What is Technical SEO? Beginner’s Guide

As an online business owner, you’ve probably asked this question many times — “What is technical SEO?” Or other questions like:

Why is technical SEO important?

How do you optimize for technical SEO?

This technical SEO guide will answer those questions and more, helping ensure that your digital marketing efforts have a better chance of being effective.

Note: Reliable Blogger is a top-notch blog dedicated to blogging and affiliate marketing. We provide easy to follow step by step guides, tutorials and software advice to help you jump-start and grow your profitable blog, learn how to make money blogging, and be a successful blogger. We are 100% supported by our readers (YOU).

Disclosure: Please note that some of the links on our blog are affiliate links (e.g. Bluehost). If you click on those affiliate links and purchase the products, we may earn a commission. It comes at no extra cost to you, but it supports us in running this blog and creating even more useful content free of charge to you.

What is Technical SEO

Technical SEO refers to the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like Google crawl and index your web pages without any problems. The main goal of technical SEO is to optimize the infrastructure of your website to improve its rankings in the search results.

It is called “technical” because it has nothing to do with the “actual” content of the website or website promotion. It encompasses any technical processes that can improve search visibility. These can include, among many others:

Website architecture
XML sitemaps
Website speed
Duplicate content
Security
User experience

Why is technical seo important?

Technical SEO is a very important step in SEO. Any technical SEO issues will negatively impact how users and search engines like Google appreciate your website.

If search engine crawlers cannot access your web pages, your content will not be in their index and will not appear for any searchers.

In addition, some technical SEO factors like mobile-friendliness, website load speed, and HTTPS are crucial Google ranking factors.

What is the difference between SEO and Technical SEO?

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical part of a website, while SEO is the process of optimizing all aspects of a website for search engines. Technical SEO is part of the SEO process.

When you dive into the world of SEO, you’ll discover that there are three main categories of SEO: On-site SEO, Off-site SEO and Technical SEO.

On-site SEO: It is related to the content on your website and how you can make it more relevant to what the user is searching.
Off-site SEO: Involves actions taken outside of your website yet can impact your search rankings. Examples include backlinks, social shares, and more.

As you can see, there are no clear boundaries between technical SEO, on-site SEO, and off-site SEO because they all have to work together for a fully optimized website.

Understanding Crawling and Indexing Process

To understand what technical SEO covers, you need to learn how search engines work and in particular about the crawling and indexing process.

How search engines work

The first step taken by search engines, (long before answering a search query), is the crawling process. During this process, search engines are looking for publicly available web pages to add to their index.

During the indexing process, information identified by the search engine bots is organized, sorted, and stored in their database (index) so that they are later accessed by the ranking algorithms to provide precise answers to the queries entered by users.

Some Technical SEO examples associated with these two processes include optimizing your robots.txt file and the noindex tag.

robots.txt

Robots.txt is a text file residing in the root directory of your website that gives instructions to search engines like Google as to which web pages they can crawl and add to their index.

The format of this file is very simple and in the majority of cases, you don’t have to make any changes to it.

What is important though is to check and ensure that there are no false blockings that will discourage search engine crawlers from indexing your site.

The noindex tag

Another way to control which web pages search engines can add to their index is the “noindex tag”. By placing the tag in the head section of a web page, you instruct search engines NOT to index the particular web page.

You can use this technique to ensure that crawlers will not index web pages that are not important to your website. Typical examples include ‘thank you’ pages, landing pages used for Facebook or Google Ads.

Technical SEO Best Practices

Follow these SEO best practices to fully optimize your website for technical SEO.

Choose Your Domain Format
Optimize Your URL Structure
Navigation and Website Structure
Structured Data Markup
Check Your Canonical URLs
Find And Fix Broken Links
Optimize Your 404 Page
XML Sitemap Optimization
SSL and HTTPS
Website Speed
Optimize For Core Web Vitals
Mobile-Friendly Website
Multilingual Websites

1. Choose Your Domain Format

One of the first technical SEO settings you need to configure is how you want your domain name to be accessible by search engines and users. By default, a website is accessible with www and without www in front of a domain name. For example, if your domain name is yourwebsite.com, your website can be accessed by:

https://www.yourwebsite.com
https://yourwebsite.com

While this is okay for users, it is confusing for search engines because they consider these as two different sites.

This means you may encounter indexing issues, duplicate content problems, and loss of page rank.

To solve this problem, you must decide which format you want to use and use it consistently throughout the lifetime of your site.

www or non-www

There is no SEO advantage to choosing one format over the other. It’s a matter of personal preference. We prefer to have www in front of our domain names because it seems more natural to us but there is nothing wrong if you decide to go with the non-www version.

If you’re on WordPress, make sure that both the WordPress Address and Site Address point to your preferred version.

To test that your website is configured correctly, open a browser window and type https://yourwebsite.com. If your preferred domain name is set to https://www.yourwebsite, then the page should automatically redirect to https://www.yourwebsite.com.

2. Optimize Your URL Structure

The next item in your technical SEO list is to revise the URL structure of your site. By URL structure, we mean the format of your URLs.

Best SEO practices dictate the following about URLs:

Use lowercase characters
Avoid using unnecessary characters or words
Make them short the descriptive
Use – to separate words in the URL
Use your target keywords in the URL without keyword stuffing

In general, once you define the format of your permanent link structure, the only thing you will have to do is to optimize your URLs when publishing new website content.

If you are using WordPress as your CMS, you will notice that when creating a new blog post, it takes your blog post title and creates the URL.

For example, if this is your blog post title “11 Technical SEO Best Practices for Beginners”, the URL generated by WordPress will be:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/11-technical-seo-best-practices-for-beginners.

This is not bad, but you can make it shorter like this:

https://www.yourwebsite.com/technical-seo – which is more targeted and easier to remember.

3. Navigation and Website Structure

The website structure is a very important SEO factor for many reasons. Users are more likely to stay on your website longer and find out what they want faster, and search engines can understand and index your website more easily.

Search engines does take into account the overall website structure when evaluating a particular web page and this is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Best practices indicate that you should use a hierarchical website structure. A site’s crawling starts from the homepage and crawlers follow links from the homepage to discover other web pages.

As a rule of thumb, make sure that each web page is accessible in less than 3 clicks from the homepage.

If have enough web pages around a specific topic area, create optimized category pages to group these related web pages.

Add Breadcrumb Menus

Another element that helps your technical SEO is breadcrumb menus.

A breadcrumb menu is a set of links at the top or bottom of a page that allows users to navigate to a previous category page or the home page of a website.

A breadcrumb menu serves two primary purposes: it helps users navigate a website easily without having to press the back button on their browsers, and it gives another hint to Google about the structure of a website.

Breadcrumbs are mentioned as an SEO task in various SEO Guides because they are highly recommended by search engines like Google.

If you don’t already have breadcrumbs enabled, ensure they are enabled on your site and have the proper schema.

4. Structured Data Markup

Structured data has gained more and more importance in the last few years because Google heavily uses it in Search Results.

What is structured data?

In simple terms, structured data is code you can add to your web pages that are visible to search engine crawlers only and helps them understand the context of your content. It’s a way to describe your data to search engines in a language they can understand.

What is the benefit of using structured data?

It can help you enhance the presentation of your listings in the SERPS and increase your CTR.

What are the uses of structured data?

There are many ways you can use structured data to describe your website content. The most popular are reviews, products, recipes, job postings, and more.

5. Check Your Canonical URLs

Every page of your site should have a canonical URL. This is defined by adding the canonical tag in the HEAD of your blog posts and pages like this:

What is a canonical URL?

It’s a simple way to tell search engines which version of a page to take into account when indexing your site. The concept is similar to the domain format where a single page is accessible through various URLs.

You can use the rel=”canonical” when you have pages with similar content for paging purposes and to avoid duplicate content issues.

As a general rule, you should specify a canonical URL for all your website pages.

The simplest way to check if your website provides a canonical URL is to visit any of your pages, right-click anywhere on the page, and select VIEW SOURCE. Search for rel=canonical and investigate the value.

If you cannot find any reference to canonical then you can either use a plugin to add this automatically (if you are on WordPress, you can use Yoast SEO) or hire a developer to make the necessary changes to your code.

As with other technical SEO techniques, once you set your site to output the canonical URL correctly, you don’t have to do anything else.

You can use the Inspection Tool (part of Google Search Console) to check your canonical URLs on Google.

6. Find And Fix Broken Links

As part of your technical SEO task, you must find and fix any broken links on your website. It’s bad for the user experience, and any backlinks pointing to missing pages lose their value.

You can find broken links using the Not Found (404) report in Google Search Console or a free tool like W3C Link Checker.

When you find your broken links, you have three options:

Redirect the missing URLs to a valid page
Fix them by changing the links to point to the correct page
Show a 404 (Not Found) page to users

7. Optimize Your 404 Page

A 404 page is shown to the users when the URL they visited does not exist on your site. Maybe the page was deleted, the URL was changed, or they mistyped the URL in their browsers.

Most modern CMS have optimized 404 pages by default, if not; you can easily make your 404 page SEO friendlier by using a plugin or editing your theme templates.

What is an optimized 404 page?

An optimized 404 page should:

Tell visitors in a friendly language that the page they are looking for is no longer available
Give them alternatives (suggest other related pages)
Have the same structure and navigation menus as your website
Make it easy to go back to the previous page, your homepage, or other important pages

How to check your 404 pages?

Testing how your 404 page looks is very easy, just open a new browser window and type a URL on your website that does not exist. What will be shown in the browser is your 404 page.

Don’t spend too much time optimizing your 404 pages. Just make sure that when a page is not found, it returns a custom 404 page.

8. XML Sitemap Optimization

One of the most important elements of technical SEO is XML sitemap optimization.

An XML Sitemap is an XML file listing all pages/posts on your site that you want the search engines to know about. Besides their title, it also includes the last updated date.

Search engines can use the XML sitemap as a guide when crawling your website.

The majority of website CMS have the sitemap functionality built-in and all you have to do is select which web pages you want to include in your sitemap.

How to Optimize Your XML Sitemap?

XML sitemap optimization is simple; only include in your sitemap the pages that are important for your website. In most cases, these are your categories, pages and posts.

Don’t include in your sitemap tag pages or other pages that have no original content on their own.

Make sure that your sitemap is automatically updated when a new page is published or when a page is updated.

9. SSL and HTTPS

As part of your technical SEO, you need to make sure that your site has an SSL installed and that it uses HTTPS. HTTPS is a known ranking signal and an additional way to establish trust with your users.

When you install an SSL on your server, your website can be accessed using HTTPS and not HTTP. This indicates that any information transferred between your site and server (such as usernames, personal data, passwords, etc) is encrypted.

If you don’t have SSL installed the first thing to do is to contact your web hosting provider and ask them to enable SSL on your hosting account then you need to follow a migration procedure to activate SSL on your website without losing your rankings. Adding an SSL is similar to migrating to a new domain name so you will have to do it correctly.

10. Website Speed

Another known ranking signal is website speed. Google is mentioning the importance of speed in all their SEO recommendations and from our research we can confirm that faster sites perform better than slower sites.

Tackling site speed is a technical issue and it requires making changes to your site and infrastructure to get good results.

Your starting point is to check your speed using Google page speed insights.

You’ll get recommendations on what you need to change to improve your website speed, but as we mentioned above, it’s a technical issue, and you may have to hire a developer to help you.

In general, what you can do to make your site load faster is the following:

Upgrade your server to use 64 bits operating system
Use asynchronous javascript loading
Use a Content Delivery Network (CDN)
Upgrade to the latest software versions for your CMS
Compress your images.
Optimize and minify your CSS and JS Files
Using a caching mechanism to serve cached pages to users
Minimize the use of plugins
Avoid adding too many scripts in the <head> of your site

11. Optimize For Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals is a set of metrics used by Google to evaluate the website speed. They are part of the page experience ranking system.

To provide a good user experience, websites should strive to achieve these core web vitals values:

Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – 0.1 or less
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) –2.5 sec or less
Interaction to Next Paint (INP) – 200 ms or less

To check your site’s core web vitals score, use the core web vitals report in Google Search Console. To get recommendations on how to improve your score, use the PageSpeed Insights report.

Again, this is another technical SEO task that can be handled with the help of a developer.

12. Mobile-Friendly Website

Having a mobile-friendly website is mandatory for two reasons:

The majority of your users are on mobile
With the introduction of the mobile-first index by Google, if you don’t have a fast, mobile-friendly site, your rankings will suffer.

Mobile-friendliness is part of technical SEO because once you have a mobile-friendly theme that is properly configured; you don’t have to deal with this again.

The first thing to do is check your site’s mobile-friendliness using Lighthouse, a Google tool available in the Google Chrome Browser.

Analyze the results and implement the recommendations until you reach the desired levels.

Besides taking care of these, there are several things you need to know about mobile SEO.

It is normal to have a lower conversion rate on mobile, but that does not mean you shouldn’t try optimizing your mobile website as much as possible.
Avoid using popups or intrusive interstitials on mobile.
Your mobile website should have the same content as your desktop website. With the introduction of the mobile-first index, Google ranks websites based on their mobile content, so any content you have on the desktop should also be available on mobile.
Your mobile site should load in less than 3 seconds.

If you already have a responsive site, then most probably you won’t have to worry about the mobile-first index, but if you have a separate mobile site on a subdomain or folder, then make sure that it has the same content as your desktop site.

13. Multilingual Websites

If you have content on your website in more than one language, then you need to use the hreflang attribute to give search engines more information about your website structure and content.

This will help them serve the right content to users and help you optimize your SEO by avoiding duplicate content and indexing issues.

It’s a highly technical SEO technique that can be configured with the help of a web developer.

Technical SEO Tools

To carry out the most important technical SEO tasks, you need the help of SEO tools.

Google Search Console – The most complete set of SEO tools is the Google Search Console, provided by Google. With the Google search console, you can submit a sitemap to Google, test your robots.txt file, and find and fix crawl errors.
Screaming Frog – You can use it to find broken links, review robots directives, discover issues with canonical URLs, and much more.
PageSpeed Insights – You can use it to evaluate your web page speed and core web vitals metrics.
Ahrefs and Semrush – use these SEO tools to perform a technical SEO audit of your website and get recommendations on fixing errors.

Learn More About Technical SEO

To continue learning about Technical SEO, read the following guide:

What is SEO – a step-by-step guide to learn SEO.

Conclusion

Technical SEO consists of a number of checks and settings you need to optimize to help search engines access, crawl, understand, and index your website without any problems.

In the majority of cases, once you get your technical SEO right, you won’t have to deal with it again, other than doing periodical SEO Audits.

The word technical implies that you need to have some technical knowledge to carry out some of the technical SEO tasks (like page speed optimization, adding structured data, etc.) but it’s necessary to do it otherwise your site won’t reach its full potential.