We’ve previously seen that SEO is the art of optimizing a website to please search engines like Google and attract maximum visitors. But beyond content, there’s a foundation, a solid base to build: this is technical SEO.
Imagine your house. You can have the most beautiful decoration in the world, but if the foundations are rotten, it will collapse. Well, it’s the same for your website. Technical SEO is that: solid foundations so that your site performs and Google loves it. It’s about ensuring that search engine robots can easily crawl, understand and index your site. It’s like giving them a clear and precise plan.
Without good technical SEO, even the best content won’t be enough to propel you to the top of search results. So, let’s get started?
Why is technical SEO important?
Technical SEO is the set of technical optimizations that we implement on a website to improve your natural referencing and make it more efficient in the eyes of search engines. It’s not about keywords or content. It’s rather the skeleton, the infrastructure. We’re talking here about loading speed, site architecture, mobile compatibility, tags, robots.txt file, and many other technical aspects.
Why is it important?
Because search engines need to understand your site. If your site is poorly structured, slow, or difficult to explore, search engine robots will have trouble indexing it correctly. Result? Your site risks being buried in the depths of search results. Having a technically “clean” site means ensuring that search engines understand your site’s content and can offer it to users.
A performing site is a site that pleases engines… and users. This is the secret to improving your SEO and boosting your online visibility.
But beyond these considerations, you must understand that technical SEO is above all a set of prerequisites to improve Google robots’ crawling.
Google consumes more electricity than Iceland. The equivalent of the production of TWO nuclear power plants per year. It’s a financial abyss.
Add to that problems that the Mountain View firm has had in its history to crawl and properly index the entire web, and you’ll understand this: Google tries to save money on crawling and indexing.
Most of the measures that Google asks you to take mainly go in their direction: it’s about reducing crawling and indexing costs, limiting pages to browse, all to save money.
You will therefore have to ensure that Google robots have a fluid and problem-free “experience” when they explore your site.
The pillars of technical SEO
Imagine you’re an architect: your website is a building, and technical SEO is the construction plan. This plan must be clear, precise and respect standards so that the building is solid and pleasant to visit.
Exploration and indexing: how search engine robots discover your website
Exploration and indexing are the first steps for your website to be visible on search engines. It’s like a first meeting: if you make a good impression, you have more chances of retaining attention.
Search engines use robots, called “crawlers” or “spiders”, to explore the web and discover new web pages or updates on existing pages. These robots follow links from one page to another, a bit like an explorer following a trail in the jungle.
Then, once a page has been explored, and it is deemed worthy of interest, it is indexed, that is, added to the search engine’s index. This index is a gigantic database that contains all the web pages that the search engine knows about.
