What is Technical SEO at Google? Best Practice Guide

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Many people believe that SEO technologies Google is harder, especially when it comes to code. In fact, the commonly used technical SEO do not require high technology, even if you have a background in the liberal arts, you can easily start this job.

Behind the difficulties, I think a lot is the working environment: the lack of opportunities to play sports. For example, some companies mainly promote one corporate website. An SEO-savvy person on the marketing team who has already fixed all technical SEO errors after joining the company, subsequent updates to the Google algorithm or technical problems that occur when updating the site, naturally, everyone is looking for them by default.

This will create a situation like this: new SEOs who come later only need to do a good job of building content, inbound links and brand reputation. Therefore, in order to better master technical SEO, you still need to practice. I hope everyone who reads this article can take action.

The content of the article:

• 1. What is Google Technical SEO and why is it important
• 2. Inventory the 12 Most Used Technical SEO Points
• A Few Tips for Learning Technical SEO on Google

1. What is Google Technical SEO and why is it important

SEO work is usually divided into three parts: internal SEO, external SEO, and technical SEO.

On Page focuses on content quality, off-page — on external links and brand reputation, and Technical - on the architecture and technology of the website, which makes it easier for search robots to crawl and index every part of the website page and provide users with a convenient browsing experience.

Let's take an example to better understand the importance of technical SEO: You wrote a very high quality article, but this article has a noindex tag set by mistake, search engines won't index it, so you can't get the SEO ranking and its traffic.

The external big (X) forwarded and shared your article and provided a link to the source text, but due to the fact that the speed of access to your site is very slow, users left after visiting and found that the page could not be loaded for long time. These are missed opportunities due to technology not handling it properly.

Technical SEO Google includes a wide range. Here I mainly promote which technical SEO points are important, why they are important and how to apply them with examples. Each technical moment must be fully mastered, and there will be a lot of knowledge, and everyone needs to deepen it in practice. The article is very long, and learners who already have a certain foundation can quickly jump to areas you don't know enough about with the help of the table of contents.

2. Inventory the 12 Most Used Technical SEO Points

1. Robots.txt file

If your site has a robots file, Google will crawl it first when entering the site. The role of the robots.txt file is to tell crawlers which URLs on your site are accessible.

The robots file is not required. If you want search engines to visit all pages of your site, you can leave the robots file unset. But I would recommend having it, because the robots file can effectively prevent Google and Yandex from crawling similar pages, as well as reduce server load by blocking unimportant pages.

Two examples:

An advertiser copied a product page for A/B testing, but changed a particularly important variable, and page content is often repetitive. In this case, it's obvious that we don't want search engines to crawl the frequently repeated B-pages. We can then put all the B-pages used for ad testing into the http://xxx.ru/ad/ directory and then block all pages in the ad directory via the robots.

If you do not plan to do SEO and ban pages that do not affect SEO, you can block them through the robots.txt file to reduce server load when spiders crawl the site.
Robots.txt must be located in the root directory, URL http://xxx.ru/robots.txt. You can see it right now by adding robots.txt to your competitor's domain name to see which pages they are blocking.

The interpretation is: Anker allows all search engine crawlers to crawl pages, except those with /coming-soon in their URLs.

Note: pages blocked by robots.txt can be indexed. If Google sees that other sites are linking to a page blocked by robots, there is a good chance that it will continue to index it. If you want to completely block it, you need to use the noindex meta tag. Next, let's talk about how noindex is used.

2. noindex meta tag

The purpose of the noindex tag is to tell search engines not to index or display the page in search results. Pages with this tag can really be sure that they are completely blocked.

3. XML sitemap file

The last line of code in many websites' robots.txt file points to that site's sitemap file. How important is a sitemap?

In fact, a sitemap and robots files are not needed for the site. If your website is small (<500 pages as defined by Google) and contains all internal links, you don't need a sitemap. Many small corporate B-side websites overseas are single page, so they don't need sitemaps, of course.

I recommend having a sitemap in addition to a one page website. The role of a sitemap is equivalent to providing Google/Yandex with guidance telling Google/Yandex which pages are on the website. In my own experience, the benefits of sitemaps for me are that they can speed up and ensure that a page is included in searches.

I will tell my own story. One day a customer sent me a product page that I had never seen before (there are thousands of articles on our site) and asked me why he couldn't find it on Google and Yandex. I checked and found that this page is indeed not included in either Google or Yandex.

It is assumed that this was a product that was launched in batches many years ago. The product is very generic and it hasn't received much traffic since launch and there is no external linking website to link it to. So I added a link to this product to the sitemap and two days later I was able to find it in the search. Sitemaps can be created by website plugins or third-party sitemap tools.

Note: There are two types of sitemap files for websites. One is for search engines, the URL suffix is .xml, the other is for users, the URL suffix is usually .html.

4. Site speed

Web page loading speed is an important factor influencing SEO ranking, so it is the responsibility of an SEO promoter to regularly monitor web page speed, when the performance is bad, you need to ask the IT staff for optimization information.

A commonly used web page speed testing tool is PageSpeed ​​Insights. This tool will also give specific optimization suggestions to improve website speed. It doesn't matter if you are tech and coding savvy or not. This is not something our SEO staff should understand. Simply send the test results page to the IT department to let them know that it needs to be improved.

Generally, images and servers have the biggest impact on speed. Therefore, you need to pay more attention to the size of the image.

5. Structured data

Structured data makes it easier for Google to understand the content of your pages and products, and allows Google to create rich snippets of search results for your pages. Why is this possible? Google does not guarantee that rich snippets will always be displayed when adding structured data. But if you don't, then it won't.

Multimedia results are achieved through structured data. Featured snippets can increase your click through rate and drive more SEO traffic. At the same time, an increase in CTR will indirectly improve SEO rankings!

If you haven't added structured SEO data yet, contact your web developer right away. Structured data configuration can usually be quickly implemented using website plugins (CMS), if you can't find a suitable plugin, you can send official Google guides to developers.

6. 404 pages

A 404 page indicates a state in which the page no longer exists. A 404 page complicates the user experience, it also compromises the integrity of the site and prevents Google from crawling and accessing the site. A large number of 404 pages appearing on the site in a short period of time will directly affect the SEO ranking.

There are many reasons for a 404 page, and every company's environment will be different. For example, products that were EOL are removed directly from the shelves; categories are adjusted and some of the original categories no longer exist; the url generation rule is to name the product name and when the product name changes, the url will also change accordingly, and so on. Here it is recommended to understand the common causes of 404 pages and refer them to the appropriate operators in order to avoid them when making changes to the site.

The 404 page makes sense, it can't be completely reversed. In other words, we allow a small number of 404 pages to exist, but we must control that their proportion is very low and work well on 404 pages for the next visit to the website.

For pages that are not available, perform a 301 redirect to go to similar pages or home pages. If there is no redirect and the page is not important, it can exist as a 404 page.

7. 301 redirect and 302 redirect

Most SEOs are familiar with 301s and 302s. So what's the difference between the two and how do you use them?

A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect and is often used to redirect a domain name, it can transfer much of the weight accumulated in front of a web page to a new URL. A 302 redirect is temporary, doesn't convey weight, and has few practical uses.

You can use third party tools to find out if a page has a 301 or 302 status.

It is recommended that SEO ranking pages avoid 301 redirects as much as possible. I have a page that I promoted heavily, and after going to a 301 redirect (just by changing the URL, the content of the page stays the same), the ranking drops straight from the top three to the fifth. And the more intense the external competition for the keywords promoted by the page, the more obvious the impact of the redirect on the ranking.

8. Canonical Address

Canonical is also a tag widely used in SEO. It is typically used when the content of multiple URLs on a website is the same or repeats frequently. You can tell search engines which version of the URL you want to display in search results using the canonical tag to avoid weight dissipation.

Like the noindex tag, the canonical tag must also be placed in the header of the web page. The link in the code is the page that will appear in the search results.

9. HTTPS security protocol

The secure https protocol is a lightweight ranking signal that Google will index if your site uses http. But the importance of https has more to do with keeping users safe while browsing a website.

For example, when the churn rate of a website's payment page suddenly skyrocketed. In this case, the problem was caused by a revision of the payment page, which changed the URL of the payment page from https to http. Many browsers will have a security warning for http pages, and customers will worry that the payment on the current page is at great security risk and will be lost. After fixing https, the churn rate of the payment page will also return to normal.

Now almost all commercial sites have been transferred from http to https. If your site or some pages have not been updated, now is the time to do so.

10. Google Search Console

Google Search Google is a tool officially released by Google that is very useful for monitoring the impact of SEO traffic and website performance.

Many master optimizers use this tool less or don't even know such a tool exists. If your website does not have Google Google search configured, you can access the URL https://search.google.com/search-console and install and deploy it according to the relevant instructions.

11. Google Tag Manager (GTM)

Google Tag Manager is a code tag management system that can be used to deploy various website tracking codes. It is characterized by very powerful features that can be deployed quickly, easily and in large quantities, while significantly reducing website code redundancy.

The niche widely used by Google Analytics can also be deployed through Google Tag Manager. Setting up advanced e-commerce is still quite difficult, so you need to hire a data expert who understands this and the company's IT department to work with the company's IT department for deployment.

After setting it up, you need to learn how to explore and use it yourself, this will allow you to understand that GTM is really convenient and easy to use! Especially when you need to deploy the tracking codes of various ad platforms, you can easily work in the background of GTM without the need for developers.

12. New web pages and old content updates were not included in the index, how to check and achieve inclusion

The technical SEO knowledge required here is an understanding of how Google crawls, indexes, and ranks pages.

If a page cannot be crawled, it cannot enter the indexing stage. The reason why the webpage is not being crawled can be due to technical SEO like robots.txt, noindex, 404 and the canonical tags mentioned above.

A Few Tips for Learning Technical SEO on Google

The above overview is commonly used in the work of most SEOs, but due to the large number of use cases, it is not possible to explain them in detail. I hope that by providing a few ideas for learning about technical SEO, you can better understand and expand your knowledge:

• The Google Search Center is a very good comprehensive learning platform: https://developers.google.com/search/docs.
• SEO is dynamic, such as the canonical tag that changed from 100% effective to the current one that doesn't work when page similarity is not very high. Therefore, you need to pay attention to the latest changes in SEO and keep your SEO knowledge up to date.
• Many SEO technical issues require the help of website developers, so many are usually good at them; you can also create Terms of Reference, Website SEO Specifications for Developers to effectively avoid SEO violations due to website changes.
• As for technical SEO, it also needs to be studied and applied at work. Having mastered it, you will understand that it is not difficult. And also it can be done very easily even with zero technical base.

If you have a different experience with technical SEO or would like to add your own examples other than the above 12 points, please leave a comment.

Reading this article:

• Sitemap XML - how to add a sitemap to Google and Yandex Webmaster
• How to create a robots.txt file for a website - correct robots

Thanks for reading: SEO HELPER | NICOLA.TOP