Beginners Technical SEO Guide: The 4 Must-Have Components
Search engine optimization is similar to home construction:
- Technical SEO is similar to the foundation.
- On-page SEO is analogous to the house's wood framing.
- Off-page SEO is the finished product (paint, cabinets, flooring, fixtures, etc.)
If the foundation is removed, the entire structure collapses to the ground.
This is how a house without foundation appears:
Nobody wants to live on Google's 2nd page (if you know what I mean).
That's why we'll show you how to lay a technical SEO foundation so solid and dependable that even a category five SEO hurricane (AKA Google algorithm update) won't bring your house down.
Here we come, page one.
What is technical SEO?
Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical aspects of your website so that search engine spiders can better crawl/index it and ensure visitor security.
Server configuration, page speed, mobile friendliness, and SSL security, for example, all help search engines crawl and index your website better and faster, allowing you to rank higher, whether directly or indirectly.
Technical SEO also contributes to a better user experience for your visitors. A faster, more mobile-responsive page, for example, facilitates navigation. What is good for people is also good for Google.
The following core factors are included in technical SEO:
- Crawlability
- Indexation
- Page speed
- Mobile-friendliness
- Site security (SSL)
- Structured data
- Duplicate content
- Site architecture
- Sitemaps
- URL structure
On-Page SEO vs. Technical SEO
On-page optimization, like technical SEO, refers to the optimization of various elements on your website (as opposed to off-page optimization that optimizes elements off-site).
On-page SEO, on the other hand, optimizes content page by page, whereas technical SEO optimizes the backend of your website sitewide.
Consider technical SEO to be like working on a car's engine (under the hood) and on-page SEO to be like working on the body.
What is the Significance of Technical SEO?
Bottom line: without a solid technical foundation, even the best content on the planet will not appear on the first page of search results.
Page speed, website security, and mobile usability are all direct ranking factors, which means that slower websites that lack SSL security or mobile responsiveness will rank lower than competitors (all other parts being equal). Not our rules, but Google's.
And, by having fewer pages crawled less frequently, you limit the number of pages that can appear in search, to begin with.
Then there are your website visitors. The average website visitor expects a mobile page to load in 1-2 seconds, and 53% of your traffic will leave immediately if it does not.
Technical SEO lays the groundwork for crawlability, indexation, security, and usability, all of which are necessary for ranking.
Checklist for Technical SEO
Nothing in SEO is as simple as checking a box on a list these days. It's not even close.
However, in the case of technical SEO, each responsibility falls into one of four categories:
- Site hierarchy
- Crawl, index, render
- Security
- Usability
1. Website structure
The hierarchical organization of your website, from the general (homepage) to specific (pages), is referred to as website structure (or architecture) (blog post).
Visitors expect a well-organized website hierarchy to help them quickly find what they're looking for. And Google relies on a well-organized website hierarchy to determine which pages you consider to be the most important and how they relate to one another.
How can you ensure that your technical SEO specialist hits a home run with your site architecture?
- Flat structure
- Breadcrumb navigation
- XML sitemap
- URL structure
Flat Structure
Your website should have a flat hierarchy, which means that any page on your website should be within 1-3 clicks of the home page. Consider this:
You can (and should) use a hierarchical navigation menu to make your website easier to navigate. However, Google recommends that visitors or search engines be able to find every page on your website simply by following internal links within the content.
Consider the following real-world example of a flat hierarchy with internal linking to connect pages (our SEO category page):
Our SEO guide serves as a category page, keeping our most important pages just two clicks away from the home page.
We also internal link to the other articles in the same chapter within each of these respective articles, ensuring that our structure groups related content with the same family.
If Google can only find certain pages by looking at our sitemap (rather than following internal links), it not only makes crawling and indexing pages more difficult, but it also makes it impossible for them to understand how relevant a page is in relation to other pages. And if Google can't determine how important or relevant you believe a page is, it won't show it to searchers.
Breadcrumb Navigation
Do you remember Hansel and Gretel?
You know, the one where they leave a breadcrumb trail to help them find their way home?
The same approach is used by breadcrumb navigation (inspired by the story) to help website visitors easily identify where they are on your website so they can find their way back to your homepage.
Breadcrumbs is not necessarily needed for websites with flat hierarchies that are only 1 or 2 levels deep or sites that are linear in structure.
XML Sitemap
An XML sitemap is a map of your website (in the form of a file) that search engines use to crawl and index your pages. Consider it a backup or secondary discovery method for search engines.
While not required (search engines find your content just fine without it), a sitemap ensures that Google can find, crawl, and index every page on your website, even those with no internal links or that don't appear in the navigation.
Who requires a sitemap? Google recommends that the following websites include a sitemap:
- Websites with more than 100 pages
- New sites with few external links as of yet
- Websites with no internal links in content sections
- Sites with a lot of rich media, such as videos and images, or news articles
URL Structure
A URL is the web page or website address.
In the past, SEO specialists stuffed URLs with keywords in the hopes of ranking higher, but Google has made it clear that keywords in URLs carry little if any, weight.
Google, on the other hand, uses URLs to better understand the relevance of your content and crawl your website.
Furthermore, using proper URL syntax can assist website visitors in easily identifying their location on your website and understanding what a page is about.
A proper URL structure, according to Google, should be clean, logical, and simple:
- Avoid ID numbers or undescriptive, complex words, parameters, or numbering in URLs (e.g., don't do this: example.com/?id sezione=360&sid=3a5ebc944f41daa6f849f730f1).
- Keep URLs short: use short and punchy slugs rather than entire page titles (for example, klientboost.com/seo/duplicate-content).
- Use hyphens (not underscores) between words: hyphens make it easier for people and search engines to identify concepts in URLs (e.g., example.com/technical-seo, not example.com/technicalseo).
- Use https:// rather than http://: as previously stated, secure your site with an SSL certificate.
- Stop words should be avoided: words like the, or, a, and, or an only make URLs longer (for example, use example.com/seo rather than example.com/this-is-an-article-about-seo).
- Remove dates from blog posts: change (for example, "klientboost.com/seo/01/15/19/on-page-optimization" to klientboost.com/seo/on-page-optimization)
2. Crawl, index, and display
Make no mistake: the first step in ensuring Google can properly crawl and index your website is to optimize its architecture.
However, the following technical SEO responsibilities go beyond crawling and indexing to help Google better render your website in search results.
- Content duplication
- Data that is structured
- Robots.txt
Duplicate content
Duplicate content is any content that is identical on your site or on another site.
Not ancillary information is found in a site's header or footer but in large blocks of identical content.
While duplicate content is common (and expected in many cases), it can lead to poor rankings, less organic traffic, brand cannibalization, backlink dilution, and unfriendly SERP snippets if not managed properly.
Why is duplicate content considered technical SEO? Because most duplicate content issues are caused by technical errors such as server configuration or poor canonicals.
Furthermore, Google gives sites a limited crawl budget, which means that requiring them to crawl unnecessary duplicate pages risks exhausting that crawl budget before they get to pages that require indexing.
Schema structured data
Search engines use Schema.org markup to understand the meaning and context of your page.
Structured schema is also used by Google to populate rich snippets.
A rich snippet is a SERP result that includes additional information. It has been proven that rich snippets increase click-through rates.
Robots.txt
The robots.txt file is a file on your website that tells any web crawler (including search engines) how to crawl the pages on your website. It's also where you'll add a link to your sitemap.
Search engines (and other web crawlers) can be told not to crawl your website or a specific page on your website. You can also tell them to wait x seconds before crawling.
When it comes to technical SEO and your robots.txt file, the main goal is to determine whether or not Google can crawl the pages on your website.
For example, you wouldn't want Google to crawl and index a new website on a staging domain before pushing it live. However, once it's live, you'll want Google to start crawling it.
In both cases, you would instruct Googlebot when to begin crawling and indexing your website via your robots.txt file.
To do so, use the robots.txt syntax shown below:
- Disallow all web crawlers from accessing your site - User-agent: * Disallow: /
- Allow all web crawlers to visit your website - User-agent: * Allow: /
- Specific crawlers should be barred from specific pages - User-agent: Googlebot Disallow: /seo/keywords/
Finally, you can use the meta=robots HTML attribute to discourage search engines from crawling your website at the page level (rather than within your robots.txt).
For example, if you didn't want Google to crawl example.com/page-one, you would include the following code within the head> section of that page:
<meta name =”robots” content =”noindex/follow” />
If you didn't want search engines to follow the page as it navigated your site, you'd use "noindex/nofollow" instead.
3. Security
Will your website prevent a hacker from intercepting personal information given by visitors?
You should hope so. Otherwise, your rankings will suffer.
The good news is that website security is as simple as having an SSL certificate. That's all.
The SSL certificate
An SSL certificate ensures that the connection between your website and a browser is secure and encrypted for visitors. SSL stands for Secure Sockets Layer.
That means any personally identifiable information, such as a person's name, address, phone number, and date of birth, as well as login credentials, credit card information, or medical records, is safe and secure from hackers.
How do you determine whether your website has an SSL certificate?
SSL-enabled websites begin the URL with the https:// (Hypertext Transfer Protocol Secure) protocol, whereas insecure connections begin with the standard http:// protocol. In addition, secure sites display a closed padlock icon before their URL, whereas insecure sites do not.
Aside from security, why are SSL certificates so important?
First, Google ranks secure websites higher than non-secure websites. If you don't have an SSL certificate, your website will rank lower than those that do (all other things being equal).
Second, if your site is not secure, Google will display a "Not Secure" warning in the browser, eroding visitor trust and costing you visitors.
An SSL certificate can be purchased from any web hosting provider, such as GoDaddy, BlueHost, Wix or SquareSpace (comes with a website), or NameCheap. BizzDesign provides this as part of your hosting at no extra cost.
4. Usability
We've said it a hundred times and will say it again: what's good for visitors is good for Google.
That's because Google relies on visitors enjoying their search experience; otherwise, they wouldn't control 93% of the search market.
Without a doubt, website hierarchy and safe and secure encryption benefit the user experience, but Google wants every technical SEO specialist to focus on page speed and mobile friendliness, as both are explicit ranking factors in Google's algorithm.
- Page speed (site speed)
- Mobile-friendliness
- Core Web Vitals
Page loading time
Websites that load faster rank higher and sell more.
According to Google, page speed is a direct ranking factor, which means that faster sites outrank slower sites (all other things being equal).
Furthermore, slower websites convert significantly less traffic.
Why do slower pages convert at a lower rate? Because people do not have the patience to wait.
The most difficult (and technical) task of technical SEO may be increasing page speed.
We know exactly what you need to do to make your website faster:
- Enable browser caching: Browser caching is the process by which a visitor's browser saves a version of your website after it loads so that it does not have to reload it every time someone visits a page.
- Compress files: GZip data compression can be used to compress HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files. You can also use standard compression software to compress large image files before uploading them to your website.
- Consider a CDN: CDNs use a network of servers around the world, all of which store your website files, to load files from the closest server to the visitor.
- Minify JavaScript and CSS: By removing unnecessary line breaks and spacing from your code, you can reduce the amount of time it takes to parse and download your files. Fortunately, tools like CSS Minifier, HTML Minifier, and UglifyJS exist to automatically unify your code.
- Limit plugins: WordPress plugins are notorious for slowing down load times. Always delete inactive plugins and try to keep the number of plugins you use to a minimum.
- Use “next-gen” image formats: For many websites, slow page speed is due to large, web-incompatible image formats. Consider using "next-generation" image formats such as WebP (created by Google) or JPEG XR (created by Microsoft). Both are performance-optimized.
- Use asynchronous loading: Asynchronous loading allows web files to load concurrently (and faster), rather than one after the other.
Mobile Friendliness
A mobile-friendly website (or "mobile responsive website") is one that is as simple to load, view, and navigate on a mobile or tablet device as it is on a desktop.
What is the significance of mobile-friendliness?
Over half of all search queries are now conducted on a mobile device. Mobile-friendliness is now a ranking factor, according to Google. That is, mobile-friendly websites will rank higher than non-mobile-friendly websites (all other things being equal).
A mobile-friendly website has the following features:
Make it responsive: Instead of using mobile URLs (e.g., m.example.com), keep mobile versions on the same URLs and use breakpoints to adjust the dimensions and layout as the screen resolution decreases. (Google still supports mobile URLs, but they do not recommend them.)
Keep it fast: Compress large image files, limit the use of custom fonts, consider AMP pages (accelerate mobile pages), and minify your code. In the world of mobile, less is more.
Remove pop-ups: Pop-ups irritate visitors on a large screen, but on a tiny mobile device, it can feel like someone is smacking you in the face.
Make buttons larger: mobile visitors scroll with their thumbs, not a mouse. Make buttons larger and include plenty of white space around them so big thumbs can hit them.
Use a large font size: Never use a font smaller than 15px; it's too small to read on a mobile device.
Keep it simple: In many cases, you'll need to remove sections for a mobile viewport, or the tiny screen will become too cluttered with information. Trim where you can, but keep what's important.
Core Web Vitals
In short, Core Web Vitals refers to the three elements (all technical) that Google believes every website with a good user experience should have:
Fast loading (LCP): The time it takes for the largest element of a web page to load should be no more than 2.5 seconds.
Interaction with website (FID): The time it takes your website to respond after a visitor interacts with it (e.g., clicking a button, loading javascript, etc.) should be 100ms or less.
Stable visuals (CLS): You should limit the number of content shifts altogether (i.e. when sections of content actually move on the screen because other elements like advertisement blocks get loaded later). Any score greater than 0.1 requires improvement (scoring of CLS is not in seconds)
Final Thoughts on Technical SEO
Now that you know which responsibilities fall under the purview of technical SEO, you can begin auditing your website's technical foundation in search of opportunities to improve.
Need Further Help?
You can also seek help or hire BizzDesign, a team of Technical SEO Experts in North Brisbane to help you take your local business to the next level. You can reach us at