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.
In the world of big brands and sites, SEO practices become part of a laundry list of developer tasks, often far beneath the threshold of serious attention. While folks in our industry have learned the detriment of ignoring the search engines' guidelines for crawling & ranking, in the world of the Fortune 1000's, there are hundreds of disbelievers. Thus, it's a great time to re-visit some co...
Nearly everyone in the world of search is familar with the examples of "miserable failure" and "click here" - two search terms in which the top results don't contain the search terms and rank solely on the strength of external links pointing to them with the corresponding anchor text. But after reviewing some backlinks pointing to Yahoo! today, I noticed quite a few adult-th...
I've lost count of how many clients have requested that music be playing in the background of their website. As a professional web developer with a few too many years of implementing ridiculous requests, I've acquired quite a knack for convincing a client that music is a bad idea. The...
I've been working over Labor Day weekend a bit, reviewing sites for clients (and friends) and continually find that site architecture best practices are being ignored. Since Monday isn't a holiday globally, I thought it would be worthwhile to provide a quick peek into what I'd recommend on the structural side of SEO: Dynamic URLs - If it's even remotely possi...
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Cloaking is a basic part of the SEO world, yet I think many of us ascribe its use to purely black-hat pursuits like spamming or tricking the search engines. In point of fact, cloaking can be used for entirely legitimate purposes. For example: Sites like the NYTimes, Salon.com & the Wall Street Journal will often show different content to search spiders than to human visit...
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. ...
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...
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." ...
SEOmoz has recently been interviewing applicants for a web developer position. Prior to conducting the interview, I wrote up a list of technical questions I wanted to ask. After interviewing, I decided to build upon this list and put together a larger one that everyone could use - both for interviewers and interviewees....
Drunk Men has put together the results of a one-year long experiment to monitor spider activity from the major three search engines. If you're watching crawling performance on big content sites, this is must read. Note their graph (in log-based scale) of relative levels of performance over time: ...
Using image replacements in a CSS driven site is becoming a very common practice. SEOmoz uses it all over the place - if you view the source of our homepage you'll see: <div id="what_is_seomoz"> <h1><span>What is SEOmoz?</span></h1> <p> SEOmoz i...
I've been wondering lately about whether comparing link attributes in HTML code would provide any value to the search engines. Testing's been done by SEOs in the past about the value of link titles (minimal if any) and rel attributes other than nofollow (nada), but I'm wondering about the target attribute, specifically. Currently, according to W...
Just wanted to start on a thread on the subject of internal 301 re-directs. What's been your general experience when re-directing a page or set of pages to the "canonical" or new version? How long have the engines taken to catch up? For us, I've noticed that Google takes between 2 and 6 weeks to recognize and properly index, although the rankings seem to follow fairly directly...