Technical SEO is an important piece of the puzzle. You can’t win the SEO game without it. This guide will help you understand the basics of technical SEO.
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Technical SEO Basics
It’s the medium that connects you with a web server and shows you the content. You enter a URL into the address bar (it does its things) and sends a GET request to the server. Sever processes the request and responds back with a status code and with other information in the Response Headers along with the the content (HTML body).
Web crawlers aka spiders or bots are the systems that search engines use to download the content from any websites.
Each browsers and crawlers have a distinct string that can identify the browser and crawler. You can add rules for specific user agents which may/may not be respected by them.
A plain text document exists on the root folder of any website named robots.txt can control the access of the web crawlers on your website.
Among all the search engine crawlers, Googlebot is the most famous user-agent used by Google for web search.
When client sends a request to the server it sends some additional information (Request Headers) to the server, on the other hand server sends back additional information too (Response Headers) along with the response body.
When any client sends request to the web server, web server reports back the status of that request with a range of codes (from 1xx to 5xx) known as HTTP status code.
Crawling is the process of sending HTTP request to the server and downloading the response body (HTML) sent by the server.
Rendering is the process of converting HTML into pixels by fetching and executing JavaScript and getting the full content for ranking consideration.
When the rendering is completed, now it’s time to make the decision for search engines whether to keep the page in their storage/memory (index) to show in the search results for related queries later.
HTML Standard
HTML Standard tells us the best practices for writing better HTML for the web. Learn more about HTML Standard. WHATWG maintains the HTML standards.
HTML <head> Element
A critical element of HTML, that can impact the visibility of any web page in the search results. You can break it easily without even knowing, if you place invalid elements in the <head> section that can cause issues with search engines. Learn more about HTML <head> Element.
Source HTML
The initial HTML that server sends to the search engine crawlers and browsers is the Source HTML or Response HTML. Learn more about Source HTML.
Document Object Model
Document Object Model aka DOM is an important part of web browsers and JavaScript-enabled content. It’s the browser’s mind model about the structure of the HTML document. Learn more about Document Object Model (DOM).
Rendered HTML
After the Response HTML is parsed, and all the Javascript executed, the DOM is then updated with all the new content and that new HTML is the Rendered HTML. Search engines use the rendered HTML for indexing. Learn more about Rendered HTML.
Pagination
An important topic that matters a lot for ecommerce websites. Make sure you use self-referential canonical tag for each paginagted pages, do not canonicalise them to the first page of that series. Learn more about Pagination.
Meta Tags
In the <head> section of the HTML we can provide metadata for the crawlers to use. These tags go the <head> section of the HTML document. Description, Robots, Viewport tags are some example of the meta tags. Learn more about Meta Tags.
Hreflang Attribute
If you’re multinational company targeting multiple languages and international visitors on your website(s), hreflang is a must-have for you to be successful in International SEO. Learn more about Hreflang.
HSTS Header
To strengthen the security of the website, reducing Man in the Middle attacks, HSTS header is a good solution. You can even preload your website to the Chrome list, so that HTTPS is always forced from the first fetch. Learn more about HSTS Header.
Nosnippet and Data-nosnippet
To exclude the content of the pages from showing in the SERP, no-snippet can be implemented. Learn more about Nosnippet.
JavaScript SEO
You can’t ignore JavaScript, while HTML and CSS are staple for the web, JavaScript adds interactivity to it. When using JavaScript frameworks, you need to make sure the main content is visible to the web crawlers in the rendered HTML. Learn more about JavaScript SEO.
Sitemap
Sitemap helps web crawlers find the important content of your website that you want to show in the search results. You can have sitemap written in HTML, XML and Plain Text. Learn more about Sitemap.
Log File Analysis
The server log file tells you what crawlers/systems access your website and when. It can show interesting data points how Googlebot crawls/accesses and can open up opportunity to fine tune your website architecture, find out loophole where your crawl budget are wasted and better spent. Learn more about Log File Analysis.
Crawl Budget
Crawl budget is the concurrent connections of Googlebot on your website and how much time it spends on your website. When your website has hundreds of thousands of pages, Googlebot may not want to crawl all of them. No crawling equals to no indexing! Learn more about Crawl Budget.
Breadcrumbs
It’s the path navigation for any given page on your website, that helps visitor to navigate between parent/child, category, and other pages in this same cluster. Learn more about Breadcrumbs.
Core Web Vitals
No ones love websites that load really slowly, that results in a really bad user experience. Your website should load reasonably faster, and Core Web Vitals give you the data points how your website performs and what you can do to improve the loading speed. Learn more about Core Web Vitals.
Canonicalization
One of my favorite topics when it comes to technical SEO. You can have multiple pages with similar or duplicate contents, and you can prioritize one of them to show in search results with rel=canonical tag, that is called canonicalization. Learn more about Canonicalization.
IETF and RFCs
IETF is a body that provides best practices for the internet in document format called RFC. Learn more about IETF and RFCs.
X-Robots-Tag
It’s a HTTP Response Header sent by the server that can control the visibility of any page in the search results. It’s the alternative way of using noindex, nofollow robots meta tag that we use in the meta robots tag in the <head> section of the HTML. This tag is often used for the other file format than HTML. Learn more about X-Robots-Tag.
W3C Validation
W3C – Wide World Web Consortium lets you validate HTML code so that you can follow the HTTP Standard. You can identify which part of the HTML is problematic and requires to be fixed in order to properly parsed by search engine crawlers like Googlebot. Learn more about W3C Validation.
Client Side Rendering
When the content of a webpage needs to be rendered on client side aka browser, it is called Client Side Rendering or CSR. It’s the most common rendering strategy, but if your main content requires Javascript to fetch and execute, CSR is going to be a problem.
Before You Go …
Hopefully you now have the understanding of the technical SEO basics that will give you a head start.