Technical SEO refers to optimising your website and server’s technical aspects to help search engine spiders crawl and index it more effectively.

Search engines reward websites that have good technical foundations, including a secure connection, quick loading times, and mobile-friendliness, with improved rankings.

Google favours websites that give its visitors trusted signals, and we know that HTTPS was officially acknowledged as a ranking factor in 2014, so it should be considered to improve any SEO strategy.

Even more pressing however, is that moving your website from HTTP to HTTPS will have a considerable impact if done incorrectly. Moving protocols is like moving domain names-Google will see it as a completely different site. If you’re planning on moving protocols, you should seek the help of a technical SEO expert.

There are SO many SEO softwares available to use, it would be hard to pick just one. At Tecmark, we use many trusted SEO tools.

Some of our favourite technical SEO software and tools include Screaming Frog, SEO Browser, GTMetrix, Google Search Console, and Google Analytics, to name a few.

Robots.txt, or robots exclusion standard, is a text file that tells site crawlers and search engines which pages on the site to crawl, and which not to crawl. If you have a lot of pages, or duplicate content, it will take Google’s crawl bot longer to crawl, which can have negative effects on SEO, so disallowing unimportant or similar pages is a good way to give your SEO a boost.

A technical SEO audit is a series of checks that can be undertaken to determine the success of the ranking factors you are using in order to improve your site’s position in search results – and may also help you to work out how they may be improved.

Search engines use “crawlers” – or specialist bots – to access each page in your website to ensure full functionality. When these bots are unable to reach a page due to a problem with a URL address, a broken link or another problem, this is known as a “crawl error”.

If you see a 404 error code when attempting to reach a page on your website, it’s likely to cause problems with SEO. This is because error messages of this kind will convince a search engine that the page in question does not exist – which will prevent it from being properly indexed.

Ideally, the content on each of your web pages should load in under two seconds. This is the absolute maximum, as users are likely to abandon a page that loads slower than this.

Search engines may fail to index your site if:

• You’re checking too early (search engines often take a few days to pick up on new pages)
• Your privacy settings are switched on
• Your site was down when indexing was attempted
• Your site loads to slowly
• You don’t have a sitemap
• You have an excess of duplicate content
• You’ve registered your domain incorrectly (you need both www and http or https domains to be properly indexed)
• You’re having problems with JavaScript or AJAX content, which is harder to index
• Web crawlers are being blocked by .htaccess or the robots.txt exclusion standard, or you’re experiencing other crawl errors
• You’ve accidentally included NOINDEX in your meta-tags
• Your site has been given a penalty that prevents indexing

You may receive a Google Manual Penalty if your website content is considered to be spam, features artificial or “unnatural” links, has been hacked, adds no value, features cloaked redirects or appears to be using other underhanded methods in order to rank.

A manual penalty often results in your URL being “de-indexed” – removed from search results – or placed way down the listings.

Also known as “schema structured data markup”, schema markup is a type of code that can be inserted into the HTML making up your website in order to help search engines to understand its content and display it correctly.