What is Technical SEO – Part 2

In the pastmaterialWe talked about how a website works, how information from the server gets to the browser, what programming languages ​​are used when creating a website, and how to understand whether a search engine sees your website. Today, throughout the topic, we will discuss how search engines understand what is posted on websites and what happens when a user interacts with the website.

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How do search engines understand websites?

Search engines browse vast amounts of information. How do they determine what is important?  What tells you about the relevance of a site page to a particular query? Here,  micro-markup plays an important role - the markup of data on site pages that helps search engines better recognize content. It tells search engines what type of information is on a particular page. Content is structured and marked up using delimiter code schemes. The data is structured based on a standard format for providing information about the page. For example, if the site contains recipes,  ingredients, calorie content, and cooking time must be indicated.

The most common schema markup from Google is JSON-LD. Instructions for structuring data are provided in Google Developers Introduction to Structured Data. 

If you are using a CMS, for example,WordPress, You may not be able to edit the HTML directly. In this case, the search engine settings page will help. You can use the instructions for adding structured data to your CMS. In the case of Wordpress, this is the “WordPress structured data plugin”.

Once you've structured your data, you can test your markup using Google's Structured Data Testing Tool.

Canonicalization as a way to show the search engine a priority page

If content is duplicated on different pages of a site, Google robots will not know which page to index in search results. For such cases, there is a rel="canonical" tag. It shows robots the original, main version of the content,  and not its duplicates.

To prevent search engines from indexing multiple versions of the same page, Google experts recommend using a self-referencing canonical tag on each page of the site. 

"Avoid duplicate content" is an internet truism, a well-worn truth. Google encourages the creation of unique content. In an effort to improve the user experience, search engines rarely show different versions of the same content. The canonical version will appear, or, in its absence, the one that the robots consider more similar to the original. 

User experience when interacting with sites

Technical optimization is primarily focused on search engines. However, content is created for people, and search engines are only an element of serving their needs. Therefore, Google algorithms encourage sites that work on improvinguser experienceWhat does it include?

Positive mobile user experience

More than half of website traffic today comes frommobile devices. Therefore, comfortable access to mobile devices is a must have. In 2019, Google introduced indexing of pages with an orientation to mobile devices. Now search engines also scan mobile versions of sites when ranking. 

How do you know if your website is mobile-friendly? There are a few things to look out for.

Adaptive design

Responsive websites adapt to the screen of any device that users are using. Read more about responsive design in ourmaterialYou can use CSS to make your page adapt to the size of the device. To check if your site is mobile-friendly, you can use Google's Mobile-Friendly Checker.

AMP

AMP pages are accelerated mobile pages. Site pages are cached on cache servers and open much faster than in normal mode. Learn more about AMP pages in ourmaterial.

Accelerated page loading

We live in a world of increased speed and want everything to be fast. So if a website page takes more than 3 seconds to load, about half of users won't wait and will return to the search results for another result. 

Page load speed is an important factor in on-page SEO. And, among other factors, it is greatly influenced by the choice of qualityhosting.

The reason for the slow loading is the image 

In addition, page loading speed is affected by the size and quality of images uploaded to the site. 

We suggest you pay attention to some of the main ways of loading images that can affect speed.

1. SRCSET attribute

SRCSET allows you to load multiple versions of an image, with priority given to the preferred version for different situations. This code snippet is added to the <img> tag to load the required image size for different devices, which significantly reduces page load time and improves the user experience.  

2. Lazy image loading

If you visit a page and instead of an illustration you see a blurry, light version of it or a colored rectangle, this is lazy or deferred loading. The image will load in a few seconds, leaving time for the main elements of the page to load. 

Increase download speed by compressing and merging files

When working on increasing page loading speed, it is often recommended to minimize resources. What does this mean? In programming, there is such a term - minification. This is the process of reducing the size of the source code by removing characters. Line breaks, spaces are removed, and code variable names are shortened, if possible.

Another process used to increase page load speed is bundling. Bundling combines multiple files with the same coding language into a single file. For example, to reduce the amount of JavaScript, they are placed into one larger file. 

Minifying and combining files and page code elements helps speed up your site and improve the user experience.

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