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Technical SEO is an important step within the SEO process. If there are problems with the technical SEO side, it's likely that other SEO efforts don't generate the results expected.
Therefore, it's crucial to understand what technical SEO is so that it can be done correctly.
The good news here is that after a technical SEO audit is completed of the website, it fixes any potential problems. With that, it's rare to have to deal with technical SEO again.
It's crucial to understand the best practices for technical SEO, how to do an audit of the website, and have a technical SEO checklist to follow. Let's get started:
What Is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the process of optimizing a website for the indexing and crawling phases. With technical SEO, the search engines can access, crawl, and interpret the information on the site for indexing purposes.
It's called technical because it doesn't have anything to do with the content on the site or website promotion. The main goal for technical SEO is to optimize the website's infrastructure.
With that, it's crucial to focus on basic terminology to understand technical optimization.
What Is SEO?
First, it's important to understand what SEO is. The simplified definition of search engine optimization is that it's the process for optimizing the website for search engines.
Optimization within the SEO context means:
Giving search engine algorithms a reason to trust the website and rank it higher than others
Helping search engine spiders understand the context of the content
Giving search engines appropriate signals to understand the structure of the site
Having high-quality content to match search intent for the user
Ensuring that the search engines can access/index the website with no problems
With that, keyword research, content writing, and other things are crucial for SEO.
Once everything is done properly, the website is considered SEO-friendly and can appear in the SERPs.
How Does One Start SEO?
The first step that search engines take before answering a search query is to index and crawl websites. During that process, search engines want to find publicly available web pages that can be added to the index.
They discover, organize, and read the pages and put them in the database so that they can be accessed later by the algorithms to offer precise answers to the search queries entered by the users.
To get the entire picture of how search engines work, it's important to focus on all three SEO pillars, including off-page SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO.
On-page SEO focuses on content and how to make it relevant to what the user wants to search for. Off-page SEO is often called link-building, which is the process of getting links or mentions from other websites to boost trust within the ranking process.
There aren't any clear boundaries between these three options. They must all work together to have a fully optimized site.
Why Optimize the Site Technically for Search Engines?
Google and other search engines need to present their users with the best results possible for the query. Therefore, the robots crawl the web pages and evaluate them based on many factors. Some of them focus on the user's experience, such as how quickly the page loads. Others help search engine robots understand what the pages are about. That's what structured data is all about. When the technical aspects are improved, search engines crawl and understand the site. If this is done effectively, it's possible to get rich snippets and higher rankings.
It also works the other way. Therefore, if there are serious technical mistakes on the website, it can cost the owner. Many people accidentally block search engines completely from crawling their sites by adding trailing slashes in the wrong places of the robots.txt file.
However, it's a misconception that technical details only appease search engines. Websites must work well by being easy to use, clear, and fast for the users. Fortunately, when creating a stronger technical foundation, this means a better user experience.
Characteristics for a Technically Optimized Website
Having a technically sound website means that the site is fast for users, and other search engines can crawl it with their robots. A proper setup ensures that search engines understand what the site is all about to prevent confusion caused by things like duplicate content.
With that, it doesn't send search engines or visitors into dead-end streets with non-working or broken links. Here are some of the more important characteristics of having a technically optimized site.
It's Faster
With the way things are now, web pages must load quickly. People are highly impatient and don't wait for the page to open. Research has shown that 53 percent of all mobile website visitors leave a site if it doesn't have a page speed of three seconds.
Therefore, if the website is slow, people get quickly frustrated and move to another website. The owner of the first, slower site misses out on that traffic.
Google understands that slow websites offer a poor experience. Therefore, it prefers pages that have a high page speed. A slow web page ends up lower in the search results than a faster equivalent, so that slow site gets less traffic.
With that, Page Experience is a newer thing that recently came out. This refers to how fast people feel that a web page is, so it's definitely going to continue being a ranking factor. Now is the time to prepare for this.
There are various tools available to test site speed. Some of them even offer pointers on how to improve it. Check the Core Web vitals from Google to help with page experience, as well.
It's Crawlable
Search engines often use robots to spider or crawl a website. These robots follow all the links to find content on the site. Therefore, it's crucial to have internal links and a great structure to ensure that they understand what content is available and what's the best.
However, there are ways to guide the robots. For example, it's possible to block them from certain content when they shouldn't be there. With that, site owners can let them crawl pages but tell them not to show it in the search results or prevent them from following links on the page.
Robots.txt File
It is possible to tell the robots what to do and give them directions for the site with a robots.txt file. This is a powerful tool and should be used carefully. As mentioned earlier, one mistake could prevent the robots from crawling the most important parts of the site.
Sometimes, people accidentally block the JS and CSS files within the robot.txt file. They contain code to tell the browsers what the site should look like and how it should work. If they get blocked, the search engines can't find out if the site runs correctly.
Meta Robots Tag
To let the search engine robots crawl a page without it being in the search results, tell it with a robots meta tag. With this tag, it's easy to instruct Google to crawl the page without following the links therein.
Typically, pages that have this tag are author pages when only one person is writing for the blog. Duplicate content can easily be found here, so use the tag to prevent the spider from crawling the links.
Some custom posts can be prevented from getting indexed, such as plugins. With that, thank you pages, admin/login pages, and internal search results don't usually have to be indexed.
Fewer Dead Links
Slower websites are frustrating for the users. However, landing on a page that isn't there is even more annoying. If a link goes to a non-existing page on the site, people see a 404 error. That ruins the user experience.
With that, search engines don't like these error pages, either. They tend to find more dead links than the visitors because they follow every single link they see, even if it's hidden.
Unfortunately, many sites have a few dead links because websites are a work in progress. People make things that ultimately break. However, there are various tools to retrieve dead links from the site.
To prevent them from unnecessarily happening, it's best to redirect page URLs when they are moved or deleted. Ideally, it's best to redirect it to the page that replaces the old one.
Doesn't Confuse Search Engines with More Duplicate Content
Having the same content on various pages of the site or other sites is confusing to search engines. That's because these pages show the same content, and the search engine doesn't know which one to rank higher. Therefore, it might rank every page with a lower content score.
Unfortunately, it's easy to get a duplicate content issue without knowing about it. Because of various technical reasons, different URLs might show the same content. For a visitor, that makes no difference. However, it does to a search engine because it sees the same content on different URLs.
Luckily, there is a technical solution to the problem. With the canonical link element, it's easy to indicate the original page or the page to rank for within the search engines. Overall, this helps to prevent duplicate content issues that may be unknown to the site owner.
More Secure Web Pages
When a website is technically optimized, it is also secure. Making the site safe for users ensures their privacy, and this is a basic requirement in today's world. Many things can help make the website secure, and one of them is to implement HTTPS.
This ensures that no one can take the data sent between the site and the browser. For example, if people log into a site, their credentials are always safe. It's important to have an SSL certificate to use HTTPS on the site.
Google understands the importance of security and made HTTPS a ranking signal. Therefore, secure sites rank higher than those deemed unsafe.
It's easy to check to see if the website is HTTPS by visiting it in any browser. On the left side of the browser's search bar, there should be a closed padlock if it's safe. Those sites with "not secure" in the search bar must be fixed quickly to avoid technical SEO issues.
Features Structured Data
Structured data ensures that search engines can understand the website, content, and business better. With this, it's easier to tell search engines what product is sold or what recipes are on the site. Plus, it gives everyone an opportunity to provide various details about the information.
Since there is a fixed format on how to provide the information, search engines can easily understand and find it. With that, it helps them place the content in a bigger picture.
Implementing structured data brings more than a better understanding from the search results. It also makes the content eligible for rich results, which helps it stand apart from the crowd in search results.
XML Sitemap
The XML sitemap is the list of all pages on the site. It is like a roadmap for the search engine. With that, it's easier for search engines to find important content through internal links. The sitemap is often categorized in pages, posts, tags, and other custom options, and it includes how many images are there and the last date for each page that was modified.
Ideally, the website doesn't require a sitemap. If it offers internal links through an appropriate linking structure, this connects the content quite well. Robots don't need anything else. However, most sites don't have a great structure, so an XML sitemap doesn't hurt.
International Websites Feature Hreflang
If the website targets multiple countries that speak the same language, search engines require help to understand which language or countries the site is trying to reach. When the owner helps them, the search engine shows people the appropriate website for their area within the search results.
Hreflang tags can assist. Just define the page for the country and language it's meant for. This also solves the potential issue of duplicate content. Even if the UK and US sites show similar content on each web page, Google knows that they are written for a different location.
Optimizing international websites is almost a specialty, but it's crucial to find the right professional to assist.
Technical SEO Best Practices
Now that everyone knows what technical SEO is, it's crucial to learn about the best practices and technical SEO strategies that are available. Some sites only need a few of them, while others must focus on all of them because no technical SEO was completed before now.
Site audits are much easier when these things listed below are used. With that, the technical aspects are taken care of, which prevents broken links, promotes link-building, and gets rid of multiple versions of the same site. Is technical SEO important? Yes, and here's what to do:
Specify the Preferred Domain
When setting up a blog or website, it's crucial to specify the preferred domain. Doing so allows the site owner to tell search engines which variation of the domain to use throughout the lifetime of the website.
Why must this be done?
A website, by default, has to be accessible with/without the "www" in front of the domain name. For example, if the name is example.com, the website should be accessed by typing in http://example.com and http://www.example.com.
While this works well for users, it can get confusing for search engines, as they consider them to be two different websites. Overall, there could be indexing issues, page rank loss, and duplicate content problems because the search engine believes that there are multiple versions of the same page or site.
To solve the problem, it's important to set a preferred domain and tell search engines about that choice.
WWW or Not
One of the biggest questions people have is whether or not to use the "www" in front of the domain or go with the newer non-www version. There's no SEO advantage for choosing one option over the other, so it's primarily personal preference that reigns supreme here.
Most companies do like using the "www" in front of their domains. It feels more natural because that's what was always done in the past. There's nothing wrong with switching to the HTTP-only version, though.
What is crucial here is to tell search engines about the decision and make sure that there is consistency throughout the lifetime of the site.
It's possible to change it up and mix and match. To do that effectively, 301 redirections are used to switch between the formats. However, this isn't recommended because there's a risk with making domain migrations, and it could mess with the other technical aspects of the site.
How to Set a Preferred Domain
Earlier, the setting to specify a preferred domain was found in Google Search Console. However, it chose to remove that option and rely solely on canonical URLs. This is talked about later in more detail.
Optimize the Robots.txt
Once the preferred domain has been set up, the next step is to optimize or check the robots.txt file. Before doing this, it's crucial to know what it is and why it matters.
What Is It?
Robots.txt is the text file that resides in the root directory of the website. It tells search engine crawlers which pages of the site they can crawl and which ones should be added to the index.
The format for this file is quite simple. In most cases, no changes must be made to it. Here are a few commands that are popular:
To block an entire site - Disallow: /
To block a directory and the contents - Disallow: /sample-directory/
To block a web page - Disallow: /private_file.html
To block a particular image from Google Images - User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /images/dogs.jpg
To block all images on the site - User-agent: Googlebot-Image Disallow: /
To block specific file types - User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /*.gif$
Primarily, what is important is to ensure that there aren't any false blockings that discourage the crawlers from indexing the website. Overall, it might be wise to hire someone to handle this, as many business owners with websites aren't sure what to do.
Optimize URL Structure
The next item in the technical SEO audit is to review the URL structure of the website. This means the formatting of the URLs.
Best practices for SEO dictate these points about URLs:
Use target keywords in the URL with no keyword stuffing
Avoid unnecessary words and characters
Make them shorter and more descriptive
Use the "-" to separate words within the URL
Use lowercase characters
In general, when the format of the permanent link structure is defined, the only thing left to do is optimize the URLs when new content is published.
For those who use WordPress as their CMS, they might notice that WordPress takes the post title and uses it to create the URL when a new post is created. For example, if the post title is "Best SEO Practices for Beginners," WordPress generates a URL to look like http://www.example.com/best-seo-practices-for-beginners. That's not a bad thing, but it could be made shorter sometimes, such as http://www.example.com/beginner-SEO. That way, it's easier to remember and more targeted.
As with the preferred domain, if someone chooses to change their permanent link structures, they can do that with 301 redirects. However, it's not recommended. There isn't much value in doing it. Therefore, it's better to start doing that with new posts and not change the old ones.
Navigation and Site Structure
The structure of the website is a crucial SEO ranking factor for many reasons. Users tend to stay on a website longer to find what they want faster. Search engines typically index and understand the website easier, as well.
Many Webmasters make a huge mistake when trying to optimize the website for conversions. They tend to forget about site structure and navigation, which damages their SEO efforts.
One example is to hide the archive pages from the users so that all the content is under one category. In the past, people thought that archiving pages and multiple categories hurt SEO, but this is actually a bad SEO practice.
Google does look at the overall structure of the website when evaluating a particular web page. Therefore, this step shouldn't be overlooked.
However, to have a real benefit from this, the category pages also have to be optimized.
In addition, Google stated in its guidelines that a well-defined structure can help webmasters tell Google what the most important content of the website is. This helps to push them higher in ranking for the pages that they care about most.
Add Breadcrumb Menus
The breadcrumb menu is just a set of links at the bottom or top of the page. This lets users navigate to the previous page they were on, which is often a category page. With that, they may also get to the homepage again.
Typically, a breadcrumb menu is there to serve two primary purposes: it can help users navigate the website easily without having to hit the back button on the browser, and it also gives another hint to the search engines about the website's structure.
Usually, breadcrumbs are mentioned in SEO guides as an SEO element that shouldn't be neglected. This is because Google highly recommends them. If breadcrumbs aren't enabled on the site, it's possible to do that, but they must have the correct schema.
Structured Data Markup with SEO
Ultimately, structured data has become much more important within the last few years because Google heavily uses it within its search results. Though discussed earlier, it's crucial to go deeper into the meaning and how it all comes together with technical and traditional SEO.
What Is Structured Data?
Simply put, structured data is a code that can be added to the web pages. It's visible to the search engine crawlers to help them understand the content and its context. In a sense, it describes the data to search engines in their language so that they get what it means.
How Structured Data Relates to Technical SEO?
Though structured data focuses more on the content of the website, it is crucial for technical SEO because the code must be added to the website to ensure that it's done right.
Usually, the structured data definition is added once, and then nothing else has to be done for it.
For example, it's important to configure the structured data for breadcrumbs once, but then no further action is necessary. The same applies to articles. When the correct definitions and codes are added to the CMS, it automatically applies them to the new content.
Benefits of Structured Data
Overall, it helps to enhance the presentation of the listings on the SERPs. This can be done through knowledge graph entries or featured snippets. They can increase the click-through rates of the website.
Uses for Structured Data
There are various ways to use structured data to describe the content on each web page. The most popular include:
Local business
Job posting
Events
Recipes
Articles/blogs
Ebooks
Breadcrumbs
Carousels
Online courses
Datasets
Fact checks
FAQs
Home activities
How-to
Image licenses
Logo
Math solvers
Movies
Estimated salaries
Podcasts
Practice problems
Products
Q&A
Review snippets
Sitelinks search boxes
Software apps
Speakable
Subscription content
Videos
Check Canonical URLs
Earlier, canonical URLs were mentioned. Every page of the website must have one. It's defined by adding a special tag in the head of the posts and pages. This is "link rel="canonical" href="thepageurl">.
What's a Canonical URL?
Overall, a canonical URL is a simple way to tell Google which version of the page to use when indexing the website. The concept is very similar to the preferred domain, whereby a single page can be accessed through different URLs.
The use of rel="canonical" is used when the pages have similar content. This is for paging purposes and can help to avoid duplicate content problems when the content is added to the website from other sites.
As a general rule, it's best to specify the canonical URL for each of the website pages.
The easiest way to check if the website offers a canonical URL is to visit one of them. Then, right-click anywhere on that page and navigate to VIEW SOURCE. Search for the "rel=canonical" command to investigate the value.
If there's no reference to canonical here, it's possible to use a plugin to automatically update it. Those who use WordPress must consider Yoast SEO. Otherwise, the best way to get it done is to hire a developer to handle the necessary changes for the code.
As with many other technical SEO elements, once the website is set up to output the canonical URL properly, nothing else must be done.
Optimize 404 Pages
A 404 page is typically shown to users when the URL they visit doesn't exist on the website. It could have been deleted or changed in the past. However, some people directly type it into the browser search bar, and they may have done so incorrectly.
Most modern WordPress themes use optimized 404 pages by default. However, if using something other than WordPress, it's easy to make the 404 page SEO-friendly by editing the templates for the themes or using a plugin to do so.
What's an Optimized 404 Page?
To have an optimized 404 page, it's important to:
Make it easy for the user to go back to the homepage, a previous page, or other important pages
Give the user alternatives (such as suggesting related pages)
Tell visitors that the page they want isn't available anymore, and use friendly language
Have the same navigation menus and structure on the 404 page as the website
Overall, when the 404 page looks its best, users feel confident that the site is authoritative and trustworthy.
How to Check 404 Pages
Testing how the 404 page looks is easy. Just open a browser window and type in a URL that doesn't exist on the website. What is shown is the 404 page. Check it to see how it looks and what it says.
However, don't spend a lot of time optimizing 404 pages. Just ensure that if a page isn't found within the website, it returns a customized 404 page.
Optimize the XML Sitemap
Though discussed earlier, the XML sitemap is crucial for technical SEO. In fact, it might be the most important element, so it must be optimized.
The sitemap is the XML file listing all the posts and pages available on the site. Besides the title, it includes other helpful information. Search engines often use this to guide them while crawling a website.
How to Optimize an XML Sitemap
Optimization of the sitemap page is simple. However, you should only include the important pages of the website within this file or list. In most cases, that consists of the posts, categories, and product pages.
Don't include author pages and tag pages with no original content here. With that, it's important to ensure that the sitemap gets automatically updated whenever a new page is added, or a current one is updated.
To submit the sitemap to Google and Bing, use either Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools. It's also possible to check the status from these websites.
Overall, though, it's much easier to hire a professional to ensure that the sitemap is done properly. Most entrepreneurs and business owners don't know much about it, so it's better to get someone with the skills necessary for the job. While there are guides out there, it might be time-consuming and challenging for those with no SEO background.
Add SSL for HTTPS
The latest trend for the internet is focused on security. HTTPS has been a known ranking signal on Google for many years and is an additional way to build trust with the users.
When installing SSL on a server, the website can then be accessed with HTTPS instead of HTTP. This indicates that the information transferred between the site and server is encrypted, such as passwords, personal data, or usernames.
In the past, SSL was highly important for eCommerce sites. Now, though, every website should have SSL installed.
If it's not on the website, the first thing to do is talk to the hosting provider to ask them to enable SSL on the account. There might be a migration procedure to follow to activate it on the site without losing current rankings.
Adding SSL is similar to moving to a new domain, so this should be done with care. If there are any questions or worries, it might be wise to get walked through the process from the hosting provider.
Website Speed - A Ranking Factor
Page speed is also a known ranking signal. Google mentioned the importance of a fast website in all of its SEO recommendations. With that, studies have confirmed that a faster page speed performs better than those with slower websites.
For example, a three-second load speed increases bounce rates by 32 percent. At a three-second load speed, bounce rates increase to 90 percent.
Tackling the website speed is considered a technical issue. It requires the website owner to make changes to the infrastructure to see improved results.
The starting point here is to check the speed with Pingdom, Google Mobile Speed, and Google Page Speed Insights. They can offer recommendations on what must be done to improve the speed. However, this is still a technical issue, and a developer might have to be brought in to assist.
Generally, there are things that can be done by the average website owner to make load times faster. They include:
Upgrading the server to use a 64-bits operating system
Upgrading to PHP 7.2 to provide huge speed improvements
Optimizing the size of the images with various tools to prevent quality loss
Minimizing the use of plugins
Upgrading WordPress and all its plugins to their latest versions
Not using premade themes that are heavy because they include code that isn't necessary
Optimizing and minifying the JS and CSS files
Using the caching plugin to provide cached pages to the users
Avoiding multiple scrips in the heading of the site
Using asynchronous JavaScript loading
Clearly, these things sound hard to do, and they can be. This is why it might be better to hire a professional.
Mobile-Friendliness
Currently, it's not optional to have a mobile-friendly website. Most of the users that visit the site are on mobile devices. With Google now using the mobile-first index, a person's rankings suffer if they don't use a mobile-friendly and fast site.
Mobile-friendliness is actually part of technical SEO because once there is a mobile-friendly theme that's been properly configured, it never has to be dealt with again. With that, this task requires more technical knowledge than most entrepreneurs have to set it up.
The first thing here is to check the mobile-friendliness of the website with a special Google tool. If the site doesn't pass the test, there is much work to do. This should be a priority, and a professional is likely needed here.
Even if the website passes the test, there are still many things to understand about SEO and mobile. These include:
The mobile website should contain the same content as the desktop site. With the mobile-first index being introduced, Google tries to rank mobile websites based on the mobile content. Therefore, any content on the desktop should also be shown on mobile. This includes internal links and other elements that are available on the desktop version.
The mobile website must load in six seconds or less (for 3G networks).
It's normal to have lower conversion rates on mobile, but that doesn't mean they shouldn't be optimized as much as they can.
Don't use popups on mobile.
AMP websites don't replace the need for a fast mobile website. Even if the Accelerated Mobile Pages are activated on the site, they must still be friendly and fast on mobile. Ultimately, the mobile-first index doesn't take into account the AMP pages as a replacement for mobile friendliness.
If the website is already responsive, then there probably isn't much more to worry about. However, if there's a separate subdomain, folder, or mobile website, then it must include the same content as the desktop.
Consider AMP
Accelerated Mobile Pages is actually a new concept that Google introduced in an effort to make mobile websites faster. In simple terms, AMP offers a version of the website that uses AMP HTML, which is a clipped version of the normal HTML.
Once AMP pages are created for a website, they're stored and provided to users through a Google cache that loads faster than other mobile-friendly pages. AMP pages can only be accessed through Google Mobile results and through other AMP providers, including Twitter.
There's a long-held debate within the SEO community as to whether AMP pages should be adopted. With that, there are advantages and disadvantages of this approach. They include:
Pros of AMP
Makes mobile pages faster
Could increase click-through rates from mobile users
Cons of AMP
Difficult to implement, even with WordPress activating its AMP plugin
Can't use AMP pages for email marketing needs
Must hire a developer to build a decent AMP-focused website
Analytics and reports can get confusing because it's important to maintain reports from two websites (the AMP and the normal one)
Currently, Google says that there isn't an SEO benefit of using AMP (other than faster speeds). However, this could change in the near future.
Advanced SEO Topics
The last two things to focus on for technical SEO are multi-lingual sites and pagination. They're highly technical tasks, and they might not apply to every website out there.
Pagination
Pagination is primarily used to break up one long page into shorter, multiple pages. It can also be used to enable paging within the category pages.
To avoid issues with duplicate content and to consolidate page rank and links on the main page, it's important to use the rel="next" or rel="prev" links. That tells the search engine that any subsequent pages are a continuation of that main page.
When Google sees those links within the code, it understands what the main page is and uses that for indexing purposes.
Multi-lingual Sites
If the website features content in multiple languages, then it's crucial to use the hreflang attribute. That way, Google gets more information about the content and site structure. This helps it provide the right content to the users. For example, Swedish people see Swedish content. Plus, it helps to optimize the page SEO by avoiding indexing and duplicate content issues.
Use Webmaster Tools Like Google Search Console
It is crucial to use Webmaster tools when carrying out highly important technical SEO tasks. These tools are offered by the search engines and are often used to optimize the website for technical SEO needs.
Typically, Google Search Console contains the most complete set of tools, and it's provided by Google. With Google Search Console, it's possible to test the robots.txt file, fix crawl errors, and submit a sitemap.
When technical SEO fixes are required, it's better to use the Webmaster tools first before hiring someone. However, it's important to note that most people can't repair the issues themselves and need to use a professional.
With that, it's recommended to register the site with Bing and Google tools and then configure the basic settings to be customized for that website. Overall, people have a difficult time with this, and an expert is often the best solution here.
Technical SEO Checklist
By now, readers should have a good idea about what technical SEO is and why it's separate from other SEO tactics.
Even if technical SEO has been done before, it's a good idea to perform an audit of the website periodically. To do that, a technical SEO checklist is necessary. Also, it's important to use the technical SEO tools mentioned here. Here's what to do, in a nutshell:
Specify the preferred domain
Optimize and check the robots.txt file
Check and optimize the URL structure
Revise the navigation and site structure
Add breadcrumb menus to the pages and posts
Add schema markups for those breadcrumbs created
Add structured data to the homepage
Add structured data to all posts
Add structured data to any other pages (based on type)
Check the canonical URLs
Optimize the 404 page
Optimize the XML sitemaps and submit them to Google and Bing
Enable HTTPS for each page
Check loading speeds and work on ways to make the website faster
Check the website's mobile-friendliness aspect
Think about using AMPs
Check multi-lingual and pagination settings
Register the website with Google Search Console
Register the website with Bing Webmaster tools
Though the technical aspects of the site's pages are crucial, it might be wise to perform a generalized SEO audit, as well. That way, it determines the optimization levels as a whole, which includes many more checks than with technical SEO requirements.
Conclusion
Technical SEO focuses on various settings and checks that should be optimized at all times. That way, search engines crawl and index the website with no problems.
In most cases, once the technical SEO is right, nothing has to be done again. However, periodical SEO audits are always a good idea.
The term "technical" implies that technical knowledge is required to deal with some of these tasks, such as adding structured data and page speed optimization. While SEO tools can help to find broken links and duplicate pages, it's often beyond the realm of website owners to do.
However, it's still necessary to do it all because the website can't reach its full potential otherwise. For those who can't do it themselves or worry about making mistakes, it might be wise to hire a professional. While there are various guides and courses out there that cover technical and regular SEO, it's often time-consuming and confusing.