SEO 101
Technical SEO is critical for search engine optimization. This complete guide covers key technical SEO audit steps, best practices, and tools to fully optimize your site. Read on to learn how to identify and fix technical SEO issues for better crawling, indexing and ranking.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to the behind-the-scenes, technical elements that optimize a website for search engines. As opposed to content creation and link building, technical SEO focuses on the HTML, URL structure, page speed and more. It helps search engines properly crawl, index and understand your site.
While less glamorous than content, strong technical SEO is essential for high rankings and traffic. Even the best content cannot rank if search engines cannot properly access and index your pages.
This complete guide will overview:
– Why technical SEO is important
– A technical SEO audit checklist
– Tools to identify technical SEO issues
– Best practices to optimize site crawling, indexing and ranking
Follow this complete technical SEO audit guide and checklist to fully optimize your site for higher rankings.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
Technical SEO might seem dull, but it has a big impact on performance. Optimizing these technical elements helps search engines:
Crawl your site: Properly crawl and discover all pages on your site to index.
Understand your pages: Identify keywords, content, and structure to rank pages for the right searches.
Index your new content: Quickly index new blog posts and content to get them ranking faster.
Avoid indexing issues: Prevent problems like crawl errors, duplicate content penalties and more.
Without solid technical SEO, pages may be crawled slowly or not indexed properly. Technical errors could even lead to manual penalties by Google.
Additionally, technical SEO contributes to user experience and conversion rates. Faster load times, mobile optimization, accessible URLs and more make it easier for visitors to engage with your site.
In short, technical SEO is the foundation for visibility and traffic. It enables your content to be seen and ranked in search engines.
Technical SEO Audit Checklist
Conducting a full technical SEO site audit is key for finding and resolving issues. This technical SEO checklist outlines what to look for:
Crawl Accessibility
XML sitemap: An XML sitemap helps search engines discover new and updated content. Ensure your sitemap includes all site pages and is submitted in Search Console.
Robot.txt file: Check for incorrectly blocked site sections in your robot.txt file.
Indexability checks: Confirm pages are not blocked from indexing through meta noindex tags or page settings.
Crawl errors: Debug any crawl errors shown in Search Console to identify accessibility issues.
Indexing
– Duplicated content – Flag and canonicalize or redirect any duplicate content issues.
– Thin content – Check for thin pages that need more content to properly summarize the topic.
– Structured data – Use structured data where applicable to help search engines understand page content.
– Image SEO – Include alt text and title attributes on images to optimize them for image search.
Page Speed
– Page load times – Pages should load in under 2-3 seconds on mobile devices and the server.
– Render blocking resources – Eliminate render blocking JavaScript and CSS for faster visible page loads.
– Image compression – Compress oversized images and serve responsive image formats for performance.
– Caching – Implement caching for faster server response times and lower resource usage.
URLs and Structure
– URL format – Clean up URLs to remove special characters, use hyphens for spaces, and implement a consistent structure.
– Redirect chains – Consolidate multiple redirects into direct single redirects when possible.
– 4xx/5xx errors – Fix any URLs returning server or client side errors.
– Hreflang tags – Properly implement hreflang tags for multi-regional sites to clarify versions.
This covers the key categories to examine in an effective technical SEO audit.
Essential Tools for Technical SEO
Alongside the above checklist, leveraging key tools is important for identifying issues:
**Google Search Console**
Google Search Console allows you to see crawl errors, indexability issues and other technical SEO insights specific to Google.
Site crawlers
OnCrawl, DeepCrawl, and Screaming Frog are crawlers that analyze sites to surface technical SEO problems.
Page speed tools
Google PageSpeed Insights and Pingdom provide page load speed data and suggestions for optimization.
XML sitemaps generator
The Yoast SEO plugin helps properly generate and manage XML sitemaps for search engines.
Investing in premium SEO tools pays dividends for auditing technical SEO completely. The data surfaced allows you to measure improvements as well.
Best Practices for Optimizing Technical SEO
Fixing issues in a technical SEO audit is just the first step. Implementing ongoing best practices is key for keeping a site optimized over the long term:
1. Adopt an SEO plugin like Yoast SEO to guide technical optimization in your CMS.
2. Generate and submit an XML sitemap to surface new content.
3. Compress images and enable browser caching for faster page speeds.
4. Implement structured data markup where applicable.
5. Watch for new crawl errors and fix quickly before pages drop from the index.
6. Monitor page indexing to ensure new pages get picked up.
7. Plan a recurring quarterly technical audit to catch any creeping issues.
8. Test mobile user experience and ensure a responsive design.
Getting technical SEO right is not a one-time effort – it requires vigilance over time. Following structured best practices will lead to ongoing search visibility and conversion success.
Key Takeaways – Complete Technical SEO Audit
Optimizing the technical side of SEO through structured audits and best practices ensures high performance:
✓ Technical SEO enables proper crawling, indexing and ranking by search engines
✓ Conduct audits covering site speed, URL structure, indexing and more
✓ Leverage SEO tools like Search Console, site crawlers and speed checkers
✓ Implement XML sitemaps, image optimization and caching for better indexing
✓ Complete quarterly audits to catch technical problems before they impact rankings
Focusing on the less visible aspects of technical SEO pays major dividends for long term search visibility. Follow this complete guide and checklist to audit your site and fix issues for even better crawling, indexing and traffic levels.