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.
I've been working with a lot of newcomers to SEO lately thanks to our PRO membership Q+A (BTW - sorry for the delays, the volume's tripled in the last 3 weeks, so we're a bit overwhelmed). It's been a great learning experience and I've gotten to see many of the struggles and misconceptions that affect entrants to the subject. As a partial remedy, I thought I'd take some time tonight to cover a ...
There are some difficulties at the moment with how to manage large numbers of local listings. As the tools for managing local listings improve, this will all get easier, but there is a fundamental problem with the setup if you operate in multiple languages. The guidelines currently say that you cannot create multiple listings for an individual entity (business location in a city) - but each listing is just associated with a single URL which doesn't work well when you operate in multiple languages.
The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.
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Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.
I've been watching a lot more of the Dr. House show, and becoming a bit obsessed with some SEO mysteries of my own. Since our last outing into diagnosis went so well, I thought we'd try again. I haven't got either completely solved, but I feel pretty good about some hypotheses. Let's see how you...
Site after site that I visit lately has been showing a tendency for using footer links to run their internal SEO link structure and anchor text optimization. While this practice, in years past, held value, today I rarely ever recommend it. Here's why: Footer links may be devalued by search engines automatically Footer links are often not the first link on t...
It was quite by chance I stumbled upon this issue early last year, while working on a project (and to be honest, it was the team at Latitude that picked up on it). Basically, one of the sites I was working on with them had some serious bloat in search results, and after digging into the situation, the solution was pretty simple. Although I cannot mention the site here because of NDA’s, I can give you an example of a site that suffers the same problem, and hopefully will give you an idea into how to manage the problem for your own/client sites.
I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: in my opinion, the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)
A few days after new content shows up in Google, it will sometimes flicker out of the SERPS for a few hours. Apparently, this is common knowledge to some SEOs. This is not common knowledge to programmers like me, and I nearly made a tin foil hat in preparation for the googlicopters when I learned the project (Linkscape) that I'd worked on for months had disappeared from all SERPs on th...
Thanks to the SEOmoz Q+A, we get to monitor a lot of the hot button issues that hit the SEO world, and as Jane noted to me during a meeting today, they always seem to come in waves. The latest buzz (and flurry of questions) comes around the practice of PageRank Sculpting. We've discussed this topic in some detail previously on SEOmoz (...
If you are like most SEO's I meet, you are probably not doing the majority of the programming and development work for your clients or company. Those of us from the marketing side of the business frequently rely on professionals to do the heavy lifting during the implementation stages of an SEO campaign. I've had the privilege of working with very smart and talented web developers in my...
For the last few years, I've been doing some SEO on Apache sites. Suddenly, this year, I've had a clutch of IIS sites to handle and I'm seeing some puzzling and worrying things, which appear to be caused by the way that Microsoft defaults to "caseless" file systems. Worrying things as in "damaging to search engine results". I can't find any guidance from Micr...
Google's got a blog post out today (and SELand covers it) about how they now recommend that webmasters and site owners DO NOT rewrite their ugly dynamic URLs to be clean and static. What's the reasoning behind this? ...