Technical SEO: What Is It & How To Fix The Most Common Issues (The Ultimate Beginner's Guide)

Key Takeaways

so you've published some amazing content you've nailed your keyword research strategy and have link building down that's great but it's important to make sure that your content and websites are not only readable by humans but by search engines too this is where technical seo comes in but don't panic you don't need to have a really deep understanding of technical seo but it is important to have an overall understanding if you want to communicate effectively to developers and have a well-rounded seo strategy technical seo is the process of optimizing your website to help search engines like google find crawl understand and index your pages the goal is to be found by these search engines to either get your content ranking in search engines or increase visibility technical seo is also concerned with improving the user experience and increasing site speed why is this important because when you get it right you can drastically improve the user experience and make it easier for search engines to access your website boosting your rankings and visibility within the search results i want to start by explaining what happens when a website is created so you can get an understanding of how they work and also how web pages make their way onto the search results when a website domain is created it's turned into an internet protocol address which you probably know as an ip address the internet doesn't understand the domain name as we see it fat joe.com for example is easier for humans to remember than the ip address which will be a combination of four number sets domain name servers link the domain name to the ip address and enable humans to easily access everything that sits behind the visible veil of the internet now let's look at the internet as a whole so we can understand where our website sits within it the world's wide web is easier to understand if we think of it as a giant spider's web the delicate strands of our web represent the billions of websites around the world connected by hyperlinks search engines use programs called spiders or crawlers which are constantly moving throughout the internet google's is called googlebot a spider will enter your website and gather a list of all urls they find through the linked pages as well as the sitemaps created by the website owner or developer you'll possibly recognize a sitemap as one of these a sitemap contains a website's most important pages making it easy for search engines to find and crawl them site maps also help in understanding your website structure making it easier to navigate your website each of these urls are then added into a queue spiders will then crawl them one by one they crawl through the internal hyperlinks to view every single page in a website before they move on to the next website via outbound hyperlinks these spiders can't jump from page to page or website to websites they only get to the next url by crawling through links if the pages aren't linked they can't be crawled so search engines have no way of knowing that those pages exist these are called orphaned pages accrual budget is the number of urls a spider will crawl in one visit only the larger websites need to be concerned with accrual budget because the more pages there are the more likely the google spiders are to miss some of these pages but also the better optimized the pages are the higher the crawl budget in the same way as we spend our money we're more likely to spend more on something that is of a higher quality and worthwhile if crawlers experience anything that blocks their way or causes obstacles while crawling your website they'll likely slow down or even stop crawling the site altogether once the crawlers have finished gathering all the data on a web page the pages are stored in google's index ready to be called upon when a user enters a search for a specific term there will be cases when you don't want google to crawl a web page it could be something that you've created purely to support the user experience or maybe a document such as a pdf there are a few ways that you can ensure that google only crawls what you want it to the first is with access restrictions the most visible is via a login system but you could also use a http authentication which simply means that the web page requires a password to enable access or you could only allow certain ip addresses to access pages you may have experienced this for yourself with accompanying intranet where you can only access files whilst you're in the office it also works for development or staging websites search engines won't be able to access any of these pages therefore they won't be indexed the second is through the contents of the robot's texts you can access the file here you'll see code that looks similar to this it's simply telling google bot in this case to ignore any urls containing these paths note that this is just for google so these pages may still be indexed by other search engines such as bing if you use wordpress you can use plugins to de-index pages or discourage your search engine from indexing a whole site from within the settings before we head into technical seo audits and fixing issues i want to draw your attention to a major google ranking factor impacted by technical seo and that's page experience google explains page experience as a signal that measures aspects of how users perceive the experience of interacting with a web page they want websites to optimize for the factors that provide a good user experience by keeping users engaged offering less friction you need to consider page experience whenever you're optimizing a website for technical seo audits enable you to get a snapshot of the current state of the technical seo on your website and enable you to create a checklist to improve the performance of your site thankfully there are a host of tools to assist you essentials include google search console which gives you an inside look to see how google sees your site you can easily monitor and in some cases resolve server errors site load issues and security issues like hacking and malware from within the console you can monitor search performance and ensure any site maintenance or adjustments you make happen smoothly you can also receive notifications whenever there are problems affecting your website's visibility in search such as server errors blocking critical pages link penalties and more screaming frog is another great technical seo tool and has been a highly recommended crawling tool within the seo space for many years the free version allows you to crawl up to 500 pages of a website which is an ideal amount for most small sites with the free features you can detect broken links redirect chains take a look at titles and meta descriptions find duplicate pages and more other tools include copyscape to ensure that you're not duplicating content from other domains or the other way around serp simulator for showing you precisely how your pages will appear in the results before going live and google page feed insights for measuring things like how long it takes images to load next i'll tell you how to fix the most common technical seo issues but to find out whether these are an issue that your website is facing you can follow our simple 10-step guide to conducting an seo audio i'll pop the link at the end of this video although technical seo can get quite complicated when you delve really deep into it there are a few top level technical seo factors that any beginner will benefit from understanding i'll also mention the common technical seo issues with an overview of how to fix them rich snippets are nuggets of information that google displays directly in the serps to provide users with more information about a website or business ranking for featured snippets will increase the prominence of your pages in the search results google doesn't automatically pull data for featured snippets so it requires you to add schema markup which is pretty much the same as jumping up and down screaming it's here if you have a wordpress site the easiest way to add schema to your website is via the free wordpress plugin search for schema within the new plugins menu and simply follow the instructions within your plugin to add your markup google also offers a tool called the structured data markup helper you can use the tool to label your content according to the built-in snippet categories e-commerce websites would use the products category websites with a complex url structure may use the breadcrumb schema which indicates a page's position in the site hierarchy or you could use the business details schema to markup opening hours of a brick and mortar store when google crawls the same content on different web pages it sometimes doesn't know which page to index in search results the royal canonical tag allows you to tell search engines where the original master version of a piece of content is located so you're telling google which page to index and it'll ignore the duplicates so if you want to republish a piece of content whether exactly or slightly modified but don't want to risk creating duplicate content the canonical tag is here to save the day ahrefs offers a tool within the site audit here you can map your pages and see a visual representation of duplicates i mentioned earlier in the video about how spiders can't jump from page to page without following a hyperlink if any of these are broken it stops the spiders in their tracks also if users click a link expecting to see more information and are hit with an error then it has a negative impact on user experience you can use ahrefs to look for broken links by running a site audit and looking at the issue list you can click through to the pages has links to broken pages error to find the links you need to resolve on that same note there are pages that don't have any links to them these orphaned pages therefore can't be found by search engines via site links this could be a new product page that hasn't been assigned a category or a new blog post that hasn't been linked to the blog page you can also use the ahrefs issue report to find all the orphan pages on a website once you find them you can either add them to your existing site page hierarchy or delete them while organizing the website content you may delete some pages which can result in a 404 error if a user or google bot stumbles across the page via an existing link the best thing to do in this instance is to set up a 301 redirect to a new but relevant page you'll retain around 90 of the seo following this strategy and you'll avoid harming the user experience however sometimes a 404 error page is still required when this happens it's best to design a great page that helps to retain your customers points them in the right direction and communicates your values and personality like this blizzard example a slow loading speed is also a common technical seo issue that can have a massive impact on your rankings just a two second delay in load time increases cart abandonment rates by 87 on e-commerce websites you can check your website's page speed by using google's page speed insights this free tool will not only give you a score but it'll even spit back some great feedback on what you can do to improve the site on both desktop and mobile aside from optimizing the backend code of the website which you'll likely need a developer for the most obvious way to improve the site loading speed is to remove any unnecessary elements from your pages things like data heavy background images are an excellent place to start you can also remove any unused plugins taking up valuable storage space on your cms the only way you'll truly know the current state of the technical seo on any website is to conduct a full audit so click the screen now to follow our simple 10-step guide to conducting a technical seo audit on any website [Music] you