{"id":135,"count":4,"description":"<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technical SEO is one of the most critical and complex pillars of search engine optimization.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">An SEO specialist must be capable of intervening on the website and optimizing aspects such as:<\/span>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The page loading speed;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Presence of corrupted links and status errors;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">HTTP\/HTTPS protocols;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Security and vulnerabilities.<\/span><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">For this reason, as an SEO professional, you have to interface with developers. You must provide them with guidelines on how to optimize the website from a technical point of view.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">There's no shortcut: if you want to become an SEO expert, you have to know technical SEO.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Don't worry. With this guide, you can learn the basics of the craft.<\/span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technical SEO: definition<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Technical SEO is the process of optimizing the technical aspects of a website, facilitating the work of search engine crawlers.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How? By making a website more accessible and improving its speed, internal structure and security.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Sitemap<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Let's start with one of the most critical files for a website: the sitemap.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The sitemap is a file containing the hierarchical structure of the pages and files of the website.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The SEO sitemap is important because search engine crawlers use this file as a compass when scanning a website.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">It turns handy when the website has many pages, or they are not well connected (bad internal linking).<\/span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Robots<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The robots.txt file is a simple text file in the root directory of your website. It gives instructions to crawlers on how to access to specific resources and directories.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Search engines can decide whether or not to follow these instructions, which are no more than guidelines that the crawler could decide not to follow.\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Unlike web pages, we can use robots.txt to prevent access to search engines to:<\/span>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Media files (images, videos, audio).<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Resource files.<\/span><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can learn more about this by studying <\/span><a href=\"https:\/\/support.google.com\/webmasters\/answer\/6062608?hl=it\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener noreferrer\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Google's guidelines on robots.txt.<\/span><\/a>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Website performance<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Monitoring and improving the performance of your website is a job that has a significant impact on your ranking.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Why?<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A fast-loading website has positive effects on:<\/span>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Dwell time;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Bounce<\/span><\/i><span style=\"font-weight: 400\"> rate.<\/span><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">A faster site can provide a better user experience, which is critical for a good ranking.<\/span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How to improve the performance of a website?<\/span><\/h2>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Before you start optimizing your site, you should know what issues you need to solve.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You can use the SEO Tester Online tools, such as the SEO Checker and the SEO Spider.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<a href=\"https:\/\/suite.seotesteronline.com\/seo-checker\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">How fast is my site?<\/span><\/a>\r\n<h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meta robot<\/span><\/h3>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As we said, the robots.txt file does not prevent the crawler from accessing specific pages.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">If we want to exclude pages from indexing, we need to use the meta robots tag.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">What is it?<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Meta robots is a tag that allows you to control the indexability of a page.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meta robots looks like this and should be placed inside thetag of the page:<\/span>\r\n<pre><\/pre>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The meta robots tag consists of two attributes: name and content.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">With the name attribute, we define the crawler which we want to target with our statement (in the example above, the \"noindex\" statement applies to all search crawlers).<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">In the content attribute, we put the action we want the crawler to perform.<\/span>\r\n<h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">URL<\/span><\/h3>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">The URL is critical in technical SEO. As you may know, it should be SEO-friendly. But what does that mean?<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">An SEO-friendly URL should:<\/span>\r\n<ul>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Describe the content;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Include the main keyword for which we intend to position ourselves;<\/span><\/li>\r\n \t<li style=\"font-weight: 400\"><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Be short and easy to read.<\/span><\/li>\r\n<\/ul>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">An example of an SEO-friendly URL?<\/span>\r\n<pre><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">https:\/\/www.domainname.com\/blog\/main-keyword<\/span><\/pre>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As you can see, the URL is clear and easy to read. You can easily guess the structure of the website from it.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">You always prefer simplicity and clarity when you can. Users and crawlers appreciate it.<\/span>\r\n<h3><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Status codes<\/span><\/h3>\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">As we have already said, technical SEO is more complicated than other aspects of search engine optimization for those who do not have an adequate technical background.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">However, it is essential to understand concepts such as HTTP requests and status codes.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">When we try to visit a website, we send a request to the server that hosts it. After receiving the request, the server processes it and \"responds\" through specific messages: status codes.<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Any example?<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Even those who are not insiders encountered messages such as error 404 (Page not found) or error 502 (Bad Gateway).\u00a0\u00a0<\/span>\r\n\r\n<span style=\"font-weight: 400\">An SEO specialist must know all of them. You have to know how to interpret them and how to act when problems arise.<\/span>\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">HTTP\/HTTPS<\/span><\/h2>\r\nAn aspect that can affect the way Search Engines \"see\" a web site is given by the use of certificates authentication that guarantee its safety.\r\n\r\nAn SEO Specialist must comprehend the difference between HTTP (<em>HyperText Transfer Protocol<\/em>) and HTTPS (<em>HyperText Transfer Protocol over Secure Socket Layer<\/em>) and know how to configure certificates authentication via SSL or TLS.\r\n<h2><span style=\"font-weight: 400\">Rel Canonical<\/span><\/h2>\r\nIt's easy, surfing the Internet, to come across same pages that are reachable from different URLs.\r\n\r\nIn order to help Search Engines, the SEO Specialist should always select a \"canonical\" URL that the search engine should use to index that page.\r\n\r\nThe \"rel=canonical\" tag helps us to communicate to the search engine which URL we want to give the priority to, compared to the others.","link":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/blog\/technical-seo\/","name":"Technical SEO","slug":"technical-seo","taxonomy":"category","parent":0,"meta":[],"acf":[],"lang":"en","translations":{"en":135,"it":137},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories\/135"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/taxonomies\/category"}],"wp:post_type":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.seotesteronline.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts?categories=135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}