This brand-new guide will teach you everything you need to know about:
This guide should prove to be extremely beneficial if you want to make certain that your technical SEO is up to date and effective at the same time.
Technical SEO Fundamentals are important to understand.Let’s get things started with a chapter on the fundamentals.
In this chapter, I’ll go over why technical SEO is still extremely important in 2022, and how you can improve your rankings.As part of this demonstration, I’ll show you what is (and is not) considered “technical SEO.”
Let’s get started.
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website complies with the technical requirements of modern search engines in order to achieve higher organic search engine ranking positions. Search engine optimization (SEO) technical elements include crawling, indexing, rendering, and web site architecture.
Having the best website and the best content is possible.
What happens, however, if your technical SEO is messed up?
If this is the case, you will not be ranked.
It is absolutely essential that Google and other search engines are able to find and crawl your website’s pages, as well as render and index the content on those pages.
Search engines must be able to find, crawl, render, and index the pages on your website in order for them to be useful.
However, this is only the tip of the iceberg. Even if Google does index all of the content on your website, this does not imply that your work is finished.
For example, in order for your site to be fully optimised for technical SEO, your site’s pages must be secure, mobile-friendly, free of duplicate content, fast-loading… and a thousand other factors that contribute to technical optimization.
That is not to say that your technical SEO must be flawless in order to rank well. It doesn’t work like that.
However, the more accessible your content is to Google, the better chance you have of ranking high in search results.
As previously stated, “technical SEO” encompasses more than just crawling and indexing.
In order to improve the technical optimization of your website, you must consider the following factors:
And I’m sure I’m forgetting a few things.
Fortunately, I’ll go over all of these topics (and more) in greater detail throughout the rest of this guide.
Structure and navigation of the website
In my opinion, the structure of your website is the “first step” in any technical SEO campaign.
(Yes, it is even more important than crawling and indexing.)
To summarise, having a strong structure makes every other technical SEO task MUCH easier to complete successfully.
With that said, let’s get into the specifics of the procedure.
The way all of the pages on your website are organised is referred to as the site structure.
In general, you want a “flat” structure for your structure. To put it another way, the pages on your website should all be only a few clicks away from one another.
Search engines such as Google and other search engines will have an easier time crawling your entire site if it has a flat structure.
Because of its flat structure, Google and other search engines have an easier time crawling your site.
This isn’t a big deal if you’re running a blog or a website for a local pizza shop. But what if you have a 250k product page ecommerce website? A flat architectural design is a significant achievement.
In addition, you want your structure to be extremely well organised.
In other words, you don’t want a website structure that looks like this:
Structure of the website is inadequate.
“Orphan pages” are frequently created as a result of this jumbled structure (pages without any internal links pointing to them).
Pages that are no longer in use
It also makes it more difficult to identify and correct indexing problems.
If you want to get a bird’s eye view of your site structure, you can use the Ahrefs “Site Audit” feature to do so.
Site audit from the perspective of Ahrefs
This is extremely beneficial. However, it is not particularly visually appealing.
Visual Site Mapper can be used to get a more visual representation of how your pages are connected to one another.
It’s a free tool that allows you to take an interactive look at the architecture of your website.
There is no need to overthink the structure of your URLs. This is especially true if you operate a small website (like a blog).
After all is said and done, you want your URLs to have a consistent and logical structure. The fact that they can see where they are on your site actually helps users understand “where” they are.
Additionally, categorising your pages under different categories provides Google with additional context about each page within each category.
Provide Google with additional information about each page.
Example: The pages on our SEO Marketing Hub all include the “/hub/seo” subfolder to inform Google that all of the pages on our SEO Marketing Hub are part of the “SEO Marketing Hub” category of pages.
.Structure of the SEO Marketing Hub
This appears to be effective. If you search for “SEO Marketing Hub,” you’ll notice that Google includes sitelinks in the search results, which is a good thing.
Sitelinks are an important part of SEO marketing.
As you might expect, all of the pages that are linked to from these sitelinks are located within the hub as well.
No one can dispute the fact that the use of breadcrumbs navigation is extremely SEO-friendly.
This is due to the fact that breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to your site’s categories and subpages.
Breadcrumbs are links that are automatically added to your website.
This contributes to the solidification of your website’s architecture.
Furthermore, Google has transformed URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation in the search engine results pages (SERPs).
URLs in the style of a breadcrumb in Google search results
As a result, I recommend that you use breadcrumbs navigation when it makes sense.
Crawling, rendering, and indexing are all types of search engine optimization.
Crawling, rendering, and indexing are all performed.
Using this chapter, you will learn how to make it incredibly simple for search engines to find and index your entire website.
The following chapters will teach you how to identify and correct crawl errors… as well as how to direct search engine spiders to the most important pages on your website.
The first step is to identify any pages on your site that are having difficulty being crawled by search engine spiders.
Here are three different approaches to accomplishing this.
The “Coverage Report” in the Google Search Console should be the first place you should look.
This report informs you if Google is unable to fully index or render pages that you wish to be indexed due to technical difficulties.
A report on Google Search Console’s coverage is available here.
Screaming Frog is the most well-known crawler in the world for a good reason: it’s extremely effective.
Following the resolution of any issues identified in the Coverage Report, I recommend performing a full crawl with Screaming Frog.
Crawl with the Screaming Frog
Ahrefs has a sneakily good SEO site audit tool that you should check out.
A website auditing tool such as Ahrefs
What I appreciate most about this feature is that it provides information on the overall technical SEO health of your site.
Health score for Ahrefs’s site audit
Overall site performance in terms of page loading speed
Ahrefs – Overall Effectiveness
In addition, there are issues with the HTML tags on your website.
Ahrefs are HTML tags that point to other websites
Each of these three tools has its own set of advantages and disadvantages. As a result, if you have a large site with more than 10,000 pages, I recommend that you use all three of these approaches. Nothing will fall through the cracks in this manner.
The vast majority of people have no trouble getting their homepage indexed.
Deep pages (pages that are several links away from the homepage) are the ones that are most likely to cause issues.
Deep pages: Several links from the homepage lead to additional pages.
A flat architecture, on the other hand, usually prevents this problem from occurring in the first place. After all, your “deepest” page will only be three or four clicks away from your homepage when you use this method.
No matter which method you use, if there is a specific deep page or set of pages that you want indexed, nothing beats a good old-fashioned internal link to that specific page or set of pages.
Internal links to important pages on authority websites are provided.
The situation is particularly critical if the page from which you’re linking is highly authoritative and frequently crawled
Is an XML sitemap still required for Google to find the URLs on your website in this day and age of mobile-first indexing and AMP?
Yup.
In fact, a Google representative recently stated that XML sitemaps are the “second most important source” for locating URLs on the internet.
Websites like Google: XML Sitemaps are the second most important source of traffic.
There was no mention of the first link, but I’m assuming it was an external and internal link.)
The “Sitemaps” feature in the Search Console can be used to double-check that your sitemap is up to date and complete.
Sitemaps are a feature of Google Search Console.
This will display the sitemap that Google is currently displaying for your website.
Sitemaps are available on the Google Search Console.
Is there a URL on your website that is not being indexed?
The GSC’s Inspect feature, on the other hand, can assist you in getting to the bottom of things.
However, it will also inform you as to why a particular page is not being indexed
However, for pages that have been indexed by Google, you can see how the page is rendered
This way, you can double-check that Google is able to crawl and index the entirety of the content on that page, if necessary
If you write unique, original content for each and every page on your website, you should not have to worry about duplicate content on your website.
Having said that:
And in this chapter, I’ll show you how to prevent duplicate and thin content issues on your website in the first place, before they occur.
Finding duplicate and thin content is a difficult task, but there are two tools that are extremely effective.
It looks for duplicate content on your website (or thin content). Additionally, it informs you of which pages need to be updated.
Copying and Pasting Content with Raven Tools
An additional section of the Ahrefs site audit tool is titled “Content Quality,” which indicates whether the same content is repeated on multiple pages of your website.
These tools are specifically designed to detect duplicate content on your own website.
Pages that copy content from other websites are included under the category of “duplicate content.”
I recommend using Copyscape’s “Batch Search” feature to double-check that the content on your website is original.
In this section, you can upload a list of URLs and see where that content appears throughout the internet.
Search for a portion of text that appears on another website by putting the text in quotation marks.
If Google displays your page as the first result in the search results, it is assumed that you are the original author of that page.
Look for text snippets of interest.
After that, you’re good to go.
Please keep in mind that if other people copy your content and post it on their website, they have a problem with duplicate content. It’s not yours. Content on your website that has been copied (or is extremely similar) to content on other websites is the only thing you need to be concerned about.
The majority of websites will have pages that contain some duplicate content.
And that’s fine with me.When those duplicate content pages are indexed, the situation becomes more complicated.
Add the “noindex” tag to the pages that you don’t want to be found.
The noindex tag instructs Google and other search engines that the page should not be indexed.
The noindex tag is used to prevent search engines from indexing a page.
If you are using the GSC, you can double-check that your noindex tag is correctly configured by using the “Inspect URL feature.”
Fill in the blanks with your URL and click “Test Live URL.”
If Google is still indexing the page, you will see a message stating that the “URL is available to Google.” This indicates that your noindex tag has not been properly configured.
The URL for Google Search Console is now available.
However, if you receive a “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag’ message, this indicates that the noindex tag is performing its function.
(This is one of the few instances in which it is desirable to see a red error message in the GSC.)
It may take several days or weeks for Google to re-crawl the pages you don’t want indexed, depending on your crawl budget.
As a result, I recommend that you check the “Excluded” tab in the Coverage report to ensure that your noindexed pages are being removed from the search index.
Certain posts at Gordon Melling, for example, have comments that are paginated. In addition, the original blog post is linked to from every single comment page.
Gordon Melling – Comments pages contain links to the original post.If those pages were to be indexed by Google, we’d have a slew of duplicate content problems on our hands. To prevent search engines from indexing those pages, we add a noindex tag to every single one of them.
Keep in mind that you can also prevent search engine spiders from crawling the page entirely by excluding each of their individual crawlers from the robots.txt file.
It is recommended that the no index tag be added to the majority of pages that have duplicate content on them. Alternatively, the duplicate content can be replaced with new content.However, there is a third alternative: canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are ideal for pages that have very similar content on them… with only minor differences between the pages in the URL structure.
Consider the following scenario: you run an ecommerce site that sells hats.
In addition, you have a product page dedicated solely to cowboy hats.
Page devoted to the product
Because every size, colour, and variation can result in a different URL, it is important to understand how your site is configured.
Every size, colour, and variation has a unique URL address.This is not good.
However, you can use the canonical tag to inform Google that the vanilla version of your product page is the “main” version of your product page. And all of the others are variations on that theme.
Use the canonical tag to identify your website.
The optimization of your pagespeed is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can have a direct impact on your site’s search engine optimization rankings.
That is not to say that having a website that loads quickly will automatically propulse you to the top of Google’s first page.(You’ll need backlinks to accomplish this.)
However, increasing the speed with which your site loads can have a significant impact on your organic traffic.
And in this chapter, I’ll show you three simple techniques for increasing the speed with which your website loads
CDNs. Cache. Loading slowly. CSS minification is important.
I’m sure you’ve heard or read about these strategies a thousand times already.
There is one page speed factor that is equally important that I do not see discussed nearly as much: page load time.
In fact, when we conducted our large-scale pagespeed study, we discovered that the total size of a page was more closely associated with load times than any other factor.
Factors that have an impact on how quickly a desktop or mobile application can be fully loaded
The key takeaway from this is as follows:
However, if your pages are large in size, it will take a long time for them to load.This is something with which we at Gordon Melling have difficulty. Because we use a large number of high-resolution images, our pages tend to be extremely largeI’ve made the conscious decision to accept slower loading times in order to save time. When given the choice, I would rather have a slow, awesome-looking page rather than a fast page with grainy images.
This has a negative impact on our Google PageSpeed Insights scores.
Google Page Speed Insights provides a poor rating.
If, on the other hand, increasing the speed of your site is a top priority, you should do everything you can to reduce the overall size of your page.
One of the most unexpected findings from our pagespeed study was that content delivery networks (CDNs) were associated with slower load times.
The use of a CDN is associated with slower desktop page loading times.
This is most likely due to the fact that many CDNs are not configured correctly.
As a result, if your site makes use of a content delivery network (CDN), I recommend testing your site’s speed on webpagetest.org with the CDN turned on or off.
Each third-party script that is included on a page increases the load time by an average of 34 milliseconds.
The use of third-party scripts has a negative impact on page load times.
Some of these scripts (such as Google Analytics) are almost certainly required.
However, it never hurts to take a look at your website’s scripts to see if there are any that you can get rid of or deactivate.
Is it possible to access different versions of your page in different countries and languages on your website?
Versions for various countries and languages are available.If this is the case, the hreflang tag can be of tremendous assistance.
The only problem with the hreflang tag is that it is not case sensitive.
It’s a pain to get everything set up. Furthermore, Google’s documentation on how to use it is not particularly clear.
Enter the Hreflang Generator Tool, created by Aleyda Solis.
When you are creating a hreflang tag for multiple countries, languages, and regions, this tool makes the process (relatively) simple.
Having a slew of broken links on your website will not make or break your SEO efforts.To the point where Google has stated that broken links are “not an SEO problem,”
What if you have broken internal links, on the other hand? That’s a different storey.
Broken internal links can make it more difficult for Googlebot to find and crawl the pages on your website. Incomplete or broken links prevent Googlebot from crawling the pages of a website.
As a result, I recommend performing a quarterly SEO audit that includes the correction of broken links.
Broken links on your website can be discovered using virtually any SEO audit tool, such as : SEMrush,Ahrefs Alternatively, Screaming Frog.
As you can see, I am not experiencing any difficulties. What can I say? I’m stumped. I’m a pro at search engine optimization.
The year is 2022. As a result, I don’t have to tell you that your website should be mobile-friendly.
Havng said that:
Even websites that are extremely mobile-friendly can experience problems.Furthermore, unless users begin to email you with complaints, it can be difficult to identify problems. That is, unless you use the Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report to determine your mobile-friendliness.
If Google discovers that a page on your site isn’t optimised for mobile users, they’ll notify you of the problem.If your website is not optimised for Google, Google will notify you.
There are even specifics about what is wrong with the page that are given to you.
If you have a large website, it can be difficult to keep track of all of the pages listed in your sitemap. In fact, many of the sitemaps that I examine contain pages that have 404 and 301 status codes on them. Given that the primary goal of your sitemap is to provide search engines with a complete list of all of your live pages, you want all of the links in your sitemap to point to live pages as much as possible.
As a result, I recommend that you submit your sitemap to the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator. Simply upload a sitemap from your website.
iPullRank is a sitemap validator that is free to use.
Also, check to see if any of your links are broken or redirecting to another page.
Errors in iPullRank results are displayed
they are pages that are not indexed by search engines.If your website is powered by WordPress, I strongly advise you to noindex your category and tag pages.(Unless, of course, those pages receive a significant amount of traffic.)
These pages are rarely useful to users because they do not provide much information. Furthermore, they can result in duplicate content issues.
If you are using the Yoast SEO plugin, you can easily noindex these pages with a single click.
Do I believe that implementing Schema will have a direct impact on your website’s SEO? No, in fact, according to our research into search engine ranking factors, there is no correlation between Schema and first page rankings on Google.
Having said that:
Rich Snippets can be generated for some of your pages if you use Schema.
Furthermore, because Rich Snippets stand out in the SERPs, they have the potential to significantly increase your organic click through rate.Rich snippets are more visible in search results.
