What is “technical SEO”? It’s any change or process focused on your site’s code, load speed, infrastructure or display that’s done to impact your site’s ability to be crawled, indexed, accessed and ranked appropriately and efficiently as possible.
Why should you optimize your site technically?
A1: If there are technical problems displaying or rendering your site, crawling it, or indexing it… ranking the site pages may be problematic to impossible, depending on the technical SEO issue. Some problems are annoyances, others much more serious
Boyd Lake SEO
Part of “Technical SEO” is the foundation for everything else. Get Crawler access/indexing wrong, and it doesn’t matter how well optimised your content is, it’s not going to rank! For bigger sites, it’s also efficiency/effectivity.
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A1. Search engines need to be able to discover, crawl, render and index the pages on your website.
You can have the best of the content for your website but if your technical SEO is messed up, then you are not going to rank.
Himanshu Suri
What are the characteristics of a technically optimized website?
In general, a technically optimised site will be “efficient”. It won’t waste crawls. It won’t waste bandwidth. It won’t be slow to load. It won’t be slow to use. It won’t confuse users/bots with duplicates. It won’t leave important content uncrawled/unindexed
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA
A2 – Characteristics of a technically optimized website * it’s secure * it’s accessible and easily navigable * it’s crawlable for search engines * It doesn’t contain duplicate content
Olena Prokhoda
A2: since the majority are going to talk about speed and security which are the general obvious. Allow me talk about the inability of having dead links and duplicate content
Avast Zumac
How can you find Technical SEO errors?
Google Search Console is a solid starting place. Get insights straight from G regarding crawling/indexing issues. Dead URLs, pages that can’t be crawled/indexed, poor load performance etc. Bing and Yandex have similar. And of course, industry tools 😀
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A3: A good crawler can find most of the technical problems you’ll need to fix. I like
@screamingfrog. Google provides lots of site crawlability info in GSC. SEO platforms like
@SEMrush & @ahrefs do a good job of this too. For Lookup tools –@MXToolBox is one I use. #serpstat_chat
Boyd Lake SEO
A3 – How to find Technical SEO issues 1 Make a list of the most common and crucial technical issues. Then check every issue step by step 2 Use SEO tools to conduct an SEO Audit. They usually detect all crucial issues 3 Hire a Technical SEO Specialist to help you #serpstat_chat
Olena Prokhoda
What Technical SEO techniques/approaches do you consider the most effective?
A4. Checking and fixing crawl errors in GSC along with broken links on your site are the easiest catch while weekly/monthly audits along with a super-fast mobile friendly website do weigh in heavily when you want to be good in the eyes of search engines.
Himanshu Suri
A4: Put your website in Internet Exploder. If it works, you’ll be all clear. Because if it works here, it works anywhere. lol The most technical advice I can give: don’t stop learning. Every day brings something new. #serpstat_chat
Damian Schmidt
1) Allow: /
2) Index Follow
Those 2 work a treatMore seriously …
Massive fan of PreConnect/PreLoad (as headers!).
Auto canonicalization.
Load priorities (embed in Head/bottom of body if vital, inline if early UX, then load CSS in head before JS etc.)
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
What tools, Chrome Extensions, Applications, and Plugins do you use for Technical SEO?
A5. Largely … the browser. Doesn’t matter what tools I queue the site up in, I’m in the site as a user, and the code as a designer/dev within minutes. (I usually find the major issues manually, before the tools come back :D) And GSC/Bing.
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
A5: Google Analytics. #serpstat_chat
Avast Zumac
A5. @sitebulb , @ProtonPrivacy, @semrush Search Lab are some tools I use #serpstat_chat
Montse Cano
Do you have any useful resources on the topic: checklists, or guides to share?
A6. Check out our webinars
Serpstat
How to boost your SEO by using Schema markup https://youtu.be/UZNEIhn-DYA
Website Performance: How You Can Measure and Boost It https://youtu.be/Teln_tjx0GM
How to Carry Out In-Depth Technical SEO Audit https://youtu.be/kTz16dIP17s
A6.2 Checklist to follow,
Himanshu Suri
Optimize the page experience
Look for any crawl errors
Fix broken links
Get rid of any duplicate or thin content
Migrate to HTTPS
Make sure your URLs have a clean structure
Optimized XML sitemap
No. I do a fair bit of work through 3rd parties, and found my stuff getting used … so I’m a tad hesitant to publish things (I really ought to though).
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
What is the best way to learn technical SEO?
By doing.
As far as I’m concerned – as it’s so broad (server/CDN, Platform/scripting, Markup/Styling, Crawling/Indexing etc.),
you cannot really “learn” it passively.Tools can do the audit for you,
Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)
but if you have to “do the work”,
you need to practice doing
A7. Let me summarize that for you,
Himanshu Suri
- Start with technical #SEO basics. Follow the guides shared above
- Understand what is crawling and how it works
- Understand the concept of indexing
- Deep dive into website architecture
A7. Doing it, talking to people you know, attending talks
Montse Cano