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. This tweetchat was administered by Himanshu Suri.

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

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

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 

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 treat

More 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)

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

A6. Check out our webinars
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

Serpstat

A6.2 Checklist to follow,
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

Himanshu Suri

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)

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,
but if you have to “do the work”,
you need to practice doing

Darth Autocrat (Lyndon NA)

A7. Let me summarize that for you,

  1. Start with technical #SEO basics. Follow the guides shared above
  2. Understand what is crawling and how it works
  3. Understand the concept of indexing
  4. Deep dive into website architecture
Himanshu Suri

A7. Doing it, talking to people you know, attending talks

Montse Cano

Jeremy Rivera

Jeremy Rivera started in SEO in 2007, working at Advanced Access a hosting company for Realtors. He came up from the support department, where people kept asking "How do I rank in Google" and found in the process of answering that question an entire career. He became SEO product manager of Homes.com, went "in-house" at Raven Tools in Nashville in 2013. He then worked at several agencies like Caddis, 2 The Top Design as an SEO manager and then launched a 5 year freelance SEO career. During that time he consulted for large enterprise sites like Smile Direct Club, Dr. Axe, HCA, Logan's Roadhouse and Captain D's while also helping literally hundreds of small business owners get found in search results. He has authored blog posts at Authority Labs, Raven Tools, Wix, Search Engine Land. He has been a speaker at many SEO conferences like Craft Content and been interviewed in numerous SEO focused podcasts.