Technical SEO best practices
The Ultimate Guide to Technical SEO
When you think about Technical SEO best practices, you naturally think about Meta Tags and Fixing a couple of things on your webpage. Technical SEO is actually making your Website page readable for Google. But because your page has to be readable to humans, and enjoyable, Technical SEO has become the art of interweaving your message and structured data in such a way that you make the most of both worlds.
Technical seo is no longer just a checklist of issues to be fixed, but it has involved into something more. Carefully integrating hundreds of keywords into the right mix, has become a task for artificial Intelligence.
The use of artificial intelligence in Technical on page seo has created a new world of creating content on your website.
In this Guide I will be sharing the 14 Basic Technical SEO Items
The 15 Basic Technical SEO Items checklist
In the basic technical SEO checklist you will find everything that is obvious for a SEO Specialist to have in place

Basic Technical SEO is to ensure that your Webpage is Optimized to be make it as easy as possible for Search Engines to find the correct data on your website and includes the following 15 aspects:
Meta Tags
URL Structure
Page Speed
XML Sitemap
Robots.txt file
HTML, JavaScript and CSS
Structured Data
Mobile Friendly
Content
Core Web Vitals
Internal Linking
Optimizing 404 Pages and redirects
Alt Tags
Schema markup
Breadcrumbs
Meta Tags
The Title Meta Tag is most probably the most important instruction on your website, because it displays to Google what your page is about. Google does not specify the length of the title tag, but a good indication is that it should not be less than 30 characters and preferable be in the range of 50 to 70 characters.
The Description Meta Tag is a way of telling everybody, including the Search Engines, what your website is about.
No Index
Creating a Consistent URL Structure
It is essential that URLs follow consistent logically structures. It really helps the user know where they have are on the site. Platforms like WordPress are doing a great job of this.
The placement of your pages in various categories gives Google extra context regarding the pages in the categories you have listed above.
Ensure your Website Page Speed is good
In the beginning of the Internet, it was relative easy to build web pages. There was not very much information and people were used to slow internet connections. Nowadays there is an overload of information and people, as well as search engines, are looking for speed. If your website is not optimized for speed, visitors will simply click away, and this is bad for Search Engines.
JavaScript and CSS make it easier to develop websites and web applications, but it comes with a price. The price is slow websites. There are may ways to Speed Optimization, which is beyond the scope of this article.
When web content becomes richer and dynamic, page speeds become increasingly crucial for user experiences and a factor in ranking in search engines. Most often, the bigger the JavaScript that’s present at the site, the harder that the site can load.
Many Technical SEO Programs which offers a SEO Audit, will automatically check the Web Site and Mobile Speed Optimization. These tools then also offers solutions to these issues, and instructions on how to fix them.
XML Sitemap
a XML Sitemap is a page with a xml structure that lists all the pages on your website in an orderly fashion. This pages is essential to the SEO success of your page, and is required by Google.

When Google finds this page, they are able to find all the pages on your website and then index them in the Search Engine.
Once you have created a XML Sitemap, you should submit it to The Google Search Console.
If you have a registered Google Search Console Account, Google will give you a report on your indexed page, and the reason for pages which is not indexed. Simply put, if your page is not indexed, it will not rank or show up on Google.
Robots.txt file
Robots are crawling the Internet all the time and some or other time they come across your website, and will look for a robots.txt file to look for instructions on how to crawl your site. You can enable or disable certain web robot crawls in your website, including specific pages.
It is possible for robots to ignore these instructions, but in most cases they won’t.
You can also stop bots from indexing your website with ‘no index’ meta tags. These Meta Tags is an indication to Search Engines that you don’t want them to index these files.
There are also robots and spiders crawling your website with harmful intent. These scripts are designed to steal your website data. These scripts can not be stopped by a robots.txt file but there are other ways to handle them.
JavaScript and CSS
JavaScript and CSS is intended to make it easy for programmers to use libraries of code to make the website better looking and easy to navigate with a lot of bells and whistles. While this is great for designing, it normally comes wit a lot of backend script, that simply slow down your entire Website.
When Google looks at this, their algorithm will penalize your website and rank it lower. Having your website pages optimized for speed is essential. There are many tools and plugins that can assist you with this.
Mobile Speed Optimize your site if you want better rankings. This is the latest as so many people are using mobile devices to access the Internet.
When analyzing your website with the Business Direct Media SEO Tool, you can find out exactly what your website and mobile site speed is, and get instructions on how to fix this.
Structured Data
Having the content of your website structured in a specific way, makes it easier for your visitors to find what they are looking for and it also helps Google to find out how your site is structured and how they should interpret it.
Structured Data also help you to make more sense of your own information, and gives you opportunities to create information in an orderly fashion.
Structured Data also help you to get rid of duplicate content and help to improve your Page SEO.
A good Site Audit will help you identify issues within your structured data.
In short, you have to ensure that your page is broken up in <H1>, <H2> and <H3> tags with paragraphs in between. This helps to identify important headline and structure point below the headline in an orderly fashion.
Ensuring that your main keyword that you want to rank for appear in these Headings, will improve your SEO and tell Google what your page is about. This also helps to create a better user experience.
Mobile Friendly
Having your Website Mobile friendly is an important factor for your page seo.
Ensure that your website is responsive. Most people are using Mobile Devices and Tablets, and if your page is not responsive, meaning that it shrinks to fit these devices, people won’t be able to properly view your data.

Google is also getting more aggressive in their approach when it comes to mobile speed and readability. And it is obvious, that when visitors can’t properly read your website, they have a bad experience, and this reflects bad on Google who sent them there in the first place.
For a site to be mobile friendly, it also has to meet the speed requirements of the search engines, which you can determine by doing a seo audit.
In most of the SEO Audits that I do on a daily basis, mobile speed is a major issue in most of them. A site audit can help you identify the issues quickly.
Content
Content is playing a more important role in Search Engine Optimization than ever before. Web Pages need to have enough content and that is why you will see blog posts are becoming longer. SEO Specialists know that a blog post with a certain number of words will rank higher.
You can determine these word counts by using a program like Surfer SEO which will give you an indication based on the artificial intelligence count of the competitor pages.
Another major important issue in technical seo is having duplicate content. Duplicate content is very easy to detect, and when it is detected on your website, your website can be negatively influenced.
Your web pages should have authoritive, and fresh information, if you want it to rank well.
A web page who have too little content on, will not rank that well, unless it is very unique information. Content Count can also be detected in a site audit and the Business Direct Media SEO Tool, will show you exactly what is the optimum word count for your business web pages.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals was introduced by Google and is a way of creating a better experience for the visitor by means of user usability.
The three Core Web Vitals is performance, responsiveness, and visual stability.
Core Web Vitals can be measured by using Google Search Console and is also Integrated in the Business Direct Media SEO Tool. Do a SEO site audit to determine how your website is doing on this.
If you ask yourself, why is technical seo important, then this is one of the main reasons. If you want to show up in the top search results, you should pay attention to technical seo matters like the core web vitals.
Internal Linking
The majority of visitors have no trouble with finding your obvious first line of pages. But when it comes to websites that have acquired lots of information, it becomes essential to drive both visitors and robots to those deep lying pages. You can accomplish this by internal linking. This is simply a way to tell everybody where to find more relevant information

Internal linking also helps with the indexing of your website pages and contributes to your overall technical seo effort. A site Audit will also point out to you what the Internal and External linking structure is and how you should adjust it for optimum results.
Internal Links helps with building your site structure, makes it easier to navigate and help search engines find relevant information
Optimizing 404 Pages and redirects
A 404 page occurs when you follow a web page link that no longer exists. 404 Pages can damage the reputation of your website, and it can also damage your technical seo. A site Audit will identify the 404 pages and redirects on you website, and will make it easier to make corrections, and fix those pages.
Internal links are sometimes a major contributing factor to the creation of 404 pages on your website, when a page is removed. One removed page can cause a lot of broken links or 404 errors, and knowing where to find them is essential.
Identifying and fixing 404 pages is one of the essential best practices of Search Engine Optimization.
Removing a page or changing a page name can also create broken links from external sources. These are a bit more difficult to fix, unless, you make an effort to change the incoming link, or to create an additional page to catch that link.
Fixing 404 Errors helps search engines in better indexing and ranking , and it helps robots to crawl and index your website. It also help robots to better understand your website. The more of these errors that you fix, the better your organic search results will be.
Alt Tags
When placing images on your website, you have to have a way to identify and name those images in such a way that machines can read and understand them. This is a technical seo factor which is important if you want to rank higher in the search results.
The Business Direct Media SEO Tool will help you also see, not only where your web page ranks, but it will also help you see where your images rank.
By placing meaningful alt tags to your website images, you are adding a technical seo factor which will help you rank for images.
When your Images rank high, it brings more visitors to your website, but it must be relevant to the content of the page, otherwise they will leave quickly, your clickthrough rates will drop, and Google will mark you page as not relevant.
These are one of the on-page elements that can elevate your blog post and every page should have good images with meaningful alt tags.
Schema markup
Schema markup, also known as structured data, is the language search engines use to read and understand the content on your pages. By language, we mean a semantic vocabulary (code) that helps search engines characterize and categorize the content of web pages.

Schema markup, found at Schema.org, is a form of microdata. Once added to a webpage, schema markup creates an enhanced description (commonly known as a rich snippet), which appears in search results.
Snippets are very powerful ranking methods, as they are normally placed at the top of web pages and is extremely important to drive traffic from organic search.
How to implement Schema Markup to your website
Select the Type of Data. There are several options listed.
Paste the URL You Want to Markup.
Select the Elements to Mark Up.
Continue Adding Markup Items.
Create the HTML.
Add Schema Markup to Your Site.
Test Your Schema.
Breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are SEO-friendly. This is because breadcrumbs automatically insert a link to a category or sub page on your website. This will help with structuring a website architecture. Google is now using URLs for breadcrumbs in the SERPs.
Breadcrumbs also makes it easy for your visitors to find things on your website, it is good for technical SEO and structured data, and improves your site structure.

Technical SEO Frequently Asked Questions
How is technical SEO different from on-page SEO and off-page SEO?
On-page SEO refers to factors that you can put on your website page that will increase the probability of you ranking higher, while off-page SEO is the influence of factors from outside your website, and these normally refers to links that is pointing to your website.
On Page SEO is basically whet Technical seo includes.
What is technical SEO?
Technical search engine optimization or SEO is an action aimed at building a website for search engines. Most businesses utilize SEO to increase their ranking on search engines (SERPs).
Technical SEO could also be looked as a set of basic rules that needs to be implemented while creating content for your website.
Technical SEO helps with developing structured data
How can I improve my technical SEO?
Technical SEO is improving your website when you ensure that the basic rules of technical seo are followed.
One of the major influences that can help you rank better is to avoid duplicate content.
If you want to improve your website with technical seo, the first step would be to do a seo audit to check some of the on-page seo and off page seo factors.
If these errors are fixed you have a way much better chance of Search Engines crawling and indexing your website.
How can I Optimize my Website Speed?
One of the factors for your website crawling and indexing to take place is that your site should run at an optimal speed.

To determine the speed of your website, request a SEO Audit and then use the Business Direct Media SEO Tool to find out how to optimize your website and mobile site speed.
Page speed and especially mobile page speed is an important factor of Technical seo. When you site has a slow page speed, that page on your site would most probably not rank as well as it is suppose to. Just by increasing the page speed, you can let that page go up in ranking and bring more visitors to your site.
Increasing page speed is one of the best practices in any seo strategy and will increase the pages load time.
Having a good load time on the important pages will help Google to crawl and index your pages.
Should I have a Google Search Console Account for Technical SEO?
Having a Search Console account connected to your SEO Tools is very important because it reflects the data from Google on which all other decisions are made.
It will reflect the important pages and will show you every page that is searched on. The Search Console will also help you identify important pages which are under optimized. These are normally the easiest to rank high, and to bring you more website visitors. It is therefore an important element to seo technical optimization.
Google Search Console also help you find and fix pages that needs attention.
What are the Technical SEO Fundamentals?
Most of the technical fundamentals are covered by this article above, and if you study them and apply them you will be 90% there.

Using a good SEO Program, also helps you to identify the fundamentals which are not in line with what it should be, and will give you tips on how to identify and solve them.
Is a SSL Certificate Essential for Technical SEO?
A SSL Certificate is important to every website as it helps to keep your website safe from all sorts of problems.
It is therefore a part of technical seo in the sense that it influences the overall performance of your website.
What is Black Hat and White Hat SEO?
Black Hat SEO refers to the methods that are followed to manipulate Google in indexing and ranking your website. These are normally very bad for your website and can eventually lead to your website rankings being compromised.
If Google see you as applying Black Hat SEO practices, they will even drop your website completely from the rankings.
Many people try to present Black Hat practices, such as buying links, and placing links to irrelevant website, as legal, but it is not and will come back to haunt you in the long term.
White Hat SEO is normally referred to as the practice of building your website structure and information on practices preferred by Google.
Every now and then, Google has an update to bring websites more in line with their strategic core values. In these updates many websites loose their rankings. These are normally websites that was mainly build on black hat strategies, or that included black hat strategies.
Can I apply Technical SEO in blogging?
Not only can you apply technical seo in your blog, but it is essential if you want to drive lots of visitors to your website. Technical SEO will help you grow your blog and create content that is important to search engines.
Make sure you also add Google Search Console to your website and SEO Tools to help your technical seo efforts to produce better results.
Following a technical seo checklist will help you identify all the factors that you should implement.
How important is a XML Sitemap?
A xml sitemap is one of the most important factors as this determines how Google indexes and rank your websites. If the pages of a site is not indexed, there is no way that they will rank.
What is a Canonical Tag?
A canonical URL is the URL of the best representative page from a group of duplicate pages, according to Google. For example, if you have two URLs for the same page (such as example.com? dress=1234 and example.com/dresses/1234 ), Google chooses one as canonical.
How can Technical SEO help search results?
Technical SEO is what drives search results to your website as it is the method of optimize a web page to achieve top rankings on Google. A Top rank, normally drives a lot of traffic to your website. If your site is seo friendly, Google will rank it high in the search engines.
By doing a SEO Audit and finding the issues that needs fixing, you can improve your site structure through good Technical SEO. This will improve your website and tell search engines how to rank the pages.
Technical SEO through the help of Google Search Console is a very effective way to optimize a page on your site. This technical process will definitely drive your pages up the rankings by making them seo friendly.