Technical SEO - the Basics

Hi all, I am back with a weekly post on Growth Hacking based on the minidegree I am doing with CXL. 

Let's dive right in and start with the basics of technical SEO.The objectives for this course are four different ones. First of all we're going to learn what is important in a technical audit for SEO and how to do one yourself. We'll talk about the tools that you're going to be needing at the beginning of your technical SEO audit. In the second one, we're going to learn the basics of the HTML. The third and fourth objectives are going to be about what kind of meta tags are important on an HTML page and where to put them. And as for the last objective, we're going to make sure that by the end of this series you know everything about optimizing on-page content with the right keywords and how this page could be structured for youto be best able to rank well in search engines. So let's dive right in and answer the question,what is technical SEO?

What is Technical SEO

It’s  all about identifying the issues, warnings, and errors that could hurt your performance within organic search. Organic search basically being the regular organic links that you will see on a search engine result page, aka the SERP.  We'll also talk about URL structures, internal linking, headings, SEO experimentation, and for the more international businesses out there, how to translate your content and how to best apply the methodologies in technical SEO that will help you to get the job done for international businesses. 

Why is technical SEO important and what are the goals of a technical audit for SEO? And what all brings it back together? Usually SEO as a technical aspect is the fundamental aspect of SEO because eventually if you don't know how to approach technical SEO the right way, it could really hurt the overall structure of all the other areas. Think of it as a pyramid. At the top of the pyramid you usually have authority. Building links and making sure that you have the right social signals to rank better overall. Then below that obviously you want to create content that at the same time is incredibly relevant to the things that you're doing there. But mostly, if anything above the fundamentals of SEO where the technical part comes in isn't done the right way,then it could really still hurt any of the other three criteria of technical SEO. 

Technical Audit

It is important to do a technical audit like at least once a quarter.There's so many new issues that come up and there's so many changes for the search engines that's it's going to be important to realize that a lot of changes happen during the quarter. But also at the same time, we're going to talk about a lot of different things that are going to be important for SEO. One of the first things to do is download the right tools and install the right tools. My preferred tool of choice these days for a quick SEO audit is Screaming Frog. The free version will allow you to crawl about 500 pages. In most cases that will often be enough for smaller sites, but also for bigger sites to find the actual fundamental SEO issues that are important for your actual site. To start off a crawl for a technical audit, open up Screaming Frog. We enter in the URL that we want to start crawling. After you fill in the full domain of your URL you'll hit start and Screaming Frog will automatically start crawling your website. In some cases it could take up to a few seconds. Something that we notice while the crawl is already running,is that on average it's crawling about nine to let's say 10 right now URLs per second.This is an important thing to realize this could impact your crawl.While you're crawling your own website it's important to realize that a crawler is basically visiting a lot of URLs at the same time.And you as a user can never visit 10 URLs every second. So this could have a significant impact on the load of your server for example .By default, Screaming Frog will crawl for about five pages a second in terms of their speed as the max number of threads. In this case we'll be adjusting this to let's say threeso there will be less load on the actual server. And because of that we will be resuming the crawland basically get all remaining results. Now you know how to start your actual crawlin Screaming Frog and what are the first things that you can find in there. Second, I also want to point you to two other tools that are free to use and that could give you instantly a lot of insights into your own site.The first tool is Google Search Consoleand the other one is Bing Webmaster Tools. While most search engine optimizers still focus their efforts on Google and can get a lot of insights through Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools is also one of the best tools out there to get more insights. Bing obviously on a daily basis is also crawling your website. And the data that you can get provided through Bing Webmaster Tools can be really useful for you to do more with and get you more insights. So now we know this, we can start answering some of the questions that we have. The first thing is have you really optimized your content before and thought about SEO while optimizing your site to begin with? You could be thinking about technical SEO, but have you also thought about all the other areas? And to think more about that,we're going to start talking a little bit about the structure of HTML pages and cover them in detail in the next post. Till then, keep learning and growing!