9 Must-Know Technical SEO Practices for 2026

Key Takeaways

imagine this someone types in a question in the search engines and you have the perfect answer to it but if your site isn't technically sound search engines might miss it entirely so technical SEO is about becoming fluent in the language of the search engin so that they can easily understand your website and deliver your content to those searching for your expertise so in this video we'll talk about the nine best practices for technical SEO let's go hey it's Jack from rang MF the one two that provides easy to use SEO and AI tools and this channel provides you with tips tricks and tutorials to help you grow your search traffic so if you're new to us consider subscribing and without further Ado let's talk about the first best practice for technical SEO in case you don't know one of the ways search engines discover craw and index pages is through visiting links so if you have created a new page on your site and other pages on your site that were already index are linking to the new page there is a high chance that the search engines will quickly find crawl and index that new page so if you have any pages that do not have any links pointing to them in other words ofen Pages then it is a good idea to add links to them to find out if your site has any ofen Pages hover to post go to your post list and if you have rankmath installed you will see these three link icons here under the SEO details of each post the first and second icons show the number of internal and external links added added to the content of this page but the third icon shows the number of internal links pointing to this particular page if this number is zero it means that this is an ofen page you will have to scroll through the list of posts to identify them however if you are a rank math Pro user you will have this option to filter out often Pages or post as you hit filter you will see all the post with no incoming links so you can find other relevant pages and add internal links to these often Pages having no often post or pages is part of a good website structure other than that you also need to have a proper hierarchy for your overall content structure now there are many different hierarchies and organizational structures for a website there is a silo structure which involves organizing information into distinct self-contain compartments or Silo each Silo typically represents a topic or category this is silo one that talks about politics for example Silo 2 talks about business and Silo tree discussers entertainment and information within a silo may not interconnect with information from other silos The Silo structure is often recommended by seos as it giv search engines a clear idea of what the content in The Silo is about if you want to understand more about Silo structure feel free to check out this video right here the link is in the description on top of that you can also consider other content structures like the hubs and spokes model which involves a central Hub page that links out to multiple related spoke Pages which in turn link back to the hub creating a strong interconnected network of related content or the Content Library model that organizes content into comprehensive topic specific libraries or repositories where all the related articles guides and resources are grouped together for easy access and navigation or the topic Gateway model that features a main gateway page typically a category page that provides an overview of a broad topic which links to various in-depth subtopic pages that expand on different aspects of the main subject and as your site grows you can consider the content database model and the glossery model we have gone in depth on each of the content help models in this video right here so if you're interested do check it out the links are in the description as well there is no right or wrong way to structure your sites but you should choose one or a combination of the models to make it easier for your site visitors to navigate through your site and when you run a new or an established site having a clear overview of your content structure maybe using tools like canva Google Sheets or Myro mind mapping will help you avoid keyword cannibalization on multiple Pages competing for the same keyword and intent whenever you create a new page on rankmath Tab if you have added a focus keyword rankmath will check if you are targeting the same Focus keyword on your other Pages if you see a fail on this SEO check you shouldn't start a new page for this targeted keyword instead you should find the existing page that is targeting the same keyword and update it if possible so in in other words rank ma will help prevent your site from falling into keyword cannibalization a good website structure must be accompanied by userfriendly navigation otherwise everything will be in vain a well-designed navigation menu is crucial for helping visitors interact and navigate your site effectively so if your site is a huge e-commerce site like H&M visitors can immediately find what they are looking for through the drop- down menu instead of browsing through every other page if it is a s comp website like one.com where they provide different types of services visitors can easily navigate to the right Services they are looking for and even if it is a niche site like fish tangwell visitors can easily navigate to the pieces of content or categories they are looking for now these large drop down menus are typically used when someone visits a website on a desktop but a large portion of traffic comes from mobile devices so we should also have the hamburger navigational menus for example if you visit H&M on a mobile device you will see this hamburger menu when you tap on it you will have a nice list of product categories tap on one again and you will have all the same navigational items as the drop- down menu earlier the same goes for one.com click on the hamburger menu and you will see the menu items tap on it again and the drop-down menu items will be neatly displayed and then for every site there should always be a footer menu that typically contains the important Pages the legal information contact details and other relevant sections most modern WordPress themes already provide these functionalities but if yours doesn't then you may want to do some research to find some suitable plugins or themes to help you out now on top of just the navigational menu one thing you should do to improve the navigation of your entire sites is to have a search function on your 404 Pages you see a typical 404 page will look like this and there is nothing wrong with it if we look at the Google search quality rers guidelines the link to this document ment is in the description now on page 77 a typical 404 page will be classified as a medium rating by the search quality rater but if your 404 page has a search function such as the 404 page of rankmath it will provide you with navigational links to its recent post as well as a search function that helps people find and navigate to other contents of our site in such a case the site will be rated as high or highest on the quality guidelines from what I know most modern WordPress themes already has a search function on a 404 page but if yours doesn't then you should definitely customize it to improve your size quality now one tip for you if you switching WordPress themes never forget to update the links on your footer menu especially the social media links because there is a high likelihood that those social profile links will be wiped off with your old theme in technical SEO indexability and craing are essential in determining how search engines navigate at index pages of your site the first step to identif defying The Crawling and indexability of your pages is to check your Google search console to check for indexing issues on Google search console you should visit the pages tab under the indexing category and here you will find all the different crawling and indexing issues of your site as you go through these issues look for pages that are supposed to be indexed but lended here for example this page you should always click on it and inspect the URL because the error reports refresh slower than the URL inspection results and if the page is definitely not indexed then you should check out the error category the page belongs to and ask yourself these questions has Google cwed the page if not why is it because something is blocking it on the robots.txt file maybe someone has submitted the URL to the page removal too or does the page has any other server errors then if a page is craw is there anything that prevents it from being indexed such as a no index meta tag on the page if this is the case you should Mark it as index or if there is a no index meta tag applied to the global meta under the titles and meta menu item you should always keep this as index or if you have accidentally discouraged search engines from indexing the entire site by checking this setting on the WordPress reading settings if nothing is blocking the page from being CW and indexed then could the page be marked as a duplicate using the Contico URL in rank Maps advanced settings in this case it is saying that this page is a duplicate of this page these are the logical thoughts you should have when fixing indexing issues now we have these videos to help you clear out your indexing issues on our channel the links to these videos are in the description also on top of just the URL inspection report you should go further to test the live URL give it a while and you will have further indexing details of the page this doesn't mean that the page is Crow and index just that it is available for indexing now it is a good idea to view the page and check out the screenshot because that's what Google is seeing sometimes it may reveal that your page might have been broken for Google or maybe it has some specific server errors found when Google is trying to crawl the page now once you have identified and fixed the crawling and indexing issues always go back to Google search console select the resolved issue and request for indexing again and now Google will send their robots to craw your page or if you have installed rang map's instant indexing plugin and have configured the Google indexing API you should submit the page for instant indexing as well as index now in case you want to learn how to set up instant indexing and a Google indexing API on your site do check out this video right here the link is in the description search engines do not like duplicated content hence finding and removing duplicated content is part of technical SEO and to identify duplicate content what we recommend you do is to visit a tool like sideliner decom we have placed a link to this page in the description what you want to do is to add your site's URL and analyze it give it a while once it is analyzed you can check out the duplicate content and then see which Pages have a match percentage of more than 20% it is normal if it is a category page a shop page or the homepage other than that if any of the indexable pages such as those you want to rank for a keyword have more than 20% match with other Pages you want to click through to see what is duplic ated if for example this it is highlighting Grill which is a rather common word if you run a BBQ website you can ignore it and if you click on this it is not exactly something important so if there are just words or a short sentence that matches other pages of your site it doesn't really matter but if it is an entire paragraph and it matches many other pages of your site then you should consider doing something about it if it is a legit duplicat page such as a product variation page or a printer friendly version of a page then you can add a canonical URL to those duplicat pages such as if this is the printer friendly version of this page and you want search engines to know that this is the original page they should index then what you want to do is to go to the printer friendly page visit the WordPress editor of the page under rank MAF and its advanced settings you can add the original page URL in this field so let's go to the main page copy that URL and paste it here this will tell search engines that this page is a duplicat page of this page right here if it is a page with little to no content or a PO quality content that could be explained by another page of your site then you want to add a 301 redirect from the poor quality page to the better quality page trimming down on duplicated pages will keep your site in tiptop shape for better rankings regardless of what some seos say you should always have an XML sit map and submit it to the search engine XML sitemap is a file that serves a crucial navigational guide for search engines as it provides a list of all the available URLs of a site including the date of the last modification it is like a road map for your site if you use rank map on your site an XML sitemap is automatically created for you you can find it by either typing sitemap.xml right behind your domain name and you will find the sitemap index or you can hover over rank map SEO go to the sitemap settings and and you will find the XML sitemap right here this is the sitemap index and each of these items are separate XML files that list all the URLs in the category this is a good SEO practice to have different XML sitemap files for different types of URLs and group them under a sitemap index and this is done for you automatically when you use rank MAF plus rankmath automatically submits your website to Google search console as soon as you have connected with it anyway if you want to understand more about the the different site Maps we offer check out this video right here the link is in the description with ai's growing roow and influence in search it is crucial to make it easy for search engines to consume and understand your content and that's where structured data or in other words schema markups comes into play it it's not just about getting reach nipplets anymore if you want Google to recommend your content as one of its inferences in the AI overview Google should first understand your content and having schema markup on your page would definitely help though it may seem complicated and difficult to implement schema markups rankmath has made it super easy for you by default if you're writing a Blog article an article schema will be added for you however if you're writing about a book on the page you should use the book schema for the page and fill up all the necessary information to the best of your ability if your page is writing about a course you should use the course schema and complete the information and if you are reviewing a course as an independent third party then you can use the review rating schear together with the pros and cons schear as you already saw there are many different types of predefine schema markups which makes it super easy for you to implement again we have these videos to help you implement the right schema markups for your pages do check them out if you want to level up your SEO the links are in the description according to statista mobile internet traffic accounts for almost 60% of total web traffic while in mobile first markets such as Asia and in Africa it accounts for an even larger share of web page views not only that Google prioritizes the mobile version of a page for indexing as well so neglecting mobile optimization for your sites is not an option and to be honest most modern WordPress themes are already mobile optimized by default so if you run a website that was set up Donkey years ago you should either hire a web developer to revamp your sites or move over to a modern WordPress team let me share with you how to check if your site is mobile friendly if you visit any page of your website right click and select inspect you will open up the developer tools I'd like to move these tools to the bottom for this purpose because you can have a full view of the page what you want to do is to click on this and I'll select this layout and now the tools will be at the bottom next you want to click on this button and then right here you want to select responsive so that you'll be able to toggle the page you see as I shift the screen larger and then smaller towards a mobile view all the page elements will naturally resized so that they nicely fit the screen this makes it easier for your site visitors to view the page now if the page is not mobile optimize as you shift it you will see some elements will be stuck and become so small that no one can view them properly so now you know what elements on the page you should optimize for mobile now not only that Bing has a tool that will help analyze any page of your site for mobile friendliness this is the tool we are talking about we have left the link to this page in the description so let's say that we add rang Maps URL here and hit analyze give it a while and it will tell you if your page is mobile friendly or not these are the optimization opportunities and it has suggested that the links of buttons are too close on the mobile device so we can probably add some padding of margins between them now if a page is not mobile friendly it would have failed most of these checks page be optimization is another piece of the puzzle for technical SEO because Google uses page be as a rank factor in his algorithm what they are looking for are the call Web vital if we analyze WP Rocket's homepage on Google PHP insights as you can see it has passed the core web vitals which are these three elements the largest contentful paint which is the largest element of the page when it is first loaded the interaction to next pain which measures how quickly your website responds to user interactions and the cumulative layout shift which measures how much an element shifts after it is being loaded and if you scroll to the bottom you will see all the speed optimization opportunities these are the fail or borderline Audits and if we expand this these are the past audits if we want to understand how to optimize for an audit for example eliminate render blocking resources you can click on it and it will share some solutions you see it is recommending WP Rockets to solve this issue and if you want to solve medify CSS it is recommending WP Rockets as well and many other issues and solutions so using WP rocket can definitely help with optimizing for page speed but I will show with you some basic tips to improve your page speed the first is to have text detected as the largest contentful pain element because it is the fastest loading element compared to images or videos then you want to create a blank page and analyze it with PHP insights because that will review the elements that are slowing down your entire site by default and then in a staging environment you want to turn on and off the plugins one at a time and test your slowest page this will single out the plugins that are slowing down your site these are some of the tips we have shared in this video and if you want to understand more about PHP insights you can check out this video as well I hope this helps in the era of data Bridges and cyber attacks ensuring that your site is secure is super important one of the most essential site Security is to have your site on the https instead of the HTTP nowadays https is a norm for all websites and if you want your sitze to rank on the search engines it is a requirement other than that site security is is mostly to prevent unauthorized access to your sit and rankmath has some features that will help if you don't know Hacker's primary tool for hacking is information the more information they can gather about your site the more vulnerable it will be so rankma has a tool called the SEO analyzer which will analyze your site search engine optimization opportunities as well as discovering security risk let's start the SEO analyzer if you haven't done so before this is the free tool by the way and it will show you every SEO aspect of your site and if we scroll to the bottom here are all the security checks we do if there is a plugin that is publicly visible it will show here the same goes for your theme if hackers know what plugins or theme you are using on your site they will try to find all websites that have the same plug-in installed and attempt to hack them immediately then rank MAF will also check if the files and folders on your website are hidden from others and if your site is secured with the https protocol we have a detailed guide on securing your WordPress website and if you're interested in checking it out this is the link we have left it in the description I hope with this you will have a clear understanding of what technical SEO is and how you can optimize your site for better rankings if you found this video helpful how about a thumbs up and subscribe to us as we are all about helping you grow your search traffic this is Jack for rang math I'll see you in the next video [Music] [Applause] [Music]