Technical SEO may seem confusing at first, but without it even the most in-depth and useful content would remain lost to those searching Google for it. That is why every ecommerce website must employ an active technical SEO strategy.
Technical SEO focuses on designing websites so they are accessible and understandable by search engines, including ensuring every page can be reached by bots for indexing purposes and that dead ends on sites and duplicate content don’t obstruct search.
To achieve all this, websites must be carefully optimized for HTML. This requires optimizing for elements like keyword usage, title tags, meta descriptions and image alt text – not forgetting making sure their architecture allows search bots access all pages simultaneously while linking all of them together; this is called site architecture and one of the primary aspects of technical SEO.
As part of an SEO audit, it’s also vital that sites are compatible with all browsers used by visitors, particularly older versions that may struggle with certain web development standards and cause display issues on a site. A technical SEO audit should take this into consideration and optimize a website for as many different browsers as possible.
An essential technical SEO responsibility is ensuring the site is free of duplicate content – both within it and across multiple domains. Duplicate content can negatively affect rankings, brand cannibalization and SERP snippets negatively – leading to lower rankings or even brand cannibalization and SERP snippets that don’t appear correctly on SERPs. Duplicate content often arises due to improper canonicalization or server configuration issues and should be remedied through proper resolution.
Finally, websites must serve up pages efficiently and quickly for visitors. This requires optimizing for speed and using a content delivery network (CDN) to deliver its files as close to visitors as possible – this is one way of increasing performance, and technical SEO includes it as part of its practice.