Organic referencing (natural referencing) is a set of web marketing techniques aimed at improving a website’s visibility in Google search results. Specifically, how does it work? How to use SEO to gain visibility? In my article on “What is SEO?“, I break down SEO into 4 main pillars:
- Technical SEO
- User experience
- Content
- Recommendations (backlinks)
In this article, it’s the first one that will interest us. I’m going to unveil 10 SEO criteria for technical optimization to check that your pages have the right foundations to gain visibility. It should be noted anyway that the 4 main pillars must be worked on to have maximum referencing.
What is Technical SEO?
The first pillar of referencing is technical SEO, it involves optimizing a set of Google criteria internal to the website. Google attaches importance to these criteria because they play both on user experience (user side) and on robot navigation (Google side). Clearly, technical SEO is mainly the optimization of a web page so that search engines can understand it as best as possible.
If Google doesn’t understand your site or if it can’t visit all your pages, that’s a negative point for your referencing. So you must make sure that everything “under the hood” of your website runs smoothly. We will therefore be particularly interested in how a website was built and what CMS (website creation tool like WordPress or Wix) it uses, if it uses one. Most technical SEO criteria are therefore addressed to Google and invisible to users.
Why is technical SEO so important? Olivier Duffez answers us:
“Why? Quite simply because that’s what all those who succeed do! Believe my experience in Google referencing.”
10 SEO criteria for technical optimization
1. Crawling and Indexability
Google works in 3 steps to manage websites. Crawling and indexability are the first two steps:
- Crawling: Google sends its robots to analyze each page of a site
- Indexing: once analyzed, pages are indexed in the search engine and are visible to internet users in search results
It is possible to control these 2 steps. Crawling can be managed via the robots.txt file which allows telling Google which pages it is not allowed to visit. Indexing can be managed by the No-index tag or the canonical tag which indicate to Google not to index a page. It is interesting to control these two steps for technical SEO, I talk about it in this article dedicated to page quality.
When using a CMS like WordPress, it is good to check if Google has properly indexed all the pages that one wishes to index. Very often, Google indexes pages that one does not wish to index and forgets others that one wishes to see indexed. It is very frustrating and you must be constantly vigilant to check the proper indexing of your pages.
For this, you can use Google Search Console. In the “Coverage” tab, you can see all the pages of your website (past or present). You can then see pages in error, indexed pages (valid), and those that Google has not indexed (voluntarily or not). Check this information. 100% of indexable pages dedicated to referencing must be in the “Valid” part and all pages that you do not wish to see indexed must be in the “Excluded” part.
2. The Sitemap
To properly guide Google, we can create a sitemap (site map) and send it to Google via Search Console. The sitemap contains all the pages we want indexed. It allows Google to know in advance the pages it must visit and therefore save time. The sitemap is mostly used on websites containing many pages, Google needs it very little on a site of less than 20 pages.
On WordPress, the well-known plugin Yoast SEO supports this feature, the other SEO plugins Rankmath and SEOPress do it too. In Search Console, it’s in the “Index” – “Sitemaps” part that we can submit our sitemap URL.
3. Page accessibility
It is very important to offer a good user experience to internet users. For this, 100% of links on pages must function correctly. The user who clicks on an error link will be frustrated and leave. It is then dramatic for your Google visibility. There are 3 types of links that recur most often:
- Code 200 links: all is well, this means the link works correctly, 100% of links on your website must be code 200.
- Code 301 links: this means the destination page is accessible but is redirecting. This happens most often when the URL of the destination page has been modified but one forgot to modify links pointing to this page. Code 301 means a permanent redirection. It is not dramatic but in too large numbers, it is bad for your loading time and your referencing.
- Code 404 links: 404 errors are not dramatic for organic referencing but they harm user experience. A 404 error is an inaccessible page. There is nothing worse to make a user leave the website. Indirectly, this therefore harms referencing.
You can check your links by crawling your website. The free tool Screaming Frog SEO Spider allows identifying erroneous links or you can ask for an SEO audit. Note that it is exactly the same thing for outbound links. I find link errors in 100% of my clients’ SEO audits. Yet it is a major criterion of technical SEO.
4. Depth
Depth corresponds to the number of clicks needed to access a web page. Users generally stop at 3 clicks. Too great a page depth harms user experience. Internet users are lazy and want to find information very quickly, if they struggle to find what they are looking for, they will leave. Moreover, robots spend limited time on a website and may miss a page that is too deep. It will then not be indexed (not immediately anyway).
Limit the number of clicks to a depth of 3 maximum. For this, you must have a simple and concise tree structure. Internal linking is also a good way to reduce depth.
5. Internal linking
It is the best way to facilitate navigation for Google robots but also for internet users. Internal linking simply involves making links between pages of the same website. It’s good for your Google visibility but also for keeping users on the site. Wikipedia is a perfect example. You have to understand that Google uses links to navigate from page to page. A URL that receives no links will be difficult for robots to find and will not be indexed. I recommend that each page make and receive 3 internal links minimum.
For my part, I think it is a major criterion of technical SEO: discover my complete guide on internal linking.
6. The Title Tag
The SEO title is an ultra-important element and must be optimized with good keywords. It will determine whether or not the user will find then click on the link to access the page. It must be enticing and the right keywords must be placed as far to the left as possible. The Title tag is visible when it is between 60 and 65 characters long. I advise you to use the maximum space possible, there is no size limit, beyond 65 characters, the text may only be truncated. Note that each title tag must be unique and that the page title is not necessarily identical to the title tag. On WordPress, it is with a plugin like Yoast SEO that one can modify the Title tag.
7. The meta description tag
The Meta description tag has much less weight than the title tag for technical SEO, it is a unique snippet of the page that appears only in search results. Too often forgotten, the meta description should be about 160 characters long to not be truncated and also be optimized with good keywords. One can find the keyword (or variant) of the title tag also in the meta description. The objective of the meta description is mainly enticing, you must make the user want to click on your page rather than on the competitor’s.
8. Hn tags
Hn tags correspond to the title and subtitle, to the architecture of a web page. They must be in order (H1 – H2 – H3 – H4 – H5 – H6). Invisible to users, they allow robots to better identify data and the semantics of a content. The more Google knows about a page, the more it will be able to display it in the most relevant search results. Be careful, the font size of headings is not necessarily linked to their Hn tag. The H1 tag is the most important, it is the page title. It must be unique and optimized with the right keywords.
9. HTTPS
Google has clearly stated that non-secure sites (HTTP) could be visually penalized in web browsers. It also stated that HTTPS was now a factor for improving referencing. It is therefore vital to switch your website to HTTPS. Here is a tutorial to switch your WordPress website to HTTPS.
10. The structure and stability of URLs
The structure of URLs is also important for technical SEO. What must absolutely be remembered is the stability of URLs. To avoid error links 301 or 404, avoid modifying a URL already online. This could create many SEO technical errors. Adding keywords in the URL is a good practice that brings a little extra to your Google visibility.
Avoid using “_”, dates, accented characters, or special characters in URLs. Always try to write short and explicit URLs.
Conclusion: How to work on technical SEO?
As we have seen, hundreds of criteria must be taken into account for good technical optimization and therefore maximum visibility on Google. These 15 elements above are largely sufficient to create a technically well-optimized web page. Keep in mind that technical SEO is only the first pillar of SEO, you must then combine this information with the criteria of the other 3 pillars for your SEO strategy to be complete.
