Technical SEO: The Definitive Guide

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Important elements of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.

How Can You Improve Your Technical SEO?

Like I said, “Technical SEO” isn’t just crawling and indexing.

To improve your site’s technical optimization, you need to take into account:

• Javascript
• Robots meta tags
• XML sitemaps
• Site architecture
• URL structure
• Structured data
• Thin content
• Duplicate content
• Hreflang
• Canonical tags
• 404 pages
• 301 redirects

And I’m probably forgetting a few 🙂

Fortunately, I’m going to cover all of those things (and more) in the rest of this guide.

Use a Flat, Organized Site Structure

Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organized.

In general, you want a structure that’s “flat”. In other words: your site’s pages should all be only a few links away from one another.

Why is this important?

A flat structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl 100% of your site’s pages.

This isn’t a big deal for a blog or local pizza shop website. But for an ecommerce site with 250k product pages? A flat architecture is a BIG deal.

You also want your structure to be super organized.

In other words, you don’t want a site architecture like this:

This messy structure usually creates “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links pointing to them).

It also makes it hard to ID and fix indexing issues.

You can use the Semrush “Site Audit” feature to get a bird’s eye view of your site structure.

This is helpful. But it’s not super visual.

To get a more visual look at how your pages are linked together, check out Octopus.do.

It’s a free tool that gives you an interactive look at your site’s architecture.

Breadcrumbs Navigation

It’s no secret that breadcrumbs navigation is super SEO-friendly.

That’s because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to category and subpages on your site.

Which helps solidify your site architecture.

Not to mention the fact that Google has turned URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation in the SERPs.

So when it makes sense, I recommend using breadcrumbs navigation.

Spot Indexing Issues

Your first step is to find any pages on your site that search engine spiders have trouble crawling.

Here are 3 ways to do that.

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Page Indexing Report

Your first stop should be the “Page Indexing Report” in the Google Search Console.

This report lets you know if Google is unable to fully index or render pages that you want indexed.

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Screaming Frog

Screaming Frog is the world’s most famous crawler for a reason: it’s really, really good.

So once you’ve fixed any issues in the Coverage Report, I recommend running a full crawl with Screaming Frog.

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Semrush Site Audit

Semrush has a sneaky good SEO site audit tool.

What I like most about this feature is that you get info on your site’s overall technical SEO health.

Site performance report.

And issues with your site’s HTML tags.

Each of these 3 tools have their pros and cons. So if you run a large site with 10k+ pages, I recommend using all three of these approaches. That way, nothing falls through the cracks.

Use an XML Sitemap

In this age of mobile-first indexing and AMP does Google still need an XML sitemap to find your site’s URLs?

Yup.

In fact, a Google rep stated that XML sitemaps are the “second most important source” for finding URLs.

(The first? They didn’t say. But I’m assuming external and internal links).

If you want to double check that your sitemap is all good, head over to the “Sitemaps” feature in the Search Console.

This will show you the sitemap Google is seeing for your site.

Use an SEO Audit Tool to Find Duplicate Content

There are two tools that do a GREAT job at finding duplicate and thin content.

The first is the Raven Tools Site Auditor.

It scans your site for duplicate content (or thin content). And lets you know which pages need to be updated.

The Semrush site audit tool also has a “Content Quality” section that shows you if your site has the same content on several different pages.

That said:

These tools focus on duplicate content on your own website.

“Duplicate content” also covers pages that copy content from other sites.

To double-check that your site’s content is unique, I recommend Copyscape’s “Batch Search” feature.

Here’s where you upload a list of URLs and see where that content appears around the web.

If you find a snippet of text that shows up on another site, search for that text in quotes.

If Google shows your page first in the results, they consider you the original author of that page.

And you’re good to go.

Note: If other people copy your content and put it on their website, that’s their duplicate content problem. Not yours. You only need to worry about content on your site that’s copied (or super similar) to content from other websites.

Use Canonical URLs

Most pages that have duplicate content on them should get the ol’ no index tag added to them. Or have the duplicate content replaced with unique content.

But there’s a third option: canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are perfect for pages that have very similar content on them… with minor differences between pages.

For example, let’s say you run an ecommerce site that sells hats.

And you have a product page set up just for cowboy hats.

Depending on how your site is set up, every size, color and variation can result in different URLs.

Not good.

Fortunately, you can use the canonical tag to let Google know that the vanilla version of your product page is the “main” one. And all the others are variations.

Reduce Web Page Size

CDNs. Cache. Lazy loading. Minifying CSS.

I’m sure you’ve read about these approaches a thousand times before.

But I don’t see nearly as many people talk about a page speed factor that’s just as important:

Web page size.

In fact, when we ran our large-scale pagespeed study, we found that a page’s total size correlated with load times more than any other factor.

The takeaway here is this:

When it comes to pagespeed, there’s no free lunch.

You can compress images and cache the heck out of your site.

But if your pages are huge, then they’re going to take a while to load.

This is something we struggle with here at Backlinko. Because we use lots of high-res images, our pages tend to be ginormous.

I make the conscious decision to live with slower loading times. I rather have a slow, awesome-looking page vs. a fast page with grainy images.

Which does hurt our scores on Google PageSpeed Insights.

But if improving your site speed is a top priority, then you want to do whatever you can to slim down your page’s total size.

Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts

Each 3rd party script that a page has adds an average of 34ms to its load time.

Some of these scripts (like Google Analytics), you probably need.

But it never hurts to look over your site’s scripts to see if there’s any that you can get rid of.

Implement hreflang for International Websites

Does your site have different versions of your page for different countries and languages?

If so, the hreflang tag can be a HUGE help.

The only issue with the hreflang tag?

It’s tough to set up. And Google’s documentation on how to use it isn’t super clear.

Enter: Aleyda Solis’ Hreflang Generator Tool.

This tool makes it (relatively) easy to create an hreflang tag for multiple countries, languages and regions.

Set up Structured Data

Do I think that setting up Schema directly helps your site’s SEO?

No.

In fact, our search engine ranking factors study found no correlation between Schema and first page rankings.

That said:

Using Schema CAN give some of your pages Rich Snippets.

And because Rich Snippets stand out in the SERPs, they can dramatically improve your organic click through rate.

Noindex Tag and Category Pages

If your site runs on WordPress, I highly recommend noindexing category and tag pages.

(Unless, of course, those pages bring in lots of traffic).

These pages don’t usually add much value to users. And they can cause duplicate content issues.

If you use Yoast, you can easily noindex these pages with a single click.

Case Study #1
How Felix Used Internal Linking to Boost Organic Traffic By 250%

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When Felix Norton audited one of his clients’ websites (an event hiring marketplace) for technical SEO issues, one thing stood out:

They weren’t using any internal links! And the internal links the site DID have didn’t use keyword-rich anchor text.

At this point, this client had been with Felix’s agency for 3 months. Felix and his team had been publishing A TON of high-quality content on their client’s blog. But traffic and rankings were stagnant.

Well, during that audit, Felix realized that none of this awesome content was linked together. Even worse: the content didn’t link to important product and services pages.

That’s when Felix decided to add internal links to their high-priority content pieces.

Product pages.

And pieces of related content.

Which resulted in a 250% traffic boost within a week of adding these strategic internal links.

Case Study #3
How Neil Reversed a Disastrous Website Migration

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Neil Sheth’s SEO agency, Only Way Online, took on a new client who’s rankings had completely tanked.

As it turned out, the site migrated their website to the latest version of Magento.

They also decided to combine this migration with a handful of changes to their website (like removing URLs that were getting search traffic) without considering the impact on organic search.

The site went from about 30,000 monthly visitors to as low as 3,000 visitors a month in a span of 2 months.

And when Neil did a full SEO site audit to figure out what went wrong, he found a host of technical SEO issues like:

• Pages without internal links pointing to them (orphan pages)
• Pages that were canonicalizing themselves to noindex pages
• Pages redirecting to a page that is then redirected to another page (redirect chains)
• Broken internal and external links
• Sitemap including pages that should not be indexed
• Poorly-optimized title and description tags

And you can start to see an uptick in organic traffic in the weeks following these technical SEO fixes.

In fact, from July 2019 to October the site has increased organic traffic by 228%.