Technical SEO

Technical SEO was the very first type of SEO. It used to simply mean making a website in a way that Google’s spiders can read it properly. It now means anything which involved working on the infrastructure of a site.

Sitemaps

The way to do make sure that Google can crawl your whole site is to simply create a sitemap. Then take this sitemap and submit it to Google Search Console. If you have a WordPress site, then a plugin like Yoast will do this automatically for you. If not, you’ll need some technical assistance I’m afraid, but it is definitely worth it.

Google will probably eventually stumble upon your site anyway, but why wait! Sign up to Google Search Console asap, and submit your sitemap so it knows exactly what pages are on your site.

Site Speed

The other main technical SEO component these days is Site Speed. It turns out that people hate slow sites, and therefore Search Engines hate slow sites. Therefore working on making your site load as fast as possible is vital.

A great way to do this is by using AMP pages for your mobile site. AMP is a new(ish) way of making web pages which makes them load lightning fast. It is still a comparatively young concept, however, so implementing is still not the easiest thing in the world.

To make any page load faster, simply don’t include anything you don’t need to. Remove tracking pixels unless they are necessary, use smaller image sizes, and don’t have too many widgets on any page. Use a website like gtmetrix.com to test your site speed, and follow the helpful suggestions.

Canonical Links

A small, yet vital component of technical SEO is setting up canonical links as necessary. Canonical links are for when you have two pages with the same content, and you don’t want to be punished for it. (Google hates duplicate content).

This can happen when you are presenting the same information but in two different ways. For example on this site, we have an Ad Size Guide explaining all our ad sizes, but also feature pages on each ad size in our Glossary. This makes it easier for people to find information, however, Google wouldn’t be pleased about us having two versions of the same page if we didn’t use the rel=canonical tag on the one we wanted Google to think of as the ‘main’ page.

By doing this, Google knows which page to attribute SEO ‘juice’ to, and which page to index (it will only index the page you identify as the main page).

To find out more, follow Googles guide here.

Don’t Do Anything Dodgy

Like with all SEO, you get punished if you do something dodgy. For technical SEO, this could include things like creating invisible text in an attempt to rank higher. It also means using javascript links, or iframes to hide content. Basically make a page that is as simple, fast and above board as possible.

Next: Local SEO