it will render JavaScript a few weeks later, which means SEO is a critical element that adds to the page with the help of using JavaScript and may not get indexed.
Think that the loading speed of your website is go back and forth to your work. You wake up early in the morning then gather your things to bring to the officers, and then take the fastest route from your home to your work. Putting on one of your shoes sounds silly thing, take a route that covers a longer distance, at the office drop your things off after returning home get another pair pairs of shoes, am I right? This is the same thing that inefficient websites do. How to Diagnose where your website might be inefficient this chapter will teach you, what can you do to streamline, and the ramification positive on your user experience and your rankings that can result from that streamlining.
Your Websites need to be set up before they get accessed.
- Domain name is purchased – Domain names like neiltpatel.com or semrush.com are bought from a domain registrar similar to Hostinger or GoDaddy. These registers are just organized and manage the domain reservation names.
- Domain Name is linked to an IP address – Names like “hubspot.com” internet don’t understand it as an address of website helping without domain name servers (DNS). Internet Protocol (IP) is used by a series of protocol addresses (ex: 127.0.0.1), but if decide to choose the name hubspot.com because it is easy to remember. Then we need to use the link to DNS for those human-readable names with machine-readable no.
How a website gets from server to browser
- User requests domain – People can request a Website by searching the name of the domain directly in their browser or by link clicking on the website after the name is linked to an IP address via DNS.
- Browser makes requests – The request is for the web pages gives rise to the browser to create a lookup of DNS request to make the name of the domain to its IP address. To the server, the browser requests the code your web page is built, such as CSS, HTML, and JavaScript.
- Server sends resources – Request once the server receives for the website, then it sends the files of the website to be assembled in the browser searcher.
- Browser assembles the web page – Resources are received by the browser, but it needs still has to render and put together the web page the render so that the user can see it in their browser. It makes a (DOM) Document Object Model as the browser organizes and parses all the resources of the web page. When you right-click and “inspect element” this is where DOM you see on the Web Pages in your browser of Chrome.
- Browser makes final requests – After all the pages which are important code to be downloaded, executed, and parsed the browser will only show a web page. The browser will make an additional request from your server the browser needs extra code to show your Website.
- Website appears in the browser – Phew! Your Website has now been rendered from the code to what you see in your browser after all that.
What a Website is made of after you have seen how the now we will see how the website appears in the browser and the code (programming languages) which is used to construct those website pages.
These 3 are the most common ones:
- CSS – How a website looks (color, fonts, etc.)
- HTML – What a website says (titles, body content, etc.)
- JavaScript – How it behaves (interactive, dynamic, etc.)
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HTML: What says a Website
A hypertext markup language is the full form of HTML and the purpose of this is to serve as the backbone of the website. Heading, lists, paragraphs, and content are all elements that are defined in HTML.
Here is an example of the webpage and this is how the corresponding HTML looks like:
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It is what lives under the hood this is what SEO and this is why it is important. Your CMS does require likely you to type your pages in the HTML (ex: “hyperlink” selection which allows you to link without having to type in “a href=”), you do something to a web page this is what you modify every time such as changing the anchor text of the internal links and adding the content. To determine how relevant your document is to a particular question this is how Google crawls these HTML elements. In similar words, plays a huge role in how your web pages rank in the Google organic search for your content.
CSS: How a Website Looks
“Cascading style sheets” is the full form of CSS and with the help of this process, your web pages take certain colors, fonts, and layouts. To describe content HTML was created rather than to style it, CSS was a game changer when it enter the scene. Without requiring manual coding of styles into the HTML of every page web pages could be “beautified”. For every page HTML. A cumbersome process, for large websites especially.
Google’s indexing system started to render web pages more like an actual browser after the year 2014, as opposed to a text-only browser. A black-hat practice of SEO was tired to Google Captilize system of older indexing was text hiding and links via CSS for search engine ranking manipulation. This practice is “hidden text and links” is a Google quality guideline violation.
CSS components that SEO should carry should care about in particular :
(1). Instead of your page’s HTML Style directive can live in external stylesheet files (CSS files), it can make your page less code-heavy and will reduce the size of the file transfer size and which makes it load faster.
(2). Like your CSS file Browser still have to download resources, your web page speed can increase and also increase in the ranking by compressing them.
(3). Your Website gets better indexing of your content if you have content-heavy than code.
(4). Your websites will get penalized and removed personally from Google’s index if you are using CSS to hide links and content.
JavaScript: How a website behaves
Webpages were built with HTML. In the earlier days of the Internet. Webpage content can take some style when CSS came along. Websites could not only have style and structure, but they can also become dynamic when the programming language JavaScript entered the scene.
For non-static website creation JavaScript has opened up a lot of opportunities. If someone tries to enter a page increased with a programming language, the browser of the user executed the JavaSCript as opposed to this programming language which the server returns, which resulted in a webpage that comes to life with some sort of interactivity.
In action you have seen JavaScript – you may not know it! This is because JavaScript can do anything to the page. It can make pop-ups, for instance, or it could request 3 party resources like the ads to display on your page.
Server-side rendering versus Client-side rendering
For SEO JavaScript can post some problems, search engines do not view JavaScript in the same method human visitors do. This is because of Server-Side Rendering vs Client-Side. In a client’s browser, most JavaScript is executed. In a Client’s browser, Most JavaScript is executed. The files are executed on the server and the server sends them to the browser in their fully rendered state.
On the client side with JavaScript SEO-critical page elements such as links, text, and tags that are loaded, as compared to those represented in your HTML, are not visible from the code of your page until they are rendered. Your JavaScript Search Engine Crawlers won’t see this meaning – search engine crawlers won’t see it in your JavaScript – not initially at least.
Googlebot should see the same thing as the user viewing a website in their browser if you are blocking Googlebot from crawling your JavaScript files, they are able generally to understand and render your web pages just the same as the browser can. Google can miss certain elements which are available only if JavaScript is executed due to the “second wave of indexing.
During the process of Googlebot rendering your web pages, some other things go wrong, which can be stopped through Google from knowing what content is contained in your JavaScript:
(i) All the requests your server couldn’t handle to crawl your account.
(ii) For Googlebot the Javascript is too complex or outdated to understand.
(iii) From JavaScript resources you have blocked Googlebot (ex: with robots.txt)
(iv) Until after the crawler has finished with the page and moves on Javascript doesn’t “lazy load” content into the page.
JavaScript has some serious ramifications for your SEO if you are doing it carefully after it has opened a lot of possibilities.
Thanking Google, there is a method to check whether Google sees things as your visitors. Use the Google tool which is Google Search Console “URL Inspection” option to see a page how Googlebot views your page. paste simply your URL page into the GSC search bar:
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Click “View Tested Page” to see how your page is being rendered and crawled after Googlebot has recrawled your URL.
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To adjacent to “HTML” click the ss (screenshot) how Googlebot smartphone renders your page.
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How visitors see your page vs Googlebot sees your page in return. Google will show you a big list of any resources they may not have been able to get for the URL you entered In the “More Info” tab.
Knowing the ways the websites work tells a big foundation for what we are talking about next: to help Google understand the pages on your site better with the help of technical optimization.
How Search Engines Understand Websites
Think you are a Search Engine Crawler who scans down an article of 10, 000 words on the keyword how to bake a cake. Steps required to bake a cake how do you identify them, the author, recipe, ingredients, or steps which are required? In this place, schema markup comes in. With the help of it spoon-feed search engines have more classifications that are more specific for what type of details on your page.
Schema is the way to organize or label your content so that search engines have a superior knowledge of what elements are certain on your website pages. With the help of this, your website gets structure to your data. This is the reason it is called “structured data”. The process of structuring your data is referred often to as “markup: because you are with organizational code you are marking up your content.
Schema Markup which Google preferred is JSON-LD (which was announced on 16 May) which also got big support from Bing. Visit Schema.org or view the Google Developers Introduction to Structured Data to get extra information on how to implement structured data to view a full list of the thousand schema markups which is available.
Schema markup can also enable features to accompany your page in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages) in extra to help Google like to know what a particular piece of content is about. “Rich Snippets” are those special features referred to, and in action, you have probably seen. They are like things:
(i) Review stars
(ii) Recipes
(iii) Sitelinks Search Boxes
(iv) Top Stories carousels
With the help of rich snippets using structure data can enable be sent, but it does not guarantee it. Rich Snippets will add likely in the future as the schema markup use maximizes.
A few words of success of Schema are:
(i) You can use multiple schema markup types on a page – If you mark one element however, like any product for instance, and there are other products listed on the pages, you must mark also those products.
(ii) Follow Google’s Quality Guidelines and don’t mark up content that is not visible to visitors. For instance, if you add structured markup to a page related to adding a review, always make sure those reviews are visible actually on the page.
(iii) Google asks that you mark up every duplicate page with your structured markup if you have duplicate pages, not just the canonical version.
(iv) Provide Content that is updated and original (if applicable) content on your structured data pages.
(v) Accurate reflection of your page should be structured markup.
(vi) For Most types of specific schema markup try to use it for your content.
(vii) By the business marked-up reviews should not be written – They should be genuine unpaid business reviews from actual customers.
With canonicalization tell Search engines about your preferred pages.
When Google sometimes crawls content that is the same on different web pages, it sometimes doesn’t know which pages in the search results index first. rel=”canonical” tag was invested for this reason: with the help of this search engines could index better the preferred version of the content and not all its duplicates.
With the help of the rea=, the “canonical” tag will allow you to tell search engines where is the original content, and the piece of the content located to master that version. You are saying essentially saying, ” Hey Search Engine! Index this; don’t index this source page.” With the help of canonical tags, you can make republish a piece of content, whether exactly or slightly modified, without risking creating duplicate content.
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Proper Canonicalization makes sure that every unique piece of content on your site has one URL only. Google recommends having a self-referencing canonical tag on every page on your website to prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of the same page. Without a canonical tag telling Google which web page version is preferred https://www.example.com get could be separately indexed from https://example.com, making duplicates.
Internet Truism is “Avoid Duplicate Content” and for very good reason! Websites which unique and valuable Content Google wants to reward that Website, not the content which is taken from other sources and repeated across multiple pages. Because Search Engine Wants to provide you with the best experience for the searcher, which will show rarely with multiple versions of the same content, instead of opting to show only the canonicalized version, or if the canonical tag does which do not exist, whichever version they deem most original most likely to be.
Due to Short and Filter Options it very also very common for websites to have multiple duplicate pages. For instance, on an e-commerce website, you may have what’s called faceted navigation with the help of which visitors can narrow down products to find exactly what they are looking for, for example, a “sort by” feature that records results on the product page of product category from the lowest to highest price. This could make a URL that looks like: example.com/mens-shirts?sort=price_ascending. Add in sort/filter in more options like size, color, material, brand, etc, and think just about all the different types of your main product category page this would create!
How users interact with websites
In the first Chapter we talk about the split on SEO Standing for Search Engine Optimization, SEO is all about users as it is themselves. This is because search engines exist in the first place to serve their searchers. This goal tells why the Algorithm of Google rewards websites that provide the best experience which is possible, and why some sites, despite some qualities like robust profile backlinks, may not perform well in SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages).
We do not know what makes their web browsing experience maximum, we can make those experiences for the greatest performance in the SERP (Search Engine Result Pages).
Making Sure a useful experience for the visitors on the mobile.
More than half of web traffic comes from mobile devices, it’s predictable to say that your website should be easy to navigate and accessible for visitors on Mobile devices. In the year 2015 April, Google cover updated its algorithm which would promote mobile-friendly pages against no-mobile-friendly pages. Your Website is Mobile Friendly how can you ensure it? There are so many ways but in this blog, we have mentioned 3 ways to configure your website for mobile, Google recommends responsive website design.
Responsive design
Designed the screen of whatever device type your visitors are using. To make the web page “respond” to the size of the device. This is perfect because it prevents visitors from having to pinch-and-zoom and double-tab to view the content on your pages. Your website is mobile-friendly not sure. With the help of Google’s Mobile-friendly test, you check whether your device is mobile-friend or not.
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AMP
The full Form of AMP is Accelerated Mobile Pages and is used to deliver the content to mobile visitors at very speed much greater than with non-AMP delivery. With help of AMP, you can deliver very fast content from its cache server (not the original Website)and uses an AMP version that is special to JavaScript and HTML.
Mobile-first Indexing
Google started switching websites over to mobile-first indexing in the year 2018. This change sparked some confusion about mobile-first and mobile-friendliness, so to disambiguate it’s helpful. Google and index the mobile version of your web page. This will make your website compatible with mobile screens is good for users and in search of your performance, but mobile-first indexing takes place independently of mobile-friendliness.
This has lifted some to do with fro sites that lack parity between desktop versions and mobile versions, such as different showing content, links and navigation, etc on their device gets a mobile view. For instance, mobile websites with different links will alter how Googlebot (mobile) crawls your Websites and sends quality links to your other website pages.
To mitigate the frustration of visitors Improve the page speed.
Content that loads lightning-fast for the searchers google wants to serve that content.
We will quickly bounce back to the SERP in the search of a better, faster page if we expect fast-loading results and we don’t get them. For On-site SEO Page Speed is crucial. By taking advantage of the above tools we can improve the page speed of the website.
To learn more about each click the link below.
(i) How to Think About Speed Tools
(ii) GTMetrix
(iii) Google Lighthouse
(iv) Google’s Mobile Website Speed & Performance Tester
(v) Chrome DevTools & Tutorial
(vi) Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool & best practices documentation
For slow pages, Images are one of the main culprits!
Images are one of the numbers of reasons for slow-loading website pages as we in discussed in Chapter 4! The ways by which to optimize the speed and way in which images are shown to your users are :
(i) Optimizing Image Alt text
(ii) Choosing the right image format
(iii) Submitting image Sitemaps
These are some of the primary ways to improve image delivery are as follows:
- SRCSET: Best image size for each device and how to deliver them.
With the help of the SRCSET attribute, you can multiple versions of your images and which version should be used in different situations specify them. To the tag this piece of code is added (where your images in HTML are located) to give unique images for size for specific devices.
This is the topic of responsive design which we discussed earlier await the images!
With the help of this, you speed up your image load times, to enhance your on-page user experience it also has a unique way of proving optimal and different images to different types of devices.
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- Show visitors image loading is in progress with lazy loading
When you visit your webpage and rather than seeing a blank white space for where an image will be, a blurry lightweight version of the colored box or version of the image in its place pops up while the text which is surrounded loads. The image loads clearly in full resolution after a few seconds. Medium which is a popular platform for blogging does this well.
The version which low-resolution loads initially and then the full high-resolution version.
With the help of this, you can render your path! You are showing a teaser image that is low-resolution while all of your other page resources are being downloaded, you are showing a teaser image that is low-resolution which helps to tell users which things are being/happening loaded. Check out Google’s Lazy Loading Guidance for more information on how you should lazy load your images.
Condensing and budling, your files improve the speed of your website.
Page Speed audits will make often recommendations such as “minify resources, ” but what is the meaning of this? With the help of minification condenses a code file by removing things like spaces and line breaks, as well as abbreviating code variable names wherever possible.
To improve the speed bundling is another common term. A bunch of the same coding languages files into one single file this process is bundling. For instance, a bunch of files of javascript could be put into one larger file which will help to reduce the Javascript file amount for the browser.
For International, Audiences Improving the Experience.
International SEO is referred to countries targeting multiple countries that should familiarize themselves with best practices to serve their audience’s most relevant experience. International Visitors will have difficulty finding a version of your website with this optimization.
The website can become international in 2 ways:
- Country – Multiregional Websites can target audiences in multiple countries and they should choose a URL structure that makes it easy to target their domains or pages to specific countries. (ccTLD) country code top-level domain is included in this such as “.ca” for Candana, (gTLD) a generic top-level domain with a specific country subfolder for instances for Canada “example.com/ca”.
- Language – Multilingual Websites are those which target websites with multiple languages. A Hreflang tag is something that these websites should add to show Google that your page has a copy for another language. You can learn more about hreflang in this blog.
