Technical SEO: Best Practices with AI SEO
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) encompasses various types, including but not limited to On-Page SEO, Off-Page SEO, Technical SEO, International SEO, Local SEO, E-commerce SEO, and Video SEO. Each of these plays a crucial role in optimizing your website and blogs. We’ve already covered On-Page SEO and Off-Page SEO in detail, and now, let’s dive into the practical implementation of Technical SEO techniques with AI SEO.
Why Technical SEO is Important?
Technical SEO is a process designed to maintain your website’s technical health and includes but not limited to fixing issues like metadata errors, broken links, site architecture, site’s crawlability and mainly concentrate on website’s technical aspects, tackling page indexing problems and overall technical health.
AI is reforming Technical SEO by automating complex processes, enhancing accuracy, and optimizing website performance. AI-driven solutions help search engines better understand and rank websites. SEO experts must embrace AI-powered tools for site audits, structured data implementation, Core Web Vitals optimization, and mobile SEO enhancements.
Now we will discuss Technical SEO segments one by one in detail with practical examples.
AI Technical SEO
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming technical SEO by making websites more efficient, and optimized for ranking with new Google’s AI-driven algorithms like MUM and RankBrain.
SEO experts must practise AI tools to enhance performance by using:
- AI SEO tools (e.g., Screaming Frog + AI) to get deeper insights.
- AI suggests SEO-friendly edits for better rankings through AI-powered chatbots.
- AI foresees and mentions blocking unnecessary pages for better crawl efficiency.
- AI tools like TinyPNG AI automatically compress and serve new formats such as WebP, AVIF.
- AI tools support identify missing schema for better SERP rankings.
- AI tools like schema.org AI auto-generate structured data for you.
- AI tools like JetOctopus and Screaming Frog AI analyze Googlebot activity to detect crawl inefficiencies.
Robots.txt file and Technical SEO
Search engine optimisation is a key component of a successful website. Using robots.txt the right way could be great for your website’s SEO strategies. Robots.txt is a simple text file that instructs search engine bots on how to crawl and index the pages on your website. It’s a way to communicate with web crawlers and web robots.
It is placed inside your root directory that instructs search engine crawlers which pages on your website to crawl and which pages are not for public view or to ignore. These crawl instructions are defined by “disallowing” or “allowing” the behaviour of specific web crawling software.
The robots.txt file must be placed at the root of the site host to which it applies. For example, to control crawling on all URLs below:
http://www.example.com/,
the robots.txt file must be located at
http://www.example.com/robots.txt.
It cannot be located in a subdirectory as:
http://example.com/pages/robots.txt
The instructions in the robots.txt file only work with the host, protocol, and port number where the file is located.
We use it mainly for the following reasons for Technical SEO:
- To prevent malicious bots from accessing the website.
- To maintain privacy of your pages and posts.
- To prevent duplicate & Non-Public pages
- To maximize crawl budget as each website has a crawl budget.
- To prevent web crawlers from accessing sensitive information, such as personal information or other sensitive customer data.
- It also prevents Server Overload.
- To block non-public pages of your website.
It is recommended to update your robots.txt file whenever you make changes to your website, such as adding new pages or files. It is also recommended to review your robots.txt file periodically to ensure that it is up-to-date.
Many experts recommend that the robots.txt be the first page you should look at if your site traffic is dropping.
Website Speed
Page speed is one of the most important aspects of technical SEO and an essential UX factor as no one is willing to wait for more than a couple of seconds for a page to load.
As a rule of thumb, a website home page should be open in 1-3 seconds and if it’s taking long like more than 5 seconds then it should be fixed.
There are many free tools available to check the speed and performance of your website but below are most popular one:
- Google PageSpeed Insights (https://pagespeed.web.dev/)
- GTmetrix (https://gtmetrix.com/)
Google https://pagespeed.web.devPageSpeed Insights will tell you what is loading time and what issues needs to fix so speed improves. It is a good practice to monitor your site speed at least once in a month and fix if there are any issues. There are many common factors which slow down site such as:
Image size
Images consume more space so good SEO practice is to optimise and compress images by using tools like TinyPNG and ImageOptim and use WebP formats. Another way is optimising images is to use lazy load option so images load only when needed. It can be done by using any of the following plugins.
- Image Optimization & Lazy Load by Optimole
- Smush
- a3 Lazy Load
Fix Broken links and avoid redirects
Go to Google Search Console to find and fix broken links and also avoid needless 301/302 redirects as it effects crawlability.
Minify script
Scripts also consume spaces if your website has more pages and we can use minifiers for Java, HTML and other scripts.
Selection of Plugins
Use only those plugins which are tested and light weight and avoid too many plugins so selection of plugins is very significant.
There are many more factors which must be address to optimize speed such as using caching plugins, optimizing your server, hosting and database.
Google Search Console
Indexing is an important part of technical SEO and we can do this by using plugins or through Google excellent tool named ‘Google Search Console’ which provides us valuable information about page indexing and user experience and many more such as:
- Performance Overview and you can see how many visitors click your website and how much is your website impressions and what is your CTR (Click-through rate) which is very vital to know.
- Indexing section tells you how many pages of your site have been indexed and which are still not indexed.
- Security section tells you if any security issues are there or site is smooth and has no issues.
- In Links section we can see how many internal and external links are added to our web pages.
- Core web vitals section one can see mobile and desktop performance and issues, if any.
- 404 and 404 soft errors can be detected by search console.
- robots.txt file details are also available like which pages are blocked by file.
Schema markup
Schema.org is a respected tool for boosting SEO and enhancing how content appears in search results. Launched in 2011 by Google, Bing, and Yahoo, it provides a standardized framework for structured data markup and helping search engines better understand and presentation website content.
Schema is not a ranking factor but simply enables web pages to appear in rich results and adding schema to your website will brings more visibility to visitors and creates possibility for more CTR, more traffic and helps creating your brand visibility.
Bloggers sites have advantage to use sitelink schema markup to showcase their webpages in the SERP’s.
There are many types of schemas having different usage and few are stated as below:
- Article
- Breadcrumb
- Course
- FAQ
- Product
- Recipe
- Video
Types Of Schema Encoding
There are three primary formats for encoding schema markup as follows:
- JSON-LD.
- Microdata.
- RDFa.
Important to note that Google recommends JSON-LD as the preferred format.
Schema markup is crucial for all websites to optimize content for overall better SEO.
There are many third-party tools are available for generation of schema for your website such as:
- Schema Pro (https://wpschema.com/)
- Merkle (https://www.merkle.com/)
- RankRanger (https://www.rankranger.com/schema-markup-generator)
Mobile Technical SEO
Mobile Technical SEO is also very important because Google primarily uses the mobile version of your site for ranking now and Over 57% of traffic is coming from mobile devices. Key considerations should be to optimize page speed, using structured data for better understanding of your content, optimise for voice search and Implement browser caching and Content Delivery Network for faster load times. Mobile SEO is also helps On-Page SEO. Please read On-Page SEO : https://accountingblogger.com/on-page-seo/
Canonical Tag
A canonical tag is a piece of HTML code that helps search engines to identify your “main” version of a page from the rest of the pages that are identical or very similar to it. One of the most common reasons a site has duplicate content is if you have several versions of the URL. For example, a site may have an
- http version,
- an https version,
- a www version, and
- a non-www version.
To solve this issue, we add canonical tags to duplicate pages and these tags tell search engines to crawl the page with the main version of your content. We can do it by using an Yoast or Rank Math SEO plugins or by using HTTP header.
Another method is adding canonical tags to your pages by going to any duplicate webpage and add rel=”canonical” tag into the <head>section of the page and it should be done on a page-by-page basis.
Here question can raise that when to use canonical tags and when to 301 redirect.
A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect from one URL to another. It tells the search engine and the user that a page has permanently moved to a new location. The old URL no longer exists whereas with canonical tags, multiple URLs co-exist, but search engines consider only one of them as the main page. Therefore, if you want the URL page to be accessible to the user, you use canonical tags. If you don’t want the URL page to exist, you use 301 to redirect it to the target page.
Use Favicon to Brand your site
A favicon is the small icon that appears in the browser tab next to the page title on left side when you open a google web page. You can use a favicon with your site to enhance user experience or as a brand recognition. The word “favicon” is a combination of “favourite” and “icon”‘.
We can say that Favicons have no direct impact on search engine optimization but it is an icon associated with a particular website and used when you bookmark a web page. A favicon is typically a graphic 16 x 16 pixels square or more and is saved as favicon.ico in the root directory of your server.
Website Secured on HTTPS
- Always use secure site for your contents as Google is giving ranking boost to websites that are secure on https version. Many of well-known hosts are offering free SSL configuration to their clients such as Hostinger.
- Google uses SSL as a ranking factor so make sure your website is HTTPS-secure by installing an SSL certificate.
www vs non www Version
Elect from day 1 whether you want to use www version or non www version for your website home and internal pages.
It is always recommended to use www version because if you have decided to use www version for your website pages, in this case, all non www version should be automatically redirect to their www versions.
Final Thought
Imagine having great content, but your site isn’t ranking as it should. The reason is searching engine bots aren’t crawling or indexing your blog properly due to Technical SEO issues. Other factors, such as slow page speed or incorrect schema markup, could also be hindering your site’s performance in search results.
Technical SEO plays a key role in ensuring that search engines can efficiently crawl and index your site. Without proper optimization, fast loading speeds, mobile Friendliness and accurate schema implementation, search engines may struggle to access, interpret, and rank your content effectively so it is vital to do Technical SEO for your website and your blogs smartly.
AI is reforming Technical SEO by automating tasks, improving accuracy, and enhancing website performance and SEO experts must use AI enhanced Technical SEO tools and techniques to optimize websites for best performance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Humayun Atif | CMA, CPA, CA (FIN), MS-IT, CA Articles from Big 4, Certified Forensic Accountant (USA), Six Sigma & Oracle Certified.
Atif is passionate about Business, Tech, and the written word. He is the author of the book ‘IFRS Made Easy’. He is a Tax and IFRS coach and the founder of accountingblogger.com