Introduction to Technical SEO
Optimising a website to rank highly in search engines involves many varying tasks. These tasks are categorised into on-page SEO off-page SEO, Local SEO and technical SEO.
Technical SEO is concerned with aspects that can keep a website from being indexed such as robots.txt files or noindex tags and also includes elements like
canonicalisation and SSL which can help a website rank higher. This page includes some detail on exactly what is involved
Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
Google and Bing both provide webmasters with ways to get more information on their site and tools to help with indexing. Search Console and Webmaster Tools are
both very useful as they provide a mountain of data about the search queries that a site is showing up for in search results as well as some essential tools.
Crawling & Indexing
Search engines work by sending out crawling bots which crawl from page to page on the internet gathering data and bringing it back to the search engine to be indexed and categorised. Then when a search is carried out the search engines algorithm will sort through the
indexed pages and decide which ones are presented first, and how they are displayed.
SEOs have a few different ways to control and influence indexing.
Robots.txt
A Robots.txt file can be added to a websites server to tell search engine crawlers what they are and aren't allowed to crawl. It's useful if you have folders that you don't want indexed or pages under construction which
aren't ready yet.
Robots Meta Tags
Robots Meta tags can serve the same purpose as a Robots.txt file. A Robots tag can be set by page to index or noindex. You can set a Robots tag or file to block or allow
specific crawlers.
XML Sitemaps
An XML sitemap is useful for telling search engines what pages you have on your site, in bulk. There are many XML sitemap generators online like this one or if you use a CMS like Wordpress there
are plugins that will create one for you.
You can submit an XML sitemap to Google through Google Search Console and to Bing through Bing Webmasters Tools.
I should note that you don't need an XML sitemap or a Robots.txt file to get a site indexed. If Google finds a link to a page on its own then it will index it, as long as there's nothing preventing it.
Inspect URL feature in Google Search Console
When a page has just been published this feature is useful for getting it indexed quickly. You can ask Google or Bing to fetch the page, check everything looks good and then submit it to the index.
Page Speed
Ensuring fast loading web pages.
Page speed has been confirmed by Google as a small ranking factor. It's also important to have fast pages to help with user engagement and conversion rates. There
are a number of ways to speed up web pages from compressing HTML and CSS files, using content delivery networks (CDN) for images, browser caching, judicial use of
compressed images, inline coding and sparse use of scripts in the header code. You can check how well a website performs with Google's PageSpeed Insights.
Duplicate Content, Canonicals and Redirects
One URL for one page
Duplication of URLs is one of those things that no one sets out to do when building a site but is pretty inevitable. Having duplicate URLs on a site can cause lots of
problems. When search engines crawl your site you want them to find and index the right URLs for pages which are linked up within the navigation. If they find
duplicate orphan URLs that can be a problem. Having varying HTTP and HTTPS versions of a page can be a problem too. If Google picks the wrong version it can
end up splitting the strength of a URL.
Canonical tags
A Canonical tag can be used to declare which version of a URL is the correct canonical version. This tag is declared within the head code section of a page. When search engines
crawl the page or duplicate pages they will see in the tag which URL should be given preference. This means that any links pointing at any of the duplicate URLs
will be attributed to the canonical URL, consolidating link strength.
301 Redirects
When updating URLs on a site or changing the navigation it's important to ensure that there are redirects added. Server redirects ensure that when a URL is changed then visited that users and
search engine crawlers will be redirected from the old version to the new. On Apache servers this is done by adding 301 or 302 redirects to the .htaccess file.
SSL - HTTPS
Secure version of HTTP
Secure Socket Layer (SSL) is a security protocol that allows a secure connection between server and browser. It allows a site to be served across HTTPS which can help users to trust a site and
also provides a ranking boost with Google.
Image optimisation
Fast quality images.
Page speed is a factor but so is customer satisfaction so images need to be compressed so that they load quickly and don't slow up the page as a whole. They also need
to be of a legible high enough quality.
Mobile friendliness
Ensuring your site works for mobile users.
Having a mobile friendly site has been necessary for years. For some sites the majority of traffic will come from users on mobile devices. To perform well for
mobile searches websites need to load fast and provide a good mobile experience. Google provides a tool to test pages as well as information on issues with Google Search Console.
Google actually crawls the mobile version of a page first in most cases so it's important for a mobile version of a site to present the content that you want to rank.
Experience
Page experience, Core web vitals and HTTPS.
Page experience is an important part of optimising a website. Google provides information on how a site is doing in Search Console. It will show you
information on how a site performs by highlighting errors with Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) of page renderings as well as Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) of a page in the browser.
HTTPS security of a website is also important. Pages should be served over HTTPS. It has been called a small ranking factor by Google and is pretty much
a standard feature of websites these days.
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