Crawler Face-off: Xenu vs. Screaming Frog
Sometimes, you just need a desktop crawler to get the job done. In this post, former champion Xenu takes on newcomer Screaming Frog.
Technical SEO
Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.
On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.
MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.
The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.
Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.
Most Recent Articles on Technical SEO
Why Is Google Not Using Your Meta Description?
Sometimes, you may wonder where Google gets your search snippets. You can't always control what Google uses, but you can nudge them in the right direction.
J
Dealing With Faceted Navigation: A Case Study
Faceted navigation is a pain in the @&$. Seriously. But then I looked to an authority site who I assumed HAD to be using faceted navigation to supply users with dozens of different kinds of combinations of different products: Amazon.com. This behemoth site is on nearly all of my search queries, not excluding the desired search terms of my emp...
Duplicate Content: Block, Redirect or Canonical - SEO Tips
Duplicate content in SEO has been around for quite some time and even if Google has been saying they have been getting smarter and smarter in figuring out the best page to display in the SERPS from a list of duplicate content pages. They claim that it is something less to worry about today, than before. But knowing this issue exist, they ...
Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
Moz Academy Training
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Keyword Research Master Guide
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
Catastrophic Canonicalization
The Canonical Tag is a powerful tool in the SEO arsenal, used wisely, but used improperly, just one line of code can destroy a site's search traffic. An experiment showing just how bad the damage can be.
Three Ways to Create a Better Performing Website (Using One Sneaky Tactic)
A particular feature of the way the web and web browsers are designed, gives us an opportunity to make our websites more usable and increase conversions. This post shows you how.
Working with Navigation in SEO [SEO Fundamentals]
Building a solid foundation in your site architecture using search engine friendly navigation is a founding principle in good search engine optimization, but what does that actually mean, and what recommendations can you make to enhance your clients (or your own) SEO? In this article, we’ll look at a few examples of well coded, search friendly navigation and look at ways to enhance your site architecture for SEO.
7 Types of SEO Evidence
We've had a lot of discussions recently about SEO as a Science. I'd like to step back for a few moments today and talk about the different kinds of SEO evidence.
M
URL Rewrite Smack-Down: .htaccess vs. 404 Handler
The mod_rewrite engine is a popular weapon for URL rewriting and redirection, but there are times (but not all times!) when it's easier, faster, and generally mo' bettah to tackle this in your 404 handler.
A Simple Guide to .htaccess
The .htaccess file on mod_rewrite enabled servers (usually Unix-based but sometimes decent Windows hosts) can be an SEOs dream (and sometimes nightmare). The small file that should be found in the root folder is what you will use to fix a lot of the crawling errors with rewrites and redirects. On small, static sites, they can even be used to create more usable, pretty URLs. An introduct...
M
Canonicalization: How to Fix Common Issues
Why is canonicalization important & how do you implement it on your site? Here are steps for creating 301 redirects in Apache, IIS, PHP, JSP, ASP and Coldfusion.
SEO Health Checks - Regular Housekeeping Tasks for Your Website's SEO
Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performan...
Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience
We've been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week's Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about h...
The Elements of an HTML Link
Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I'd like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag's attributes.