Before we get into the details, let’s begin with the basics and know what is technical SEO exactly. Making sure a website complies with the technical standards of current search engines in order to achieve higher organic ranks is known as technical SEO. Website architecture, crawling, indexing, and rendering are crucial aspects of technical SEO.
The best material may be found on the best website. Nevertheless, what if your technical SEO is flawed? Hence, you won’t be ranked. Google and other search engines must be able to locate, crawl, render, and index the pages on your website at the most fundamental level.
The pages on your website must be accessible to search engines so they may find, crawl, render, and index them. But, that only scratches the surface. Even if Google DOES index all of the material on your website, your work isn’t finished there.
That’s because your site’s pages must be safe, mobile-friendly, duplicate-content-free, and quick to load in order for your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO. and a million other factors affect technological optimization.
This does not imply that your technical SEO must be flawless in order to rank. There isn’t. However, your chances of ranking are better the more accessible your content is to Google.
I already said that “technical SEO” goes beyond simple crawling and indexing. You must consider the following in order to enhance the technical optimization of your website:
I doubt I’m forgetting any of them. Happily, I’ll go over all of that and more in the next sections of this article.
The structure of your website is, in my opinion, “step #1” of any technical SEO effort. Why does this step come before crawling and indexing?
First off, poorly built site structure contributes to a lot of crawling and indexing troubles. Thus, you won’t have to worry as much if you do this step correctly about Google crawling every page of your website. Second, your site structure affects everything else you do to optimize it, including your sitemap, URLs, and the use of robots.txt to exclude particular pages from search engine indexing.
The key line is that every other technical SEO activity is much easier when the structure is good. Let’s go on to the steps after that.
All of the pages on your website are arranged according to your site structure. In general, you want a “flat” structure. In other words, the pages on your website should all be just a few links apart.
Google and other search engines can easily crawl all of the pages on your website thanks to a flat structure. For a blog or a website for a neighborhood pizzeria, this is not a major concern. But what about an online store with 250 000 product pages? It’s a HUGE DEAL when architecture is flat. Also, you want your building to be extremely orderly.
Typically, this unkempt structure results in “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links pointing to them). It also makes it difficult to identify and resolve indexing problems. To acquire a bird’s eye perspective of your site structure, use the Semrush “Site Audit” tool.
Check out Visual Site Mapper to see how your pages are connected more visually. It is a free application that provides you with an interactive view of the architecture of your website.
You don’t need to overthink the format of your URLs. particularly if you manage a small website (like a blog). Having said that, you do want your URLs to have a clear structure. In fact, this clarifies to consumers “where” they are on your website. Also, grouping your sites into various categories offers Google more information about each page within each category.
It goes without saying that breadcrumb navigation is excellent for SEO. That’s because internal links to your site’s categories and subpages are automatically added by breadcrumbs. it strengthens the architecture of your website. Not to mention the fact that URLs now function as breadcrumb-style navigation in the SERPs thanks to Google. Thus I advise using breadcrumbs navigation when it makes sense.
Making it incredibly simple for search engines to find and index your complete site is the focus of this section. I’ll also demonstrate how to locate and correct crawl issues. and the best way to direct web crawlers to deep pages on your website.
Find any pages on your website that crawlers are having problems accessing as your first step. Here are 3 methods for doing that:
The “Coverage Report” in the Google Search Console ought to be your first port of call. If Google is unable to fully index or render the pages that you want to be indexed, this report will let you know.
The reason Screaming Frog is the most well-known crawler in the world is because it’s so, so fantastic. So, I advise doing a thorough crawl with Screaming Frog once you’ve rectified any issues in the Coverage Report.
An excellent SEO site audit tool is available from Semrush. The information you receive about the general technical SEO health of your site is what I like best about this function. Website performance analysis. and difficulties with the HTML codes on your website. These three instruments each have advantages and disadvantages. So, I advise employing all three of these strategies if you manage a huge website with more than 10,000 pages. Nothing will slip between the cracks in this manner.
The majority of folks have no trouble getting their homepage indexed. The pages that are several links down from the homepage are known as “deep pages,” and they often cause issues. In most cases, a flat architecture avoids this problem altogether. After all, your homepage is only 3–4 clicks away from your “deepest” page.
In either case, nothing beats a good old-fashioned internal link to that page if there is a certain deep page or series of pages that you want to be crawled, especially if the page from which you are connecting has a high authority and is frequently crawled.
Is an XML sitemap still necessary for Google to identify the URLs of your website in the era of AMP and mobile-first indexing? Yes. In fact, a Google representative recently said that the “second most significant source” for locating URLs is an XML sitemap. (The initial? They stayed silent. But, I’m assuming both internal and external linkages).
Go to the “Sitemaps” section of the Search Console to confirm that your sitemap is functioning properly. You can see the sitemap that Google is now displaying for your website.
A URL on your website may not be indexed. Well, the GSC’s Inspect tool can assist you in solving the problem. It will also explain why a page isn’t being indexed. But, you can see how Google displays pages that ARE indexed. By doing so, you can confirm that all of the information on that website is fully crawlable and indexed by Google.
You generally won’t need to be concerned about duplicate content if you create original, unique content for every page on your website. Having said that, duplicate content technically can appear on any website… particularly if your CMS produced several copies of the same page at various Addresses.
The same is true of thin content: most websites don’t have a problem with it. Yet, it can lower your site’s overall ranks. Thus it’s worthwhile to find and repair. Also, I’ll demonstrate in this chapter how to proactively address duplicate and thin content problems on your website.
There are two tools that are AMAZING at identifying thin and duplicate material. The Raven Tools Site Auditor comes first. It looks for duplicate content on your website (or thin content). and informs you of the pages that require updating. The “Content Quality” feature of the Semrush site audit tool also lets you know if your website uses the same material on many pages.
These programs concentrate on duplicate content on your own website, having said. The term “duplicate content” also refers to web pages that reproduce content from other websites. I advise using Copyscape’s “Batch Search” option to confirm that the information on your website is original. You can upload a list of Links here to see where that material appears on other websites.
Search for that text in quotations if you come across a passage of text that appears on another website. Google will consider you the original author of the page if your page appears first in the search results. Now you can proceed.
PS: If someone steals your content and posts it on their website, that is considered duplicate content. not your own. You should only be concerned about information on your site that is directly plagiarised from or strikingly similar to the content on other websites.
The majority of websites will contain some pages with duplicate material. That’s fine too. When those pages with duplicate content are indexed, this creates a problem. The answer? Give those pages the “no-index” tag. Google and other search engines are instructed not to index the page via the no-index tag. Using the GSC’s “Inspect URL tool,” you may confirm that your noindex tag is configured properly. Click “Test Live URL” after entering your URL.
You’ll notice a notification that reads “URL is available to Google” if Google is still indexing the page. Hence, your noindex tag isn’t configured properly. But, the noindex tag is working if you get an “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag’ message.
One of the few occasions where you WANT to see a red error notice in the GSC is now. It can take a few days or weeks for Google to re-crawl the pages you don’t want to be indexed, depending on your crawl budget.
As a result, I advise making sure your no-indexed pages are being deleted from the index by looking at the “Excluded” tab in the Coverage report.
PS: You may prevent each search engine’s particular crawler from accessing the page by banning them individually in your robots.txt file.
The no-index tag should often be added to pages with duplicate content. Alternately, have original content substituted for duplication. Yet canonical URLs are a third choice. Canonical URLs are ideal for web pages with remarkably similar content and only a few subtle variations.
Let’s imagine, for illustration, that you manage an online store where hats are sold. You’ve also created a product page specifically for cowboy hats. Every size, color, and variation may have a unique URL depending on how your site is set up. Really bad. Fortunately, you can inform Google that the “primary” version of your product page is the plain version by using the canonical tag. And they’re all versions of one another.
One of the few technical SEO tactics that can directly affect your site’s rankings is increasing page speed. Yet, having a quick-loading website doesn’t guarantee that it will rank highly on Google’s first page.
(For that, you need backlinks.)
Yet, increasing the speed at which your website loads can significantly reduce your organic traffic. And in this chapter, I’ll walk you through 3 quick strategies to speed up the loading of your website.
CDNs. Cache. load slowly. CSS minification. You have probably read about these strategies a thousand times already. But despite its importance, I rarely hear people discuss Web page size when discussing page speed.
In fact, the total size of a page had the strongest correlation with the load times of any component when we conducted our extensive page speed study. The lesson to be learned from this is that there is no free lunch when it comes to page speed. You can greatly increase your site’s cache and image compression. But, if your pages are large, it will take some time for them to load.
I consciously choose to put up with longer loading times. Instead of a quick page with blurry photos, give me a sluggish page that looks amazing. This does lower our Google Page Speed Insights rankings. However, if speeding up your website is a primary issue, you should take every precaution to reduce the overall size of your page.
The association between CDNs and slower load times was one of our page speed study’s most unexpected findings. This is probably due to the improper configuration of several CDNs. So, if your website employs a CDN, I advise checking its speed on webpagetest.org with and without the CDN.
A page’s load time increases by 34ms on average for every third-party script it contains. You may require some of these scripts (like Google Analytics). Nonetheless, it never hurts to review the scripts on your website to see if there are any you can remove.
Here are a few quick technical SEO pointers. We’ll discuss redirects, structured data, Hreflang, and more in this chapter.
Does your website include variations of its pages for several locales and languages? The hreflang tag can be of tremendous assistance in that case. The hreflang tag’s sole drawback, then? It is difficult to set up. Also, Google’s instructions for using it aren’t exactly clear.
Enter the Hreflang Generating Tool by Aleyda Solis.
With this tool, creating a hreflang tag for numerous nations, languages, and regions is (relatively) simple.
A large number of dead links won’t make or break your SEO. Broken links aren’t even an SEO issue, according to Google. But what if some internal linkages are broken? That’s a different tale. Broken internal links might make it more difficult for Googlebot to locate and crawl the pages on your website.
To fix broken links, I advise performing a quarterly SEO assessment. Any SEO audit tool, such as Semrush or Screaming Frog, can be used to discover the broken links on your website.
Do I believe that implementing Schema directly improves the SEO of your website? No. In actuality, there is no connection between Schema and first page ranks, according to our analysis of search engine ranking determinants. Having said that, sing Schema CAN provide Rich Snippets for certain of your pages. Moreover, Rich Snippets can significantly increase your organic click-through rate because they stand out in the SERPs.
It might be challenging to maintain track of every page in your sitemap if you manage a large website. In reality, a lot of the sitemaps I review have pages with the 404 and 301 status codes. As displaying all of your live pages to search engines is the primary objective of your sitemap, you want all of its links to connect to active pages.
Thus, I advise using the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator to check your sitemap. Simply insert your site’s sitemap. Also, check to see if any of your links are misdirected or broken.
I strongly advise not indexing category and tag pages if your website is powered by WordPress. (Unless, of course, those pages receive a significant amount of traffic). Users typically don’t gain anything from these pages. They can also lead to problems with duplicate material. You can quickly noindex these pages with Yoast with just one click.
It’s 2022. You already know that your website needs to be optimized for mobile devices. Having said that, problems can arise on even the most mobile-friendly websites. These problems can be challenging to identify unless people start emailing you with complaints.
Except if you make use of the Mobile Usability data from the Google Search Console. Google will notify you if they discover a page on your website that isn’t mobile-friendly. Even more specifically, they list the issues with the page. In this manner, you are fully aware of the problem.
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