Technical SEO: What It Is and How It Works

1. Page speed

Page speed is a key factor affecting both SEO and user experience. Slow-loading pages have a higher bounce rate because visitors are less patient. Google treats speed as a ranking factor, so slow pages can be held back in the rankings. Speed optimisation involves several techniques, such as image compression, minifying HTML, CSS and JavaScript files, caching and server performance optimisation. You can also use a CDN (content delivery network) to speed up loading for users all over the world.

From an SEO perspective, an optimal page load time is under 2 seconds.

There are, however, several factors to consider:

• Core Web Vitals: Google introduced Core Web Vitals, which evaluate website performance in three main areas – Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP) and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). For SEO it is key that:
  • LCP (loading time of the main content) is under 2.5 seconds.
  • INP (how quickly the page responds to user interactions; it replaced First Input Delay in 2024) is under 200 milliseconds.
  • CLS (visual stability while loading) has a score lower than 0.1.

2. Mobile optimisation

With the growing number of mobile users, it is crucial that your website is optimised for mobile devices:

• Responsive design: websites should automatically adapt to different screen sizes to ensure comfortable navigation on all devices. This includes resizing images and adjusting font and button sizes so they are easy to read and use on small screens.
• Google mobile-first indexing: Google now evaluates websites based on their mobile version, so responsiveness is a must.

3. Crawlability

Crawlability means that search engines can crawl your site and its content without problems. If pages can’t be crawled, search engines won’t be able to add them to their databases and they won’t appear in the search results.

You can ensure crawlability through:

• Correct use of the robots.txt file, which controls which parts of the site search engine bots may and may not crawl.
• Creating a sitemap – a file that helps bots better understand your site structure.
• Fixing broken links (404 errors), which can prevent bots from crawling your pages.

4. Indexability

Indexability is about whether your pages are included in a search engine’s index. If a page is not indexed, it won’t appear in the search results. Several factors can prevent a page from being indexed:

• The noindex tag – this meta tag tells search engines not to index the page.
• Duplicate content – if a site contains a lot of duplicate content, it may be penalised or ignored. The solution is to implement canonical URLs to mark the main version of a page.
• Poor URL structure – overly long or chaotic URLs can be problematic for search engines.

5. Website security (HTTPS)

Website security is an important factor that Google considers when ranking pages. HTTPS (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) is the encrypted version of HTTP that protects data exchanged between the user and the server. Sites with an SSL certificate (a secure connection) are considered safer, which increases visitor trust and the likelihood that they stay on the page. Since 2014 Google has favoured HTTPS sites, and sites without it may rank lower. Security is especially important for online stores and sites that collect sensitive data such as personal details or payment information.

http = hypertext transfer protocol

• message: Welcome to our site
• what an attacker sees: Welcome to our site

https = hypertext transfer protocol secure

• • message: Welcome to our site
  • what an attacker sees: dfdfdfea546sd5454F4FKgfksdljf45hKDkvjodoioifvlnlkdc

6. Structured data and schema markup

Structured data is a way of adding markup to HTML so that search engines better understand the content of a page. Using Schema.org, you can structure information such as products, ratings, reviews and events, which can earn your page richer search results known as rich snippets.