Getting to grips with technical SEO

Expert advice on the business of running a garment decoration company

Technical search engine optimisation (SEO) plays a huge role in determining whether your website is successful or not. In a nutshell, technical SEO is the efforts of a webmaster or developer to ensure your site is compatible with Google’s many search engine guidelines: it gives your site the best chance to be indexed and ranked for its key search terms. It is concerned with the structure and architecture of the site itself rather than how often you post a blog.

As your business’s website develops over time, the site’s architecture needs to be considered to ensure that Google can regularly crawl, cache and index your pages. Google has little bots and ‘spiders’ which are used to crawl websites, the main one being the ‘Googlebot’ which scans the links from one page to another. Indexing is how search engines categorise your webpage based on content, links, meta descriptions etcetera. Using an algorithm, they categorise each page in relation to a search term and give it a ranking based on this. Page caching is another method that can help you to improve the load time of your web pages and thus optimise your site for the search engines. Cached pages are served up as static HTML versions of a page in order to avoid potentially time-consuming queries to your database.

For e-commerce websites, categorisation plays a significant part in the site architecture (and also makes user experience much simpler). Careful keyword research and planning should be carried out when planning your site categories – attention should be paid when assigning a URL with crucial keywords as this can play a role in ensuring that specific pages get ranked for your preferred terms.

Site speed is also pivotal for an e-commerce website to perform well in the eyes of a search engine. Customers want a website to be slick, quick and allow them the capability of checking out in a few moments. This can be quite a challenge for the garment decoration industry, where there are thousands of products available.

The costs associated with managing thousands of products on an e-commerce website on a managed server is high and something that needs to be planned for as part of your ongoing online budget – the common consensus here is less is more. Showing your customer a select group of garments rather than offering hundreds of similar ones will not only ensure that the load time isn’t compromised, but will also make for a much simpler user experience.

The best time to take care of the technical aspects of SEO is during the construction phase of the website. Do your research, ask developers the right questions and make sure that the technical bases are covered. Fixing these areas after your site has gone live can be costly and time-consuming.