Technical SEO: The Beginner’s Guide

Websites that rank at the top of Google Search are more likely to have a strong technical SEO foundation.

In this technical SEO guide, you’ll learn how to analyze and solve your site’s technical issues like a pro. So, you can level-up your search engine optimization strategy and start ranking better.

Let’s get into it.

What is technical SEO and why is it important?

Technical SEO is all about improving the backend of your website and making sure that search engine spiders can easily find, crawl, and index your website.

When you get technical SEO right, you have the chance of appearing in search engine results pages (SERPs).

So, you can rank and get traffic. That doesn’t mean you will, but it’s the important first step.

But if your website architecture has issues and search engines have issues crawling your site or accessing it, you’re done. 

You won’t even make it into search results.

Even if you’ve got the best links and best content. It won’t matter.

This is why technical SEO is so important. It’s the foundation your SEO strategy is built upon.

The good news is that like on-page SEO, you have complete control over your technical SEO.

Implementing effective technical SEO on your site

Now that you know the importance of technical SEO in your overall strategy, let’s discuss how you can help search engines find your site much easier and rank higher on Google search results.

Site navigation and structure

It all begins with how you structure your website from your homepage, which is your site’s central hub.

This is where people can find the most important information and pages on your site.

In particular, the navigation menu gives you a glimpse on how the website is structured.

You should see the category pages here. Hovering over the categories are the subcategory pages. This is common among e-commerce sites, although publication sites, which are much more straightforward, may share the same structure.

There’s also the footer menu at the very bottom of the page. This is where you’d find less important pages on the site, although it’s common practice to repeat the pages that appeared on the nav menu.

Then, there’s the sidebar menu, which usually appears on blogs and larger publications. It contains links to the latest news and updates relevant to the site’s topic and coverage.

From these sections on the homepage, there are two things to consider.

The first is click depth, which refers to how deep your site pages are from the homepage.

You want your important pages to be as visible as possible on the homepage. This way, users can click on and visit these pages.

At the same time, you need your other pages to be visible as well, even if they don’t show up on the homepage.

This means effectively linking to these pages from your category and subcategory pages. We will discuss internal links more later.

You want your site to have a crawl depth of 3-4, which means the pages are 3-4 clicks away from the homepage max.

Then there’s the crawl budget, which is the other thing you must worry about.

Search engines assign a set number of pages on your site to crawl over time. Once they reach a limit, it takes time for their spiders to restart crawling and indexing the web pages.

This becomes an issue if you publish a lot of content in one go, or have a lot of content irrelevant to your site’s topic.

In this case, Google may not be able to crawl the important pages on your website because you may have prioritized the less important or irrelevant pages to be crawled first.

This will depend on which pages you show on your homepage and how you show them.

Internal & external links

Now, on to internal links, which are arguably the most pivotal element of technical SEO. Without them, you make it impossible for crawlers to find their way through your website. That’s a death blow to any SEO strategy right there.

In essence, these links help establish your website’s architecture. The pages you link to and how you link to them allow search spiders to form a connection between them.

Ideally, you should limit your interlinking strategy to pages that have a clear topical relationship with each other. Linking pages about its menu in your coffee store website makes sense; linking your menu pages to your franchising pages doesn’t.

Also, internal links enable your link equity to circulate across all pages.

Doing this lets your site’s authority spread throughout your website, enabling your inner pages to rank much easier on search engines.

The other type of link to consider is external links. These point from pages on your website to other websites.

From a CRO standpoint, external links are terrible because they cause visitors to leave your website.

However, you’d still need this link type on your site to provide value to readers and help Google understand your site’s relationship with others.

For example, if you have content about mountain biking and want to share its health benefits with your audience, you want to link to cite studies and statistics to back up your claims.

Of course, it would be better if you conducted studies of your own, but for the most part, you have to link to trusted sites that give credence to mountain biking’s health benefits.

From here, Google can form a much better opinion about your site in relation to the sites you’re linking out to. The external links allow the search engine to form a stronger connection between your site and mountain biking, allowing your pages to rank higher for terms related to the topic!

Rendering and indexing

Once search engines crawl the page, they should be able to index your page and display it for relevant search queries if it makes sense to. Of course, there are many other factors that go into deciding which pages rank, but this step is critical.

Now, this process gets more complicated if your site relies on JavaScript (JS). The rendering and indexing of JS is more complex and resource intensive.

It takes extra resources just to correctly load the JavaScript files.

This automatically gives HTML websites the upper hand in terms of ease in crawling and indexing the pages.

But if migrating your site from a JS-dependent content management system (CMS) to an HTML CMS is out of the question, implementing the technical SEO best practices (which we will discuss later) is more crucial than ever.

XML sitemap

This file helps search spiders identify which pages on your site need to be crawled. 

You can usually access the sitemap of most sites by visiting the following URL:

domain.com/sitemap.xml

You should see something like this:

This file is accessible for search engines, which makes the pages found in it much easier to crawl.

Another benefit of sitemaps is that they add newly published pages to your site automatically.

To be clear, you still need internal links to make multiple pages on your site crawlable by Google. But having a sitemap is another important way for the search engine to find new pages to crawl.

If you use WordPress, you can create an XML sitemap for your site with SEOPress in a few clicks.

Note: The exact URL of your sitemap will depend on how you create it, and whether or not you have multiple sitemaps. For example, SEOPress will create a master sitemap document which will then link to specific sitemaps for each taxonomy. For example, you may have one for posts and one for pages.

URL structure

Your page’s uniform resource location (URL) structure plays a big part in your site’s crawlability and the way search engines will interpret the organization of your site.

And we’re not just referring to including the keyword in the URL of the page, which is an on-page SEO practice.

We’re referring here to organizing your URLs to reflect your site structure.

Let’s say you run an e-commerce website selling different product types. Showing categories and subcategories in the product URL can help search engines better understand how the web page is structured on the site.

Below are examples of URLs that reflect what I just said:

https://example.com/mens-shoes/

https://example.com/mens-shoes/oxford

https://example.com/mens-shoes/oxford/wholecut/

https://example.com/mens-shoes/oxford/wholecut/beckett-simonon-valencia

https://example.com/mens-shoes/loafers/

https://example.com/mens-shoes/loafers/penny/

https://example.com/mens-shoes/loafers/penny/morjas

The first URL is a category page (men’s shoes), while the second and the fifth are subcategories (types of men’s shoes: Oxford and loafers).

Under Oxford is the third URL, which is the subcategory of a subcategory (wholecut). The fourth URL is the product page, that is a brand of wholecut Oxford shoes (Beckett Simonon Valencia).

The fifth is the second subcategory under men’s shoes (loafer), with its own subcategory (penny). The seventh URL for this product is under it.

The URLs are organized and grouped according to their various types, making it simpler not only for search engines to understand which product belongs to which group on the site but also for visitors who may want to look at other products from the category using the site’s easy-to-follow URL.

Thin and duplicate content

Let’s talk about thin content first, which people often misjudge by word count.

Just because a page has few words in it doesn’t mean it’s “thin” content. At the same time, 2,000 words of content may end up saying nothing at all.

Between the two, search engines would consider the latter as the actual thin content.

As long as you provide useful content on the page regardless of word count, it will offer more value than even the longest and most comprehensive page on your site.

What about duplicate content?

This is an issue that happens to all websites including publishers. But it’s most common with ecommerce stores.

If you don’t sort out your technical SEO, it’s entirely possible to receive traffic to the same page on your site via different URLs.

Without optimizing your website for technical SEO, it’s possible for you to receive traffic from the same page on your site but using different URL.

The duplicate content, in this case, is generated for different reasons. But the most common occurrence is when your product has color variants for the same product and choosing a different color generates a different URL for the page.

This can also happen when the page has URL parameters that were used when running an ad campaign that gets indexed by Google.

To solve this, we set canonical URLs. I’ll explain this a little later on.

PageSpeed

Page load times are a ranking factor in Google’s algorithm but there are some important distinctions to be made.

You won’t get a huge ranking boost by having a blazing fast website. That’s just not how it works.

If your website is super slow, however, they may demote your content or be less likely to rank your pages in general.

I say this because you need to know that you won’t outrank your competitors by hustling to get load times 50ms faster.

That said, fast page load times are important for conversions. So, you’ll need to work on getting your site as fast as possible.

Note: Need help speeding up your website? NitroPack can deploy performance optimizations automatically. Including a CDN. Click here to try it for your self.

But it’s about more than just having a fast-loading website. It’s also about the efficiency and performance of loading the page files properly.

This is why Google created the Core Web Vitals. Use these metrics to get a clearer idea of how good (or bad) the site’s loading performance is.

To check your scores, run your site URL or page URL through Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. 

Hopefully, you’ll see something like this:

If you get a low score, you’ll also see a bunch of action steps to work through.

You can also check your Google Search Console account to see which pages are scoring high for its CWV and those that need improvement.

From here, however, you can’t tell the specific issues encountered by each page, so you still have to run each one using Google PageSpeed Insights. Still, it’s a useful indicator of problematic pages at scale.

Structured data

Rich snippets are additional elements that appear for certain pages in SERPs. Displaying them can help your pages stand out and get more clicks.

To make rich snippets appear on your page, you need to create a schema markup code and embed it before the </head> section of a page.

The challenge now is ensuring that a) you use the correct markup for the page and b) the pages have the right schema markup code.

First, check the SERPs for your target keyword to see if the pages have rich snippets. If they don’t, there is no need to create structured data for it.

If you do see rich snippets, then you’ll need to add them. If you have a custom CMS, this would need to be done manually.

But if you use WordPress, you can use the Schema Pro plugin to generate the schema markup for each page. The plugin will auto generate the structured data based on the page’s information so you don’t have to manually do it individually.

SSL

Security is everything to your website, and Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are, well, a layer that helps make your website safe from online threats.

In particular, it obfuscates the data transferred from the user’s browser to your site’s server and vice versa. Without it, scammers can steal your information and use it for nefarious reasons.

This is important for sites that collect personal and sensitive user information.

To know if the site has an SSL certification installed, just look to the left of the URL in your browser’s address bar. You’ll be able to click on the icon for more information. Look out for the padlock icon.

Installing an SSL certificate is pretty straightforward so there’s no excuse not to bother.

Most hosting providers give you the option to set up a free SSL certificate via Let’s Encrypt on your site.

Your web host will show you exactly how to do this. 

But to illustrate, here’s how you can enable SSL on your website if you host with Cloudways:

Robots.txt

We mentioned crawl budget earlier. One way to limit the pages Google can crawl on your site is by editing your site’s robots.txt file.

You can access this (or create a file of your site that doesn’t have one yet) using an FTP client or from your hosting provider’s Control Panel.

There’s also a plugin you can use to edit the file straight from the WordPress dashboard.

Once accessed, you can instruct search engines to not crawl specific pages on your site, particularly those that you don’t want Google to crawl like your site’s checkout page, Contact page, and others.

You can also use the file to block search spiders from crawling pages that contain session IDs and tracking parameters, both of which are common reasons for duplicate content.

Note: Learn more in Adam Connell’s guide to Robots.txt files.

Log files

This is more advanced and not always necessary. But, if you want to get super technical with your SEO, you’ll need to access your log files.

These capture the activities and requests that take place on your site. It details everything from the visitor IP address to the user agent string, identifying whether a bot or browser is initiating the request.

They also track various log types, such as errors occurring on the server, security-related events, and application changes and updates.

Log files are very useful if you’re trying to identify the root cause of a technical SEO issue. The files give you all the records of visitors and bots that accessed your site.

For example, you might find that a bad bot is consuming too many server resources. You can then work to block it. You might also find that a good bot (one that respects robots.txt instructions) is accessing your site too frequently. For the latter, you can update your robots.txt file and add a command to slow the bot down (the command involves adding a crawl delay).

How you access log files will depend on your hosting provider. They’ll have a tutorial that explains more.

Note: There are also technical SEO tools like JetOctopus that provide log file analysis.

Technical SEO best practices

To help you implement the right technical SEO strategy for your website, you need to know which tactics and practices to use and observe to ensure that Google crawls your site without problems. Let’s take a look at the main ones you need to know.

Run SEO audits regularly

A technical SEO audit is like an X-ray of your site’s structure and composition. Running one will give you a snapshot of how technically sound your website is and what errors to fix and issues to address.

There are a couple of technical SEO tools to help you conduct an effective audit on your site. One of them is SE Ranking. Its Site Audit feature gives you an action plan of issues to prioritize to improve the site’s indexability.

After the audit, click on the Issue Report and the Errors tab to see the most glaring issues SE Ranking found on your site.

You can monitor the improvements you’ve made on your site by referring to its Audit Score. The higher the score, the more technically sound your website is.

We’re big fans of SE Ranking because it’s an all-in-one SEO tool with plenty of features. And it’s surprisingly affordable considering the features you get access to.

Also, consider using Screaming Frog SEO Spider for a more in-depth SEO audit analysis.

This desktop-based software provides you with a wide range of data to help you analyze your site’s technical SEO makeup more effectively, from site architecture to keyword density.

After running an audit, you can browse its various tabs to inspect the factors affecting your website’s crawlability.

Reduce crawl depth

Reducing the crawl depth for your pages to 4 clicks max (clicks away from homepage) will be important to ensure search engines don’t have to crawl too deep.

We can find this metric within Screaming Frog.

Once you’ve run a crawl of your site, go to the Internal tab. Next, find the Crawl Depth column and reorder the pages from the highest number of clicks away from the homepage.

From here, you can create a list of pages you want to bring nearer to your homepage and figure out a way on how to do that exactly.

Eliminate orphaned pages

Orphan pages are those that don’t have internal links pointing to them.

As a result, either these pages on your site have yet to be crawled or aren’t ranking as high on organic search despite being optimized just right.

You can identify orphaned pages using Screaming Frog.

If you have a WordPress site, it’s best to use Link Whisper to identify these pages and add internal links pointing to them.

Run a Link Audit to see how many orphaned pages your site has.

Click on the page and add inbound links on the next page.

The tool will then provide you with a list of links from other sites that point to the orphaned page, complete with their anchor text. Before adding the link, you can edit the text to make it sound more natural if necessary.

Fix broken links

Link Whisper’s Link Audit also shows you broken links to replace and fix on your site to improve crawlability. SE Ranking’s site audit tool does this as well.

Visit these links to see what you can do to resolve the issue.

Exactly how you’ll handle this depends on the link that’s broken. If it is an internal link, you can easily replace it.

For external links, you may need to replace it but in most cases you can just update the copy and remove the link.

Consider redirecting non-performing pages

To help curb crawl budget waste, you need to identify pages that need to get clicks and impressions via Google Search Console.

Go to Performance > Search Results and click on the Pages tab. Then, organize the pages to show those that need to generate clicks and impressions.

From here, the goal is to try optimizing these pages and give them another shot. Maybe they were targeting the wrong keyword, the content doesn’t address keyword intent, or they don’t have lots of inbound links.

However, if these pages didn’t produce your desired results over time, you may need to remove and redirect them to a similar page on your site. Failing that, your homepage may be suitable if there’s nothing similar.

If you use WordPress, you can use the 301 redirects plugin for this. However, it’s important to note that PHP redirects use up PHP workers & are more resource intensive.

The best option would be to add redirects via your .htaccess file. But you need to be comfortable with this and be very careful. One rogue character in your .htaccess file can take down your entire site.

Note: Be careful when removing content. Sometimes content that doesn’t get traffic can help search engines understand the topical focus of your website. And some content will have backlinks pointing to it. If you remove the page, those websites may remove those links which isn’t a good thing. So, be careful how you proceed.

Set canonical pages

The best way to eliminate duplicate content on your site is to set canonical tags to the page that you want search engines to index.

This way, they will ignore other URL variants (those with URL parameters and session IDs) and index the canonical page instead.

You can do this using SEOPress.

Just open the WordPress editor for the post/page in question and scroll to the SEO section, click on the Advanced tab and paste the URL variant of the page that you want Google to rank.

Then save the updates.

Use a caching plugin

A fast loading and well optimized website is important for search engines and users. 

For WordPress users, some web hosts will provide a caching plugin. Generally the in-house plugins tend to not be that great.

This roundup from EcommerceBonsai has some recommendations if you need them.

If you’re not technically inclined and use WordPress, NitroPack is your best option. It’ll deploy optimizations and a CDN automatically.

It’ll also handle things like caching, CSS/JS minification, GZIP compression, defer JavaScript loading and plenty of other optimizations.

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! Hopefully, this detailed guide to technical SEO has given you nuggets of wisdom on tackling technical optimization, even if you still need to gain tons of SEO experience.

If there’s one thing to take away from this guide, it’s to keep everything simple for search spiders. The harder they have to work crawling your site pages, the lower the chances they’ll get indexed and rank on top of SERPs.

So, do whatever it takes to observe the technical SEO fundamentals mentioned above so you can proceed with developing your on- and off-page SEO campaigns. Best of luck!

Related reading:

• Page Speed & SEO: What You Need To Know
• Content Optimization: A Step-By-Step Guide For Better Google Rankings
• Bounce Rate: What It Is And How To Fix Yours