Technical SEO refers to website and server optimizations that help search engine spiders crawl and index your site more effectively (to help improve organic rankings).
Well, because Technical SEO is what allows search engines like Google to know that you have a website of high value. This is important because it can prompt the search engines to rank you higher
Search engines give preferential treatment in search results to websites that display certain technical characteristics — for example a secure connection, a responsive design or a fast loading time — and technical SEO is the work you need to do to ensure your website does so.
Secure Sockets Layer – SSL – is a security technology which creates an encrypted link between a web server and a browser. You can spot a site using SSL fairly easily: the website URL starts with ‘https://’ rather than ‘http://.’ In 2014 Google announced that they wanted to see ‘HTTPS everywhere’, and that secure HTTPS websites were going to be given preference over non-secure ones in search results.
A ‘responsive’ website design adjusts itself automatically so that it can be navigated and read easily on any device. Google is clear about the fact that having a responsive site is considered a very significant ranking signal by its algorithms. And, with the introduction of Google’s ‘mobile first’ approach to indexing content, a responsive website is now more important than ever. So it makes sense to ensure that your website is fully responsive and will display in the best format possible for mobile, tablet or desktop users.
Search engines prefer sites that load quickly: page speed is considered an important ranking signal.Minimise ‘HTTP requests’ - keep the use of scripts and plugins to a minimum. Use one CSS stylesheet (the code which is used to tell a website browser how to display your website) instead of multiple CSS stylesheets or inline CSS. Compress your web pages (this can be done using a tool called GZIP). Minify your site’s code - rid of any unnecessary spaces, line breaks or indentation in your HTML, CSS and Javascript (see Google’s Minify Resources page for help with this).
Duplicate content can either be confusing for users (and indeed search engine algorithms); it can also be used to try to manipulate search rankings or win more traffic. As a result, search engines aren’t keen on it, and Google and Bing advise webmasters to fix any duplicate content issues they find.
An XML sitemap is a file that helps search engines to understand your website whilst crawling it – you can think of it as being like a ‘search roadmap’ of sorts, telling search engines exactly where each page is. It also contains useful information about each page on your site, including when a page was last modified; what priority it has on your site; how frequently it is updated. In BigCommerce, your XML site is created automatically; if you are using another platform you may need to use a sitemap generator to build one.
AMP is a Google-backed project which aims to speed up the delivery of content on mobile devices through the use of special code known as AMP HTML. AMP versions of your web pages load extremely quickly on mobile devices. They do this by stripping your content and code down to the bare bones, leaving text, images and video intact but disabling scripts, comments and forms. Because they load so fast, AMP versions of pages are far more likely to be read and shared by your users, increasing dwell time and the number of backlinks pointing to your content – all good things from an SEO point of view. On top of that, Google sometimes highlights AMP pages in prominent carousels in search results – giving you an important search bump.