This is a complete guide to technical SEO.
In this new guide, you will learn:
- Crawling and indexing
- XML site map
- Repetitive content
- Structured data
- Hreflang
- There’s more.
So if you want to make sure that your technical SEO is up-to-date, you should get a lot of valuable advice from today’s guide.
- Chapter 1-Technical SEO Foundation
- Chapter 2-website structure and Navigation
- Chapter 3-crawling, rendering, and indexing
- Chapter 4-streamlined and duplicated content
- Chapter 5-Page Speed
- Chapter 6-other Technical SEO skills
- Technical SEO case study
Chapter 1: technical SEO Foundation
Let’s start with the chapter on the basics.
Specifically, in this chapter, I will explain why technical SEO is still very important in 2022.
I will also show you what is (and does not) are considered “technical SEO”.
What is technical search engine optimization?
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that websites meet the technical requirements of modern search engines, with the aim of improving natural search rankings. Important elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.
Why is technical SEO important?
You can have the best website with the best content.
But what if your technical SEO screws up?
Then you won’t rank.
At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl, render, and index pages on your site.
But this is only a superficial problem. Even if Google does index all the content on your site, it doesn’t mean your work is done.
This is because, in order for your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO, the pages of your site need to be secure, mobile optimized, non-repetitive, and load quickly. And a thousand other aspects of technical optimization.
This is not to say that your technical SEO must be a perfect ranking. It didn’t.
However, the easier it is for Google to access your content, the better your chances of getting ranked.
How can you improve your technical search engine optimization?
As I said, “technical search engine optimization” is not just about crawling and indexing.
In order to improve the technical optimization of your website, you need to consider:
- Javascript
- XML site map
- Website structure
- Website structure
- Structured data
- Simple content
- Repetitive content
- Hreflang
- Specification label
- Page 404
- 301 redirect
All of this (and more) is described below in the rest of this guide.
Chapter 2: website structure and Navigation
In my opinion, the structure of your website is the “first step” of any technical SEO activity.
(yes, even before crawling and indexing)
Why?
First of all, due to improper website structure design, there will be a lot of crawling and indexing problems. So, if you do this correctly, you don’t have to worry about Google indexing all the pages of your site.
Second, the structure of your website will affect everything you do to optimize the site. From URL to site maps to using robots.txt to block search engines from accessing certain pages.
The bottom line here is that a strong structure makes all other technical SEO tasks easier.
With this, let’s move on to the steps.
Use a flat, organized website structure
The structure of your site is how all the pages on your site are organized.
In general, you need a “flat” structure. In other words: all pages of your site should have only a few links to each other.
Why is this important?
The flat structure allows Google and other search engines to easily crawl 100% of your site’s pages.
For blogs or local pizza parlor sites, this is no big deal. But what about an e-commerce site with 250k product pages? A flat architecture is a big deal.
You also want your structure to be super organized.
In other words, you don’t want this site architecture:
This messy structure usually creates “orphaned pages” (there are no internal links to their pages).
This also makes it difficult to identify and fix index problems.
You can use Semrush’s “Site Audit” feature to get a bird’s-eye view of your site structure.
This is very helpful. But it’s not super vision.
For a more intuitive understanding of how your pages are linked together, check out Visual Site Mapper.
This is a free tool that allows you to view the architecture of your site interactively.
Consistent URL structure
There is no need to overthink your URL structure. Especially if you run a small website (such as a blog).
That is: you do want your URL to follow a consistent logical structure. This can actually help users understand their “location” on your site.
Placing your pages under a different category provides Google with additional context about each page in that category.
For example, the pages on our WP tutorial category WordPress SEO contain “/ learn/wp-seo” subfolders to help Google know that all of these pages are under the “WordPress Academy” category. As you might expect, all pages linked from these additional links are in the center.
Bread crumb navigation
It’s no secret that breadcrumb navigation is very friendly to SEO.
This is because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to categories and subpages on your site.
This helps to consolidate the structure of your website.
Not to mention that Google has turned URL into breadcrumb navigation in SERP.
So, when it makes sense, I recommend using bread crumbs for navigation.
Chapter 3: crawling, rendering, and indexing
The whole content of this chapter is to make it super easy for search engines to find and index your entire site.
In this chapter, I will show you how to find and fix crawl errors. And how to send search engine spiders to deep pages on your site.
Found an index problem
Your first step is to find all the pages on your site that search engine spiders cannot crawl.
There are three ways to do this.
Override report
Your first stop should be the coverage report in Google Search Console.
This report lets you know whether Google cannot fully index or render the page you want to index.
Screaming Frog
There’s a reason why Screaming Frog is the most famous crawler in the world: it’s really great.
Therefore, once you have solved any problems in the coverage report, I recommend that you run a full crawl using Screaming Frog.
Semrush Site Audit
Semrush has a Site Audit tool.
What I like most about this feature is that you can get information about the overall technical SEO health of the site.
Site performance report.
And the HTML markup of your website.
Each of these three tools has its advantages and disadvantages. Therefore, if you run a large Web site with 10k + pages, I recommend that you use all three methods. In this way, nothing will fall from the crack.
Internal links to the Deep page
Most people have no problem indexing their home page.
It is the deep pages (several linked pages on the home page) that often cause problems.
Flattening structures usually prevent this problem in the first place. After all, your “deepest” page will only be 3-4 clicks on your home page.
Either way, if you have a specific deep page or a set of pages that you want to index, there is nothing better than the old-fashioned internal links to that page.
Especially if the page you link to has a lot of permissions and is being crawled all the time.
Use XML site map
In this mobile-first indexing and AMP era, does Google still need a XML sitemap to find the URL of your site?
Right.
In fact, Google representatives recently said that XML site maps are the “second most important source” for finding URL.
The first one? They didn’t say. But I assume external and internal links).
If you want to carefully check that your site map is working properly, please go to the site Map feature in Search Console.
This will show you the site map that Google sees for your site.
GSC “check”
Is the URL on your website not indexed?
Well, GSC’s check function can help you understand the truth of the matter.
Not only does it tell you why a page is not indexed…
But for indexed pages, you can see how Google renders the page.
In this way, you can carefully check whether Google can crawl 100% of the content on the page and index it.
Chapter 4: streamlined and duplicated content
If you write unique original content for each page on the site, you may not need to worry about repetitive content.
Then say:
Technically, duplicate content can occur on any website. Especially if your CMS creates multiple versions of the same page on different URL.
The same is true when content is scarce: for most sites, this is not a problem. But this may damage the overall ranking of your site. So it’s worth looking for and repairing.
In this chapter, I will show you how to proactively solve the problem of duplicate content and streamlined content on your site.
Use the SEO check tool to find duplicates
There are two tools that do a good job of finding duplicate content and streamlining content.
The first one is Raven Tools Site Auditor.
It scans your site for duplicate (or thin) content. And let you know which pages need to be updated.
The Semrush site Inspection tool also has a content quality section that shows whether your site has the same content on multiple different pages.
Then say:
These tools focus on repetitive content on your own website.
Duplicate content also covers pages that copy content from other sites.
To carefully check whether the content of your site is unique, I recommend using Copyscape’s “bulk search” feature.
You can upload the URL list here and see where the content is displayed on the network.
If you find a piece of text that appears on another site, search for the text in quotation marks.
If Google first displays your page in the results, they will assume that you are the original author of the page.
You can go now.
Note: if other people copy your content and put it on their site, it’s their duplicate content problem. Not yours. You only need to worry about the content on your site being copied (or super similar) to the content of other sites.
Noindex pages without unique content
Most websites have pages with repetitive content.
Never mind.
This becomes a problem when those duplicate content pages are indexed.
Solution? Add the “noindex” tag to these pages.
The noindex tag tells Google and other search engines not to index pages.
You can use the check URL feature in GSC to carefully check that your noindex tags are set correctly.
Copy and paste your URL, and then click TEST LIVE URL.
If Google is still indexing the page, you will see the “URL is available to Google” message. This means that your noindex tag is not set correctly.
However, if you see the “excluded by noindex tag” message, then the noindex tag is working.
(this is one of the few times you want to see a red error message in GSC ?)
Depending on your crawl budget, it may take days or weeks for Google to re-crawl pages that you don’t want to index.
Therefore, I recommend checking the Excluded tab in the coverage report to ensure that your unindexed pages have been removed from the index.
For example, some articles on the page have paged comments.
There are original blog posts on each comment page.
If these pages are indexed by Google, we will have duplicate content problems.
This is why we add a noindex tag to each of these pages.
Note: you can also completely prevent search engine spiders from crawling pages by blocking their respective crawlers in the robots.txt file.
Use the specification URL
Most pages with duplicate content should be tagged with no index. Or replace repetitive content with unique content.
But there is a third option: canonical URL.
The canonical URL is very suitable for pages with very similar content. There are subtle differences between pages.
For example, suppose you run an e-commerce site that sells hats.
You have a product page set up for cowboy hats.
Depending on how your site is set up, each size, color, and change may result in a different URL.
not good.
Fortunately, you can use canonical tags to let Google know that the original version of your product page is the “main” page. All the others are variants.
Chapter 5: page Speed
Improving your page speed is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can directly affect your site ranking.
This is not to say that a fast-loading site will put you on the home page of Google.
(you need a backlink)
But increasing the loading speed of the website can significantly reduce the natural traffic.
In this chapter, I’ll show you three simple ways to improve the loading speed of a Web site.
Reduce the size of the page
CDN . Cache. Delayed loading. Shrink the CSS.
I’m sure you’ve read these methods a thousand times before.
But I don’t see many people talking about the equally important page speed factor:
Page size.
In fact, when we conducted a large-scale page speed study, we found that the total page size was more related to load time than any other factor.
The main points here are:
When it comes to pagespeed, there is no free lunch.
You can compress images and cache your website.
However, if your pages are large, they will take a while to load.
This is the problem we are trying to solve. Because we use a large number of high-resolution images, our pages tend to be huge.
I consciously decided to put up with slower loading time. I’d rather have a slow, great-looking page than a fast page with grainy images.
Too many high-resolution pictures may affect the score of the page on Google PageSpeed Insights.
However, if improving the speed of your site is a top priority, then you want to do everything possible to reduce the total size of the page.
Note: if you are very concerned about Google PageSpeed Insights and want to get high marks, you can check out our previously released optimization tutorial.
Test the load time with and without CDN
One of the most surprising findings of our pagespeed study is that CDN is associated with shorter load times.
This may be because many CDN settings are incorrect.
Therefore, if your site uses CDN, I recommend that you test your site speed on webpagetest.org with CDN on or off.
Eliminate the third script
Each third script of the page increases the load time by an average of 34 milliseconds.
You may need some of these scripts (such as Google Analytics).
However, check your site’s script to see if there is anything you can get rid of that will never get hurt.
Chapter 6: other technical SEO techniques
Now is the time to provide some quick technical SEO tips.
In this chapter, we will introduce redirection, structured data, Hreflang, and so on.
Implement hreflang for international websites
Does your website have different versions of pages for different countries and languages?
If so, the hreflang tag can be a huge help.
What is the only problem with hreflang tags?
It’s hard to set. Google’s documentation on how to use it is not very clear either.
Input: Aleyda Solis’s Hreflang generator tool.
This tool makes it relatively easy to create hreflang tags for multiple countries, languages, and regions.
Check whether your website has dead links.
Having a bunch of dead links on your site won’t make or break your SEO.
In fact, Google even said that the broken link was “not a SEO problem”.
But what if you break the internal link?
That’s another story.
Broken internal links can make it harder for Googlebot to find and crawl pages on your site.
So I recommend a quarterly SEO check, including repairing broken links.
You can use almost any SEO checking tool, such as Semrush, to find damaged links to your website:
Or Screaming Frog.
Set up structured data
Do I think setting up Schema directly contributes to the SEO of your website?
No, no.
In fact, our search engine ranking factor study found no correlation between Schema and home page rankings.
Then say:
Use Schema to provide rich summaries for some of your pages.
And because rich feeds stand out in SERP they can significantly increase your natural click-through rate.
Verify your XML site map
If you run a large site, it is difficult to track all the pages in the site map.
In fact, many of the site maps I look at have pages with 404 and 301 status codes. Considering that the main goal of the site map is to show all the active pages to the search engine, you want 100% of the links in the site map to point to the active page.
Therefore, I recommend running your site map through Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator.
Just enter the site map from your site.
And check to see if any of your links are damaged or redirected.
Noindex tags and categories page
If your site is running on WordPress, I strongly recommend that you do not index category and tag pages.
(unless, of course, these pages generate a lot of traffic).
These pages usually don’t add much value to the user. They can cause duplicate content problems.
If you use Yoast, you can easily index these pages with a single click.
Check for mobile availability issu
It’s 2022. So I don’t need to tell you that your website should be optimized for mobile devices.
Then say:
Even websites that are super suitable for mobile devices can run into problems.
These problems are difficult to find unless users start sending you an email complaint.
That is, unless you use Google Search Console’s mobile availability report. If Google finds that a page on your site is not optimized for mobile users, they will notify you.
They may even provide you with the details of the page error.
In this way, you know what to fix.
Technical SEO case study
Let’s conclude this guide with a completely new set of technical SEO case studies.
Specifically, you will see how to improve their Google ranking in the following ways:
- Date structured data
- Internal link
- Frequently asked questions
- Best practices for website migration
Therefore, it is not too late, let’s go straight to the case study.
Case study # 1:Felix how to use internal links to increase natural traffic by 250%
When Felix Norton examines technical SEO issues on one of his client sites (an active recruitment market), one thing stands out:
They didn’t use any internal links! And the internal links to the site DID do not use keyword-rich anchor text.
At this time, the customer has been working in the agency of Felix for 3 months. Felix and his team have been posting a lot of high-quality content on their clients’ blogs. But traffic and rankings are stagnant.
Well, during that audit, Felix realized that none of the great stuff was connected. To make matters worse, the content is not linked to important product and service pages.
Just then, Felix decided to add internal links to their high-priority content fragments.
Product page.
And related content.
This resulted in a 250% increase in traffic within a week after adding these strategic internal links.
Case study # how 2:Salman uses date mode to double Google traffic on its pages
Salman Baig runs a technology review site called Voxel Reviews.
One of the most important keywords of Salman is “the best game laptop under the age of 500”.
This sounds like a long-tailed keyword. Because it is.
But it is a highly specific keyword with a high search intention. This means it is worthwhile for Salman to take the time to find a way to improve the rankings for the semester.
When he looked at the SERP of the keyword, he saw an opportunity. He can take advantage of the opportunity of technical SEO.
Specifically, he noticed that most of the pages on the first page had the current month and year in their title tags.
However, many of these pages do not actually update the page (or the “release” date in their HTML).
For example, this page adds the current month to its title tag, such as clockwork.
However, if you use the date range to search for the page’s URL…
… You can see the actual date that Google saved for this article:
This is the opportunity Salman sees:
Adding the current month to his title tag may help his natural click-through rate. But Google clearly ignored it.
But if Google can see that Salman’s page is legally updated, he may get a promotion.
To show Google that his page is actually up-to-date, he added a date at the top of the article.
He also updated his Schema to update the “datePublished” and “dateModified” dates.
This change helps Salman’s site to be selected by selected clips.
The selected clip, coupled with the improvement in the ranking of his target keywords, increased the number of visits to the page by more than 200%.
Case study # 3:Neil how to reverse catastrophic website migration
Only Way Online, the SEO arm of Neil Sheth, has taken over a new customer whose rankings have fallen completely.
As it turns out, the site migrated their site to the latest version of Magento.
They also decided to combine this migration with some changes to their sites, such as deleting the URL that gets search traffic, regardless of the impact on natural search.
In two months, the number of monthly visitors to the site has dropped from about 30000 to 3000.
When Neil conducted a comprehensive inspection of the SEO website to find out what the problem was, he found a number of technical performance SEO problems, such as:
- Pages that do not have internal links to them (orphaned pages)
- Normalize itself to a page without an index
- Page redirect to one page, then redirect to another page (redirect chain)
- Internal and external links are broken
- Site maps include pages that should not be indexed
- Optimize poor title and description tags
Within a few weeks of these technical SEO fixes, you can begin to see an increase in natural traffic.
In fact, natural traffic to the site increased by 228% from July to October 2019.
Case study # 4: how Bill uses FAQ mode to increase hits by 15.23%
Bill Widmer (Bill Widmer) runs a blog about RVs called The Wandering RV.
Bill’s most important page is this RV insurance guide:
Unfortunately, keywords like “RV insurance” are dominated by big brands such as Geico and Bankrate.com.
So the chances of Bill’s single blog ranking above these sites are slim.
At that time Bill realized that he didn’t have to surpass his big-brand competitors. He can use FAQ Schema to get more natural clicks.
So Bill added FAQ Schema to the FAQ section of his page, which helped him get a rich summary.
This change increased Google traffic on the page by 15.23%.
Write at the end
This is the whole content of my technical SEO guide.
Which tips in this guide would you like to try first? Will you focus on accelerating your website? Or maybe you want to find and fix dead links?
