Technical SEO is all about site cleanliness, while link building is all about getting the most juice from other sites into yours. While they may seem like two separate things, they can actually work hand-in-hand. When doing link building, technical SEO can make or break your campaign.
In this article, we will talk about how technical SEO can help you get more juice from your link building campaigns.
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO generally refers to the aspects of on-site SEO that the users cannot see. Technical SEO is geared towards Google as opposed to the user, so most people are not familiar with what goes on in the world of technical SEO.
Google uses robots to crawl websites and understand what it is that they offer. These robots do not see websites like you and I do, so technical SEO is the practice of improving the on-site experience for the crawlers.
Some of the things technical SEO deals with are:
- Site structure.
- URL structure.
- Sitemaps.
- 404 and 301 errors.
- Page speed.
The importance of technical SEO cannot be understated. Making sure that these crawlers don’t run into issues on your site is almost as important as making sure that users have a good experience.
What Is Link Building?
Link building is the practice of gaining more referring domains to your site. That is, you want other high-authority websites to link to your website. This will increase Google’s trust in your website because if other trusted sites are linking to you, then you must be a trusted website as well.
The problem with link building is that it can be very tricky to do successfully because Google actively discourages people from engaging in it. Basically, Google is trying to prevent a pay-to-play situation where sites just pay high-authority sites for links instead of actually earning them.
This is where technical SEO comes in. In the world of SEO, there are many instances in which bad technical SEO can lead to wasted or missed opportunities. Let us show you how engaging in good technical SEO can overhaul your link building campaigns.
Fix Broken Links
You might not be aware of it, but links break—all the time. A broken link is a useless link, so you should be checking at least monthly if any of your referring domains have broken.
You can then go ahead and fix any broken links, either by updating them yourself (like in the case of a directory profile) or contacting the referring website and kindly requesting an update.
You’d be surprised by how much SEO juice you can waste from broken links.
Remove Duplicate Pages
Duplicate content is bad enough as is, but having links going to two different pages is a disaster. You should look through the content of your site and see if there are any duplicate pages or pages with very similar content.
If you find pages that you can merge into one, you should take the stronger of the two and eliminate the other. Not only will this prevent keyword cannibalization, but you will end up with a stronger page as a result. Make sure to update all links going to the deleted page as soon as you make the merge.
Update Site Structure
You want to make sure that your site structure is clear and organized—not just for the crawlers, but for your own good too. Having a clear structure to work with can help you identify internal link building opportunities, an aspect of link building that is too often overlooked.
By cleaning up your internal site structure, you can identify new ways to interlink your own pages so that you move the SEO juice around in an effective and efficient way.
Final Thoughts
You know the saying, “cleanliness is next to godliness,” and it couldn’t be more spot-on when it comes to link building and technical SEO. Get more out of your link building campaigns by using these technical SEO strategies.
