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

Computer Programming, Particularly Web Development, Is An Excellent Career Choice
Rand Fishkin

Computer Programming, Particularly Web Development, Is An Excellent Career Choice

A writer at the blog, Half Sigma, recently authored a post entitled - Why a Career in Computer Programming Sucks. I haven't taken the bait on one of these in a while and figured I'd throw in my two cents on why this obviously intelligent, articulate and experienced fellow doesn't what the @#$%! he is talking about. Let's first review his primary arguments: 1. Programming experience...

The Illustrated Guide to Duplicate Content in the Search Engines
Rand Fishkin

The Illustrated Guide to Duplicate Content in the Search Engines

If there's one issue that causes more contention, heartache and consulting time than any other (at least, recently), it's duplicate content. This scourge of the modern search engine has origins in the fairly benign realm of standard licensing and the occassional act of plagiarism. Over the last five years, however, spammers in desperate need of content began the now much-reviled process of...

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SEOs - Take a Note from PPC Specialists & Focus on the Ad Copy
Rand Fishkin

SEOs - Take a Note from PPC Specialists & Focus on the Ad Copy

One of the more remarkable developments over the last few years in SEO has certainly been the intelligence increase of Google & Yahoo! (and MSN to a lesser degree). From 1997-2002, a page really needed to be "optimized" for search engines in ways that differed from how they were "designed" for visitors. Bravo! to the engines for closing this gap - now, it's our turn to i...

Questions in SEO that I Can't Answer
Rand Fishkin

Questions in SEO that I Can't Answer

On occassion, I feel that my blog posts here may make it seem that I'm an insufferable know-it-all in the realm of SEO, which certainly isn't the case. To illustrate the point, I thought it would be revealing and worthy of discussion to bring up several questions to which I don't have good answers. Here goes: The Diminishing Value of Anchor TextThe theo...

5 HTML Elements You Probably Never Use (But Perhaps Should)
O

5 HTML Elements You Probably Never Use (But Perhaps Should)

This is a list of HTML elements I've found to be very poorly represented in most markup on the web today. Many of these elements offer more semantic value than actual functionality, but with the rising popularity of CSS driven design where HTML elements are used for what they were actually intended for, I felt shining a little light on them was appropriate. ...

Top 10 Fastest Ways to Squash a Spider
Rand Fishkin

Top 10 Fastest Ways to Squash a Spider

Are those pesky search engine robots crawling your site too much? Does the sight of even one result from a "site:" command at the engines boil your blood? Are you tired of seeing visitor after visitor trickle into your website from referrers like "Google", "Yahoo" and "MSN". Well worry no more, because below, I've listed the top 10 ways to keep those...

Subdomains, Subfolders and Top-Level Domains
Rand Fishkin

Subdomains, Subfolders and Top-Level Domains

Many of the client issues we've been working with recently have centered around canonicalizing, re-directing and structuring URLs for content. Marketing, sales, executives and IT departments all seem to have a unique viewpoint on these matters, making compromise and agreement especially difficult. For the purposes of this post, I'll focus solely on the "best practices." ...