Technical SEO Basics: The EASIEST Guide On The Internet

If you think great content and backlinks are enough to make your website rank, think again. Without Technical SEO, your website is incomplete. Unless you have a robust framework, it is impossible to create a strong foundation for your website.

In many ways. Technical SEO falls within the On-Page SEO Services framework. However, most SEO experts unnecessarily complicate the process by saying it is an entirely different domain. This is not true. There are two components of SEO Services-

• Off-Page SEO
• On-Page SEO

There is no standard definition of what technical SEO stands for. However, SEO experts agree that technical SEO prepares favorable grounds for your content to rank and succeed. I always try to give the example of a human body when people ask me about technical SEO.

A human body needs to care for itself with proper amounts of sleep and the right levels of nutrition. It also needs to ensure that the internal organs are working properly. Unless all these conditions are met, no one will be able to work properly or perform to the best of their abilities.

Similarly, technical SEO optimizes the internals of your website to help you carry on the external processes better. The ultimate goal remains the same-

• Driving traffic to the website
• Increasing revenues
• Climbing the Search Engine Rankings Page (SERPs)
• Improving health and metrics

Educational qualifications, extra skill sets, and others that can be compared to Off-Page SEO. These are also equally important. However, without the right health, will you be able to pull 14-hour shifts? I guess not.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO basics would be incomplete if I didn’t answer the most common query about the same. I think people generally confuse technical SEO with off-page, and that’s just funny!

See, it’s simple! The point of technical SEO involves improving a website to ensure it is easy for search engines to find, comprehend, and manage your content. Moreover, it also includes several factors that revolve around user experience, such as making your site faster and optimized for smartphones. 

If done right, then technical SEO can improve your overall visibility in SERPs (search engine result pages).

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

TBH, it can literally make or break your overall SEO performance. So, if your website’s pages are not accessible for search engines, then they will not appear in SERPs – it doesn’t matter how helpful your content happens to be. 

This, in turn, leads to a fall in organic traffic on your website – and not just that, it also impacts your business revenue. In addition, a website’s mobile-friendliness and speed are popular ranking factors. 

So, if your web pages take time to load, then users might get annoyed, leaving your website in the process. Moreover, such user behavior typically might signal to crawlers about how your website is failing to create a positive experience for users. Also, you will see that your website is failing to rank on search engine result pages. 

Additionally, to gain a better understanding of technical SEO, we need to know more about two crucial processes:

1. Crawling.
2. Indexing.

1. How Does Crawling Work?

Crawling is one of the most essential components behind the running of search engines. When a search engine follows links on webpages, they are already aware of finding web pages it has not checked before. 

For instance, every time I publish a new blog on Search Engine Magazine, I add the link to our main page for blogs. So, the next time Google crawls my site’s main blog page, it can check the links recently added to the new blogs. And that is one of the methods by which the search engine giant discovers new blogs. 

On that note, there is more than one way to ensure your web pages are accessible to major search engines: 

• Create a website architecture that is SEO-friendly. 
• Once you have a sitemap, submit it to Google. 

2. How Does Indexing Work?

Once a search engine finishes crawling your web pages, it tries to analyze and understand the actual content on the same pages. 

And then the same search engine goes on to store the same pieces of content in its database – a huge search index that contains millions of webpages. Yep, so the thing is: search engines have to index your webpages to appear in the search results. 

So, how can you check whether a page is indexed or not? For instance, if you want to check the indexing status of Search Engine Magazine, type “site:www.searchenginemagazine.com” into Google search. 

This will roughly give you an idea about how many webpages from your website have been indexed by Google. Also, you can use the same formula to check whether individual webpages have been indexed by Google or not. 

In addition, if you face difficulties while indexing your web pages on Google, then you can do the following:

• Add canonical tags wherever needed. 
• Make careful use of the Noindex tag. 

Technical SEO Basics: What Top Ten Technical SEO Terms To Look For?

Your website might have the best content on the internet. It might also have hundreds of quality backlinks. However, if it is not optimized from a technical SEO point of view, you might experience:

• Lower search rankings
• Lesser amounts of traffic
• Low levels of visibility and discoverability
• The decrease in metrics and SEO scores
• De-indexing by search engines.

If we do not want our website to suffer the above problems, we need to optimize ten technical SEO issues.

1. Page Loading Speed:

Nothing depresses search engines and users more than a website that does not load fast. A website with a slow loading speed increases bounce rates. It also contributes to Google lowering the website in search rankings.

TTFB or ‘Time To First Byte’ directly impacts search rankings. According to Quicksprout, more than 40% of people leave a website if it does not load in under 3 seconds. With so much information on the internet, no user is going to wait for your website to load. People and search engines expect instant information.

Experts have coined a term for changing search rankings based on slow loading speed- ‘Pogo Sticking’. From your hosting platform to images that are not optimized, all can contribute to slow loading speed.

2. Mobile-Friendly Websites:

One of the best things about the digital industry is its emphasis on making everything dramatic. When Google announced its 2015 update stressing the importance of mobile responsiveness, the industry termed it ‘MobileGeddon’. (I hope you get the reference to Armageddon- end of the world, Bruce Willis, Ben Affleck, anything?).

The emphasis Google places on mobile-friendly websites stems from the fact that mobiles outnumber desktop internet usage 3:1. This is a huge number. If 60% of all searches are happening on cell phones, Google needs to consider it strongly.

Google also announced a ‘Mobile First Indexing’ approach to all websites in 2015. If you are a brand, optimizing your website from a mobile point of view should be right at the top of your checklist. A mobile-friendly website offers great performance metrics.

(Search rankings work differently on desktops and mobile phones.)

3. Safety And Security Are A Top Priority:

In 2017, the ‘Wannacry’ malware affected 400,000 machines in 150 countries. The total damage? $4 billion! Google places a lot of emphasis on website security and considers it of the utmost importance.

Most cyber-attacks happen because of third-party malware transferred to a user’s computer when they open a website. This is the reason why Google is keen on HTTPS websites as opposed to HTTP websites.

SSL encryption is critical when it comes to Google assessing how safe and secure your website is. If you are an e-commerce company or handle data related to the finances of consumers, site security is of paramount importance.

4. Duplicate Content:

Striving for quality, informative, and log format content should be the second step. The first step should be to ensure that whatever content you have on the website is original. A strong component of technical SEO is locating duplicate content and addressing it.

There are ways in which you can eliminate duplicate content from the website from a technical point of view. Most of the big e-commerce companies use complex technical programming to overcome the problem. However, if you cannot follow them, you can simply use Copyscape and locate the duplicate content.

You can ask your content writer to rewrite those parts, and you will be good to go. Google finds no value in showing such information to users. Worse, duplicate content can lower your metrics or contribute to your site getting de-indexed.

5. Robots.txt:

I was at a conference on SEO best practices in late 2016. The topic of the Paper Presentation was how SEO experts frequently overlook the role of robots.txt. One of the speakers drew an analogy between robots.txt and a house usher.

Even after nearly three years, I still think about the analogy. Robot.txt helps Google’s crawlers and bots access various sections of your website. These are sections that you want search engines to index, and other pages, which you don’t want them to index.

Robots help the crawlers, spiders, and bots crawl through your website and find-

• Content
• Keywords
• Images
• CTAs
• Backlinks
• Internal Links

They are a very crucial and important part of technical SEO and help contribute immensely towards optimizing performance.

6. Optimize Your URLs:

A URL is like an address for several sections within your website. For search engines, the URL plays a key role in determining the content of a particular page. A search engine typically sees and aligns the following things-

• URL Description
• Meta Description’
• Title Tags
• Focus Keyword
• Keywords in H1 and H2

If all these things correspond to one particular topic, it represents the best possible impact on Google. The alignment between all the above is necessary for your content to rank on Google.

The URL structure also corresponds to you having just one version of your website.

For example, many websites have different identities, like:

• http://www.mysite.com
• http://mysite.com
• https://mysite.com
• https://www.mysite.com

These are four different versions and four different identities of one website. You need to check if your site is suffering from similar problems and eliminate them immediately. According to experts, 310 Redirects are the most effective way to do this.

7. Employ The Right Hosting Service Provider:

I once had an Australian client who owned a chain of restaurants. In one month, I was able to fix 90 percent of his SEO. From changes in content to crawling, getting over a hundred quality backlinks, optimizing images, videos, and everything.

However, despite everything, the page loading speed was abysmal. I had asked him about his hosting plan and was happy to hear his response. A few days late, I was going through some data and noticed that his hosting server was based in Canada.

If you are running a business in a particular geographical location, make sure that the server’s location is also there. There is technical wizardry that is involved in the explanation. However, for people who are not so adept, you can ensure the following requirements-

• Always select a dedicated hosting service.
• Ensure that the server is located within your geographical location.
• Pay importance to the SSL encryption provided by your hosting service provider.
• Check the facilities for ‘Automatic Data Backup’ every day.

8. Optimize 404 Pages On Your Website:

If users request a page from your website from the server, and it is not delivered to them, the server will return a 404 Error Page. Simply put, the fewer 404 error pages on your website, the better its performance will be.

There might be several reasons why the 404 pages were shown to users. These can range from deleted content to server malfunction to wrong configurations owing to improper coding. You need to ensure that your site has no 404 pages at all. Google takes websites with many 404 pages to the task.

Some penalties that you might experience from 404 can decrease your site’s metrics. Or even contribute to de-indexing.

9. Schema Mark-up In HTML:

Many SEO Services often ignore the small points when it comes to implementing the perfect technical SEO strategy. ‘If it does not contribute directly to page rankings, why bother?’ is their attitude.

Yes, schema markup in HTML does not have any direct impact on page rankings. However, schema markup helps search engine bots access your content in a better manner. The biggest advantage of schema markup is helping create snippets.

Snippets are highly useful when it comes to displaying concise and precise search results. In addition to YouTube videos ranking exponentially well on search, snippets are doing equally well.

10. Content Optimization:

Once you have been able to sort the above issues, it is now time to make your content talk. This is where you need to optimize pages for keywords and rankings. Mix up the content with images, videos, infographics, and case studies,

Content optimization involves optimizing the:

• Title Tags
• Meta Descriptions
• Focus Keywords

I have already mentioned that search engines look for alignment between several key markers. Once they see that the alignment is there, they promote the page on the search rankings. It is important that you pay attention to this part of technical SEO.

You can also check for favorable backlinks when you are doing content optimization. By linking credible pages externally, as well as internally, you can push the right kind of content on search engines.

Read Also:

• Future SEO: How Will Search Engine Algorithms Shape The Future Of Organic SEO?
• Omnipresent SEO: Is This Modern SEO Approach Worth The Hype?
• How AI Is Transforming Seo Strategies In 2025