Ranking your website on a search engine is all about spiders. 🕷️
Not the creepy crawly kind and yes, that is just an oversimplification, but that is how it starts. A spider is basically a type of bot that crawls your website and determines if it goes into the search engine’s index. They follow links to jump from page to page to get a clear picture of what your website is all about. Our job as search professionals is to make it as easy as possible for these bots to understand your website as a whole and send the right signals to search engines like Google.
A Technical SEO Professional focuses on making sure your website follows modern best practices so search engines can easily find and understand it. This includes behind-the-scenes work like improving your site’s code, structure, loading speed, mobile responsiveness, crawlability, and overall security.
This is part 3 in our series of Understanding Search Engine Optimization. If you want to know more about the core concepts, read our blogs on basic SEO terminology and On-Page SEO.
Technical SEO
Technical terms are probably the most overwhelming and hard-to-grasp so we’ll just cover a few big important ones here.
- Indexing/Crawlability – Those spiders we talked about earlier? They are bots, essentially pieces of code that take a look at your website and, if they determine that a page is useful, they will do what’s called “indexing,” which just means that they add the page to the search engine’s database, enabling it to be found by searchers. When you look up a business on Google, you’re only seeing indexed pages.
- Sitemap – This is a file on your website, created by your web team, that just lists every page you want a search engine to find. Think of this file like a roadmap for bots. They can’t get lost when we tell them all the most important “landmarks” and guide them through the structure of your site.
- HTTPS/SSL Security – This means your site is secure, which is a ranking factor now in the modern era of search. When you see “https” in front of a website URL, this means that data gets encrypted and the connection between your website and its visitors is private.
- Mobile-Friendliness – This refers to how well your website displays on smartphones and tablets. This is also a ranking factor.
Why Technical SEO Matters
Even if your content is great and your keywords are on point, none of that matters if search engines and AI bots, like those used by ChatGPT, can’t find or understand your site. Technical SEO ensures your content is accessible, fast, and secure, which helps both bots and real visitors. A well-optimized site also improves the user experience, which leads to lower bounce rates and higher engagement. These are signals that search engines use to gauge quality and relevance.
Think of it like maintaining your car: content is the fuel, but without a properly tuned engine, you’re not going anywhere. Technical SEO keeps the site’s “engine” running smoothly behind the scenes.
Site Performance and Maintenance
A slow website can hurt your rankings and turn visitors away. Google tracks things like loading speed and stability through Core Web Vitals, so optimizing performance is essential. Simple fixes like compressing images, using browser caching, and running your site through a Content Delivery Network (CDN) can make a big difference, helping both your SEO and your visitors.
Structured data, or schema markup, also plays a role by helping search engines understand what your content is about, whether it’s a product, event, or FAQ. While it doesn’t directly improve rankings, it can make your search results stand out with rich snippets that draw more clicks.
Finally, even great sites need regular checkups. Broken links, duplicate content, and crawl errors can build up over time. Running routine audits keeps your site healthy, crawlable, and ready to perform at its best.
Technical SEO might not be as flashy as content creation or keyword research, but it’s the backbone of a strong search presence. When your site is fast, secure, and easy to crawl, you’re setting the stage for every other part of your SEO strategy to succeed.
If you’re unsure where to start with technical SEO or need help auditing your site, the team at Posture Interactive can help. Reach out to us, and we’ll make sure those spiders find exactly what they’re looking for.
