Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing a website’s infrastructure, architecture, and backend to improve its visibility and ranking in search engines. This discipline focuses on the technical aspects of a website that affect its crawlability, indexability, and overall performance.
Technical SEO differs from on-page SEO in the following ways:
- On-page SEO deals with optimizing the content, HTML elements, and other on-page factors of a website, while technical SEO focuses on the website’s backend and structure.
- On-page SEO is more content-focused, while technical SEO is more concerned with how search engines access and interpret the website.
The definition of technical SEO is somewhat subjective; the line between on-page and technical SEO may blur in some cases.
Some examples of technical SEO include:
- Improving site speed and performance
- Optimizing website navigation and structure
- Setting up proper canonicalization and redirects
- Implementing structured data (e.g., schema markup)
- Ensuring mobile-friendliness and responsive design
- Creating and optimizing XML sitemaps and robots.txt files
- Fixing broken links and crawl errors
- Implementing HTTPS and secure connections
- Optimizing website caching and server response times
- Ensuring proper international SEO setup (e.g., hreflang tags)