What is technical SEO? And why is it important?

Ben Davis

Although technical SEO is not as time consuming as ongoing optimisation such as link building, get it wrong and you can scupper the search performance of your website fairly quickly (indexing issues occur upstream of quality scoring).

In Econsultancy’s newly updated SEO Best Practice Guide, the analogy of a train is used – no matter what the carriages look like (on-page content), if the engine (technical SEO) doesn’t work properly, nobody will ride the train. 

The most appropriate time to consider technical SEO is during a website’s construction. If this doesn’t happen, lengthy and involved technical SEO audits may be needed to identify and fix problems, with possible periods of uncertainty as changes are made.

However, technical SEO is not just about site build; updates by search engines and changes in your own business direction or customer behaviour may necessitate change, too.

So, let’s get down to brass tacks, what actually is technical SEO?

Technical SEO considerations when creating and maintaining a website include the following.

Future-proofing the site architecture

As the website grows over time, the architecture has to be able to cope. Ideally, pages should not be buried too deeply (more than four levels down) within the site, which means planning a ‘horizontal’ site. This allows search engines to regularly crawl, cache and index pages.

Categorisation is a big part of site architecture in ecommerce, dividing a catalogue of products into categories and assigning URLs. Products may need to live in several categories, which brings further considerations such as canonicalization (see below).

Other decisions to be made include: 

  • the appropriate use of subdomains
  • the formatting of URLs
  • using the correct parameters for dynamic content (such as product filters)
  • the submission of sitemaps (including mobile and video) 
  • applying a ‘robots’ meta tag and using the robots.txt file (to give instructions to search crawlers, such as ‘do not index’)

site architecture

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the process of choosing a preferred URL when there are several choices for an individual page. Canonicalization issues often occur with the homepage (for example, if many different international URLs point to the homepage, or more simply if www.example.com and http://example.com do so).

Tags and redirects are used to solve these issues so that search engines do not understand such URLs to be evidence of duplicated content.

Pagination

Pagination, often used for ecommerce categories when displaying lots of products, can create crawler issues, duplicate content (similar to canonicalization) or simply ‘diluting’ the relevancy of your content by spreading it further.

Again, using the correct meta tags is the key to ranking effectively for paginated content.

Website cannibalisation

Namely, ensuring this doesn’t happen (similar content competing in search and leading to lower positions overall) by understanding what content you want to rank highest and determining the correct structure for internal linking, subdomains and international sites to enable this.

For more on this topic see our article about World Cup rankings and The Daily Mail’s architecture.

cannibalization

Redirection

Redirection is used to ensure users are served the most appropriate content for them, which could be contextualised for their location, language or device.

Speed optimisation

Site speed can be optimised in a variety of ways including content delivery networks, caching solutions, minifying code, asynchronous loading or using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML, which does all of these things and more.

HTML markup

HTML can be enhanced to give specific specific information to web crawlers. This markup is needed to have content formatted at its best.

Examples include:

  • Open Graph – telling Facebook how your content should appear
  • Twitter Cards
  • language tags
  • title, description and header tags
  • structured data markup e.g. to show rich snippets in search

Don’t forget to download our SEO Best Practice Guide!

That should give you some idea of what technical SEO entails. For lots more, including detailed how-to instructions, see Econsultancy’s new SEO Best Practice Guide, which also includes a range of other sections such as on-page optimisation, link building, measurement and more.

What is technical SEO? And why is it important?

Ben Davis

Although technical SEO is not as time consuming as ongoing optimisation such as link building, get it wrong and you can scupper the search performance of your website fairly quickly (indexing issues occur upstream of quality scoring).

In Econsultancy’s newly updated SEO Best Practice Guide, the analogy of a train is used – no matter what the carriages look like (on-page content), if the engine (technical SEO) doesn’t work properly, nobody will ride the train. 

The most appropriate time to consider technical SEO is during a website’s construction. If this doesn’t happen, lengthy and involved technical SEO audits may be needed to identify and fix problems, with possible periods of uncertainty as changes are made.

However, technical SEO is not just about site build; updates by search engines and changes in your own business direction or customer behaviour may necessitate change, too.

So, let’s get down to brass tacks, what actually is technical SEO?

Technical SEO considerations when creating and maintaining a website include the following.

Future-proofing the site architecture

As the website grows over time, the architecture has to be able to cope. Ideally, pages should not be buried too deeply (more than four levels down) within the site, which means planning a ‘horizontal’ site. This allows search engines to regularly crawl, cache and index pages.

Categorisation is a big part of site architecture in ecommerce, dividing a catalogue of products into categories and assigning URLs. Products may need to live in several categories, which brings further considerations such as canonicalization (see below).

Other decisions to be made include: 

  • the appropriate use of subdomains
  • the formatting of URLs
  • using the correct parameters for dynamic content (such as product filters)
  • the submission of sitemaps (including mobile and video) 
  • applying a ‘robots’ meta tag and using the robots.txt file (to give instructions to search crawlers, such as ‘do not index’)

site architecture

Canonicalization

Canonicalization is the process of choosing a preferred URL when there are several choices for an individual page. Canonicalization issues often occur with the homepage (for example, if many different international URLs point to the homepage, or more simply if www.example.com and http://example.com do so).

Tags and redirects are used to solve these issues so that search engines do not understand such URLs to be evidence of duplicated content.

Pagination

Pagination, often used for ecommerce categories when displaying lots of products, can create crawler issues, duplicate content (similar to canonicalization) or simply ‘diluting’ the relevancy of your content by spreading it further.

Again, using the correct meta tags is the key to ranking effectively for paginated content.

Website cannibalisation

Namely, ensuring this doesn’t happen (similar content competing in search and leading to lower positions overall) by understanding what content you want to rank highest and determining the correct structure for internal linking, subdomains and international sites to enable this.

For more on this topic see our article about World Cup rankings and The Daily Mail’s architecture.

cannibalization

Redirection

Redirection is used to ensure users are served the most appropriate content for them, which could be contextualised for their location, language or device.

Speed optimisation

Site speed can be optimised in a variety of ways including content delivery networks, caching solutions, minifying code, asynchronous loading or using Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) HTML, which does all of these things and more.

HTML markup

HTML can be enhanced to give specific specific information to web crawlers. This markup is needed to have content formatted at its best.

Examples include:

  • Open Graph – telling Facebook how your content should appear
  • Twitter Cards
  • language tags
  • title, description and header tags
  • structured data markup e.g. to show rich snippets in search

Don’t forget to download our SEO Best Practice Guide!

That should give you some idea of what technical SEO entails. For lots more, including detailed how-to instructions, see Econsultancy’s new SEO Best Practice Guide, which also includes a range of other sections such as on-page optimisation, link building, measurement and more.

All Things SEO Column Channel: SEO Google: Accelerated Mobile Pages / AMP Google: HTTPS & Secure Search Google: Mobile Google: SEO Search Engine Land SEO - Search Engine Optimization SEO: General Uncategorized

SEO priorities for the new year

David Freeman

It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-day of your SEO campaigns, but columnist David Freeman advises you to stop for a moment and take a look at the bigger picture.

The post SEO priorities for the new year appeared first on Search Engine Land.

Ple…

analytics

Audit This – Why It Matters Where You Put The Google Analytics Tracking Code

Sayf Sharif

This is the first in (hopefully, what will become) a series of posts, where I focus on various items in our massive diagnostic checklist that we use for auditing Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager implementations for problems and for finding opportunities.…

The post Audit This – Why It Matters Where You Put The Google Analytics Tracking Code appeared first on Seer Interactive.

A-Post to Marketing Land Channel: SEM Google Google AdSense Google: AdWords Search Engine Land Uncategorized

Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report: 1.7 billion ads removed, including fake news ads

Ginny Marvin

The company says efforts to crack down on payday loan ads, ads that look like system errors and “tabloid cloaking” ads were among those that led to an increase in removed ads in 2016.

The post Google’s 2016 Bad Ads Report: 1.7 billion ads removed, including fake news ads appeared first on…

Please visit Search Engine Land for the full article.