Technical Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) refers to the process of optimising your website so that search engines can crawl and index it effortlessly. It is called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the actual content and the main goal is to optimise the infrastructure of the website.

Search engines give preferential treatment to websites that display certain technical characteristics such as a secure connection, responsive design, or fast loading time. In this guide, we mention some of the characteristics that you can start optimising so that your website is up to scratch.

By following these guidelines, you can ensure that the structure of your website meets the expectation of search engine algorithms and is rewarded in search results accordingly.

1. Site speed
If your website is slow, your website visitors will get frustrated and move on to another website. There are some free tools that you can use to test the speed of your website:

• GTMetrix
• Pingdom
• Google Page Speed Insights

You should aim for a three-second page load time. Some factors that can help make your website faster:

• Optimise your images: Images take up almost half of the space on your website. Use an image compression tool to resize your images so that they are as small as possible. Make sure you don’t compromise on the quality of your images when doing so.

• CSS style sheet: Use only one style sheet. Multiple style sheets mean many server requests which can lengthen the time taken to load your website.

• Minify your site coding: Minification refers to the process of removing unnecessary or redundant data in your coding without affecting how the resource is processed by the browser.

• Reduce plugins: Keeping unwanted plugins on your WordPress websites will add a great number of pointless files. It will also increase the size of your backup and put an overwhelming amount of load on your server resources while backup files are being generated.

2. Mobile-friendliness
The web is being accessed more and more on mobile devices. Designing your website to be mobile friendly ensures that your pages perform well on all devices. Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a free tool you can use to check if your page is mobile responsive. Browse your website on your mobile devices and see if the navigation is easy or if you can spot any errors.

3. XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a map that contains your site’s pages, posts and more. It is a tool that search engines use to find all the content on your site and it helps search engines determine what to index and what not to index.

Many SEO plugins generate an XML sitemap for free but if you are not using an SEO plugin, make sure that you have an XML sitemap that is submitted to Google. Google not only needs to know you have an XML sitemap, but they also need to know where it is.

4. Crawl Errors
Search engines use robots to crawl or spider your website. The robots follow links to discover content on your site. A crawl error is when a search engine tries to get to a page on your site but can’t do it for some reason. This can happen when you change an URL or delete old content. To help you determine the pages that are not working, set up the Google Search Console.