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What is Technical SEO?

  • By Steve Founder of PageDart

Is SEO an art or a science?

One of the reasons for this debate is that many SEO tasks are difficult to measure. SEOs perform keyword research and link building. We know that these strategies help content rank, but there is no guarantee.

Web developers, architects, and DevOps look at these tasks and see them as the job of marketing. Not something they need to worry about. They are not technical.

Yet, things are changing. Search engine algorithms are becoming more complex with 200+ different ranking factors. Many of which are technical.

This is Technical SEO.

Tackling them is a team effort with SEOs, webmasters and developers working together.

In this article, we are going to cover Technical SEO and list some resources for you to learn more.

Why is Technical SEO Important Now?

Technical SEO affects your search engine ranking. A simple misconfiguration of your robots.txt file can stop your site from showing in search. The steaks are high.

Google keeps adding technical ranking factors. This makes Technical SEO more important than ever. But, What is Technical SEO? Here are some of the technical ranking factors:

And more…

These tasks need a deep technical understanding of how the web works. It is no longer SEOs alone that need to understand SEO. We need SEOs, webmasters, web developers, architects and DevOps working together.

Tackling technical issues as a multidisciplinary team.

Technical SEO Tasks

The goal of Technical SEO is to increase the efficiency, and speed of your site. This is so that web crawlers such as GoogleBot can crawl your site without any technical issues. When GoogleBot finds problems then either:

  • Your page will not appear in search results
  • Google will move your site down the rankings as it offers users poor experience.

Improving the Technical SEO of your website will allow Google to crawl your site. Which allows them to index the content. It is also a clear sign of a healthy site. Google likes healthy sites as it will give Google users a great experience. Making them come back to Google next time.

That is the ultimate goal of Technical SEO.

Let's look at some of the common Technical SEO tasks:

  • Improving the page speed of a website by optimizing images, CSS and JavaScript. Using CDNs to enable caching and compression. Monitoring page speed using tools such as Lighthouse, WebPageTest.org and PageSpeed Insights.

  • Ensure that web crawlers can crawl a site by optimizing the robots.txt and sitemaps. Integrating with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Logging when bots crawl your site using log files.

  • Performing a Technical SEO audit to identify areas of the site that need improving

Questions Technical SEO Addresses

There are many Technical SEO tasks as the subject is very broad. Here are some questions you can answer by focusing on the Technical SEO of a website:

How do web crawlers work?

As part of Technical SEO, you must have a good understanding of how web crawlers or Bots work. With this knowledge, you can fix issues when crawlers are unable to visit your site. Going further you can start to optimize your site to be more efficient.

How to Perform a Technical SEO audit?

Here is a great free resource that covers performing a Technical SEO Audit. It provides a checklist of Technical SEO tasks that can give you an idea of the health of your site.

How to improve page speed?

Improving page speed is a huge task. It starts with an audit, I have covered in-depth some of the performance issues you can look to improve on your site. My top tip is to start with images.

How to fix errors on Google Search Console

Many errors can happen when Googlebot tries to crawl your site. Here are some of the common ones:

There are many more.

Now you have a good understanding of what Technical SEO is. Let's look at some resources that you can use to learn more.

Books

There are unfortunately very few books on the subject of Technical SEO. Many books touch on the subject by dedicating a chapter. Yet, they don't go in-depth enough. Here are some of my recommendations for further reading.

The Art of SEO

The book “The Art of SEO” has a chapter titled “Developing an SEO-Friendly Website”. The authors touch on many Technical SEO improvements, such as:

  • Making Your Site Accessible to Search Engines
  • Creating an Optimal Information Architecture
  • Root Domains, Subdomains, and Microsites
  • Optimization of Domain Names/URLs
  • Mobile Friendliness
  • Duplicate Content Issues
  • Controlling Content with Cookies and Session IDs
  • Content Delivery and Search Spider Control
  • Redirects
  • Content Management System Issues
  • Best Practices for Multilanguage/Country Targeting
  • Semantic Search
  • Schema.org

Web Performance in Action

This last book Web Performance in Action is a great deep dive into improving the page speed of your site. There is real technical detail which goes into subjects such as:

  • Optimizing CSS, Javascript and Fonts
  • Making Images Responsive
  • Asset Delivery
  • HTTP/2
  • Performance Monitoring Tools

Using WebPageTest

My next recommendation is Using WebPageTest. This book is a deep dive into how to use WebPageTest.org. The website allows you to run performance tests and the book helps explain the results. This is a great book if you are new to WebPageTest as it helps to make sense of the charts and numbers.

SEO Warrior

The last book SEO Warrior also covers many areas of SEO. It does a good job of picking out some of the technical “traps” that your site may fall into. It covers Technical SEO such as:

  • Sitemaps
  • Robots.txt
  • Web Performance
  • Javascript
  • Web Spiders
  • Website Accessibility

Courses

There are a few online courses available. At present the best one is free and offered by SEMRush:

  • SEMRush has a dedicated free course for Technical SEO that is worth checking out. It covers many of the technical aspects including web performance. This is the course to beat at the moment.

Once you have completed the above course if you want more then take a look at the following courses.

Online Communities

There are some great online communities for getting help with Technical SEO. Here are some to check out:

  • BigSEO is a slack group with a dedicated Technical SEO channel. There is a good mix of SEOs, webmasters and developers and this is one of my favorite communities. You can find me there.
  • WebPageTest Forums is for help and feedback on web performance. If you have trouble understanding the test results then this is the place to seek help.
  • Google Webmaster Group is a great place for any issues you are having with Googlebot and your site
  • JavaScript Sites in Search. This group is to help people trying to rank JavaScript sites on Google.
  • Online Geniuses is a large slack group with many channels. One of the most popular is #SEO and again this has a good mix of disciplines and a helpful community

Tools

There are many tools to help with Technical SEO. Here are some of the most useful:

Crawlers

These tools will crawl your website and discover Technical SEO issues:

  • Screaming Frog - An application that will crawl a site and perform an audit. There is a free and paid tier.
  • DeepCrawl - is an online version of Screaming Frog. Giving very in-depth Technical SEO information about a site.
  • OnCrawl - Is a paid-for product that is a crawler and cloud-based log analysis. This tool can help track when bots visit the site and how often.
  • Botify - Also paid, Botify is a cloud-based crawler with log analysis similar to OnCrawl.

Images

Image compression tools make images smaller in file size without losing quality. This makes them faster to download.

  • Compressor - Image compression which reduces image file sizes for free
  • Squoosh - is an open-source project from Google that can compress an image for free

Google's Tools

Google offers many free tools that are very useful when diagnosing issues:

  • Google Search Console - This allows you to track any errors that Google is finding when crawling your site.
  • Google Structured Data Tester - Allows you to test the schema.org structured data on your site for errors.
  • Google Mobile Friendly Tester - Test to make sure your page is displaying on mobile devices.
  • Lighthouse - A web page audit tool that has audits for performance, SEO and Accessibility
  • Pagespeed Insights - A tool to perform Lighthouse audits. If you have a popular site then it will show you performance data from real users as well.

Page Speed

These tools will track your Page Speed overtime. This is useful to make sure that your site is getting faster, not slower:

  • Web Page Speed Test - In-depth page performance analysis tool for free
  • GTmetrix - is a paid-for service that
  • Rich Link Preview Test how an URL looks in different social media
  • Yellow Lab Tools - Free tool to show the page speed and any front-end issues your site may have.
  • SpeedCurve - Paid service to track speed and suggest improvements to your site.

Security

Wrapping Up, What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is a very broad subject with many listed in this article as a reference.

The key takeaway is that Technical SEO deals with how web crawlers crawl your site. It is the job of Technical SEO to make this as efficient as possible.

Using the links provided you will be able to dive deeper into each area and improve them one by one.

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