Technical SEO
Summary
TLDRThis script delves into the critical aspects of technical SEO, emphasizing its impact on website visibility in search results. It outlines Google's crawling, indexing, and ranking processes, highlighting how technical SEO can either facilitate or hinder these stages. The video also introduces SEMrush's Site Audit tool to identify and rectify common SEO issues, such as crawlability, indexing problems, and site performance, ultimately aiming to enhance a website's search ranking and user experience.
Takeaways
- 🔍 Technical SEO is crucial for website visibility on search engines like Google, and a single mistake can lead to the site disappearing from search results.
- 🌐 Understanding how Google operates is fundamental to mastering technical SEO, which involves a three-step process: crawling, indexing, and serving search results.
- 🕸️ Crawlers are automated programs that find and download web page content; technical SEO issues can prevent Google from crawling certain pages, impacting their visibility.
- 📚 The indexing process involves Google determining the relevance and value of web pages, adding them to its index, and excluding low-quality or duplicate content.
- 🏆 Rankings in SEO are not universal numbers but are personalized based on user location, language, device, and behavior, and are subject to constant changes by Google's algorithms.
- 🛠️ Semrush's Site Audit tool can identify technical SEO errors and suggest fixes, which can be implemented by web developers or SEO specialists.
- 🔄 The importance of crawlability in technical SEO cannot be overstated; without it, pages cannot be indexed or ranked by Google.
- 🔄 Redirects play a significant role in SEO, with permanent (301) redirects being preferable for SEO purposes compared to temporary redirects.
- 🔄 Duplicate content can dilute ranking power; combining similar pages or using canonical tags can help focus SEO efforts on a single, strong page.
- 🔒 HTTPS is a must for websites, providing security and improving Google rankings, whereas HTTP is outdated and less secure.
- 🌐 International SEO involves using hreflang tags to help Google serve the correct language versions of web pages to users.
- 📈 Core Web Vitals measure user experience in terms of loading speed, interactivity, and layout stability, and are a direct ranking factor in Google's algorithms.
- 🖼️ Image compression and content caching are effective ways to improve website performance, with tools like TinyPNG or Cloudflare offering solutions.
- 🔗 Internal linking is vital for SEO, helping search engines understand site structure and user navigation, with a goal of making every page reachable within three clicks from the home page.
- 🏷️ Markup, such as schema.org, helps Google understand page content better and can enhance search snippets with rich information, improving click-through rates.
Q & A
What is the most important part of SEO according to the script?
-Technical SEO is considered the most important part of SEO because a single detail wrong can cause the entire website to disappear from Google, even if all other aspects are done right.
What are the three main steps in Google's process for handling web pages?
-The three main steps are crawling, indexing, and serving search results. Crawling is when Google finds web pages, indexing is when Google determines the content of the page and adds it to its database, and serving search results is when Google displays the most relevant pages in response to a user's search query.
Why is it a problem if Google can't crawl a web page?
-If Google can't crawl a web page, it won't be able to index it, which means the page will not appear in Google search results, leading to a loss of potential traffic and visibility.
What is the purpose of the indexing process in Google's search engine?
-The indexing process involves determining what each page is about, assessing if the page is worth displaying in search results, and then adding the page to the Google index, which is a database of web pages that can be displayed in search results.
Why might Google choose not to index certain pages?
-Google might choose not to index pages that are of low quality, duplicates of other pages, or do not contain anything useful, as it aims to provide the most relevant and high-quality results to users.
How does personalization affect search results in Google?
-Personalization in Google means that search results can change based on an individual's location, language, device, and even past search behavior, making the ranking of a web page for a keyword an average across all users rather than a single number.
What is the role of technical SEO in the process of Google serving search results?
-Technical SEO plays a role in ensuring that a website is optimized for Google's algorithms, which determine the quality and relevance of web pages to be displayed in search results.
What is the purpose of Semrush's Site Audit tool?
-The Site Audit tool is used to find technical SEO errors and provide recommendations on how to fix them, helping to improve a website's search engine ranking and visibility.
Why is it important to regularly run a site audit?
-Regularly running a site audit helps identify and address new issues that may arise, ensuring that the website remains optimized for search engines and continues to perform well in search results.
What are some common technical SEO issues that can be found and fixed using the Site Audit tool?
-Some common issues include broken internal links, non-indexable pages, crawl budget waste due to improper redirects, duplicate content, and the improper use of canonical tags.
How can a website's architecture help improve its crawl depth?
-A well-structured website architecture ensures that every page is reachable within three clicks from the home page, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index all pages.
What is the significance of using HTTPS for a website?
-Using HTTPS encrypts the data between the user and the site, making it more secure for users and also serving as a ranking factor in Google's search algorithms.
What is the role of internal linking in SEO?
-Internal linking helps search engines understand the relationship between pages on a website, aids in crawlability, and can improve the ranking of targeted pages by directing more link equity to them.
What are Rich Snippets and how do they benefit SEO?
-Rich Snippets are additional information and visuals that can be added to regular search snippets, such as star ratings or images, which can attract user attention and potentially increase click-through rates and traffic.
Outlines
🔍 The Importance of Technical SEO
The first paragraph emphasizes the critical role of technical SEO in ensuring a website's visibility on search engines like Google. It explains that even minor technical errors can lead to a website's disappearance from search results. The paragraph outlines the three-step process of how Google operates: crawling, indexing, and serving search results. It also touches on the personalization of search results and the dynamic nature of rankings. The importance of addressing technical SEO issues at each stage is highlighted, and the paragraph concludes with an introduction to using SEMrush's Site Audit tool to identify and fix these issues.
📊 Site Audit Overview and Crawlability
This paragraph delves into the Site Audit process, starting with the Site Health score that reflects the number of errors and warnings on a site. It discusses the significance of crawlability, which is essential for Google to index pages. The paragraph provides insights into the issues found during the audit of Casper.com, such as broken internal links and their impact on user experience and search engine crawling. It also explains the importance of fixing these issues and the option to automate the Site Audit process for ongoing monitoring.
🔄 Redirects, Duplicate Content, and Canonical Tags
The third paragraph focuses on the issues of redirects and duplicate content identified during the site audit. It explains the difference between permanent (301) and temporary redirects, emphasizing the SEO benefits of using 301 redirects for moved pages. The paragraph also addresses the problem of duplicate content and how it can dilute a site's ranking power. It suggests combining duplicate pages or using canonical tags to direct search engines to the preferred version of the page.
🌐 HTTPS, International SEO, and Core Web Vitals
This paragraph covers various thematic reports from the site audit, starting with the importance of using HTTPS for security and as a ranking factor. It then touches on international SEO considerations, such as hreflang tags for multilingual sites. The Core Web Vitals report is highlighted, which assesses website performance based on user experience metrics like loading speed, responsiveness, and layout stability. The paragraph also provides recommendations for improving site performance, such as compressing images and using caching techniques.
🔗 Internal Linking and Website Structure
The final paragraph discusses the importance of internal linking for SEO, explaining how it helps search engines understand the relationship between pages and can improve rankings. It suggests an ideal website structure, resembling a pyramid, where every page is reachable within three clicks from the home page. The paragraph also advises adding contextual internal links, especially in blog posts, to enhance SEO and provide additional resources to users.
📝 Markup and Rich Snippets for SEO
The last paragraph of the script introduces the concept of markup, which can enhance a page's SEO by helping search engines understand its content better. It discusses the use of Rich Snippets to make search results more attractive with additional information and visuals, potentially increasing click-through rates. The paragraph concludes by emphasizing the benefits of using markup and the Site Audit tool's ability to identify pages lacking markup for optimization.
Mindmap
Keywords
💡Technical SEO
💡Crawlers
💡Indexing
💡Search Results
💡Personalization
💡Site Audit
💡Crawlability
💡Redirects
💡Duplicate Content
💡Canonical Tags
💡Core Web Vitals
💡Markup
Highlights
Technical SEO is crucial as a single detail wrong can cause a website to disappear from Google search results.
Technical SEO involves ensuring search engines can find, access, and rank a website.
Understanding how search engines like Google work is fundamental to learning technical SEO.
Google's process involves crawling, indexing, and serving search results.
Crawling issues can prevent pages from ever ranking on Google.
Indexing determines if a page is worth displaying in Google search results.
Google does not index every page it finds due to quality and relevance algorithms.
Search results are personalized based on user's location, language, device, and behavior.
Rankings in SEO are not fixed numbers but averages for users in specific time and place.
SEMrush's Site Audit tool can identify and suggest fixes for technical SEO errors.
SEOs often collaborate with web developers to implement technical SEO fixes.
Casper.com is used as a case study to demonstrate the use of SEMrush's Site Audit tool.
Casper's website has a low site health score indicating potential for improvement.
Broken internal links are a common technical SEO issue affecting user experience and Google crawling.
Crawlability is the most important technical SEO concern for Google indexing.
Non-indexable pages may be intentional for brands like Casper to avoid duplicate content issues.
Redirects play a crucial role in SEO, with 301 redirects being preferred for permanent URL changes.
Duplicate content can dilute ranking power and may require consolidation or canonical tags.
Core Web Vitals, measured by Google's Lighthouse, are a ranking factor impacting user experience.
Improving site performance can be achieved through image compression and content caching.
Internal linking is vital for website architecture and can enhance SEO rankings.
Markup can enhance SEO by helping Google understand page content and improve search snippet visibility.
Transcripts
thank you
[Music]
technical SEO is arguably the most
important part of SEO that's because if
you get a single detail wrong with
technical SEO your entire website can
disappear from Google
even if you do everything else right
technical SEO includes making sure that
Google and other search engines can find
access and rank your website it also
includes optimizing your website's
structure page load speeds and some
other things
let's back up a little to learn
technical SEO you need to know a little
more about how Google and other search
engines actually work it's a three-step
process
first Google crawls the internet
it sends out automated programs called
crawlers to find web pages and it
downloads content from those web pages
including text images videos and so on
some technical SEO issues can prevent
Google from crawling your web pages and
in that case those pages will never rank
on Google because they won't make it to
the next step in the process
the next step in the process is then
Google indexes those web pages or at
least some of them the indexing process
includes determining what each page is
about figuring out if the page is worth
displaying in Google search results and
then adding the page to the Google index
if so
the Google index is a giant database of
hundreds of billions of web pages that
can be displayed in Google search
results it's important for you to know
that Google doesn't index every page
that it finds if its algorithms conclude
that the pages are just copies of other
Pages or if they're low quality or don't
appear to contain anything useful Google
doesn't want to put them in its index or
show them to people there are also
technical SEO issues that can prevent
indexing from happening for a given web
page and again this would prevent those
web pages from ranking on Google
the last step in the process is that
Google serves its search results
each time a user conducts a Google
search
Google displays the results that its
algorithms have determined are most
likely to satisfy that person
which according to Google comes down to
the highest quality and most relevant
pages and information it has indexed
technical SEO plays a role in this step
too
let me also clarify something about how
rankings work in SEO we talk about how
highly a web page is ranking for a given
keyword as if it's a single Universal
number but actually Google personalizes
many search results so the search
results in individual user sees can
change based on that person's location
language device and even their behavior
like the past searches that they've
conducted
Google's also constantly shifting
rankings of different web pages around
so when we talk about a web Page's
rankings for a keyword it's really an
average for all the users in a given
place during a given time period rather
than a single clear-cut number
now you have a better understanding of
how Google works including its three
main steps or stages
and you know that technical SEO can help
or hurt in each of those stages
now let's take a look at some of the
most important technical SEO issues and
optimizations you should know about
we'll do this by using semrush's site
audit tool this tool can find all sorts
of technical SEO errors for you and even
show you how to fix them as a side note
you don't necessarily have to implement
these fixes in a website's code yourself
if you own the website you definitely
can do that but more often seos work
with web developers to get the changes
made so if you don't know how to code
that's okay to use the site audit tool
let's head over to site audit in the SEO
section of the left hand navigation
let's do this for the mattress brand
casper.com
so we'll type in casper.com and we'll
start setting up the audit
I know Casper has a decent sized website
so I'm going to set the limit to 10 000
checked Pages there are a bunch of other
settings that will just leave as
defaults but notice this last one at the
bottom which lets us set this up to
automatically run every week and receive
an email each time it's done
this is great to do because it means
you'll find out about any issues that
come up on your website rather than
having to remember to go in and check
manually
so we'll keep that setting to run each
week and hit start site audit now
remember how Google has crawlers that go
out and explore websites semrush has its
own crawler too and its crawler is now
going through the Casper website to find
any technical SEO issues to crawl
thousands of pages takes a while so
normally you'd go do something else and
check back in 20 or 30 minutes or when
you get notified via email
but let's just skip ahead here with a
quick Video Edit and boom it's magically
done
here's the site audit overview page
the first box is the site Health score
which is based on how many errors and
warnings are on the site the higher the
score the better
and you can see that Casper's score
isn't great
but in a way that's actually good news
for Casper because it means there are
probably some big opportunities to
improve its results
that said you can't expect to score 100
here eighty percent or higher is
generally pretty good
you can also see how many errors
warnings and notices there are these are
based on how severe they tend to be so
an error is more severe warnings are
less important and notices generally
aren't a big deal at all
below those are the Thematic reports
these show the different types of issues
the semris crawler found along with a
sub score for each
we'll come back to those in a second but
first I want to show you the issues tab
above
this tab shows all the issues semrush
found
so for example we can see there are a
lot of broken internal links
now an internal link is just a link that
points from a page on the website to
another page on the same website
broken links are a problem for users
because they lead to error pages and
they're a problem for Google because it
makes it harder for Google to crawl and
index the pages you can click on the why
and how to fix it link next to any of
these issues to see exactly what it
means the impact it can have and how to
fix it
and you can click on the issue text
itself to see a list of the pages that
have the problem
when we click on this we can see each
page that has the broken link
the URL of the broken link
and the HTTP status code of the page
that's linked to
for example
a 404 status code means the page
couldn't be found and was probably
deleted
so jumping back to the issues tab you
could go through each of these to
understand the overall technical SEO
issues with your site
and either fix them yourself or send the
report to any web developers to fix them
or hire someone to fix them we won't go
into detail about every one of these
because there are hundreds of potential
issues and they only matter when they
come up
back to the overview tab these thematic
reports are just another way to view the
issues
the first one you see here is
crawlability
crawlability is probably the single most
important technical SEO concern because
as we saw in the way Google works
everything starts with a crawl if Google
isn't able to crawl your web pages it
can't index them either which means you
won't be able to rank and get search
traffic
when we pop open the crawlability report
we can see that less than half of the
pages on Casper's website are actually
indexable
that means that most of Casper's web
pages can't show up in Google search
results
but that's not necessarily as bad as it
sounds Casper might have a lot of web
pages that they need for whatever reason
but that they don't want to show up on
Google so at least some of this is
probably on purpose
for example Casper might have a bunch of
pages with duplicate content or near
duplicate content
in other words pages that are basically
copies of other pages with only minor
changes they might have 10 different
landing pages that they Point Instagram
ads at and each one has a slightly
different design to match the specific
ad but they all advertise the same
mattress that Casper also has a product
page for
in that case Casper would only want the
main product page to show up in Google
search results
so they would no index the Instagram
landing pages and they would be
non-indexable
but often pages are non-indexable on
accident for example web developers like
to set up Pages they're building on the
staging site within no index tags which
is good
but then they forget to remove those no
index tags when those pages go live on
the website so those pages can't rank on
or over here in the crawl budget waste
widget there are some other potential
problems first we have temporary
redirects and permanent redirects
redirects are used when you move a web
page from one URL to another
when a person or crawler visits the old
URL the redirect will automatically send
them to the new URL instead
when it comes to SEO the right type of
redirect to use is usually a permanent
one also called a 301 redirect
that tells Google to rank the new URL
instead of the old one and that it
should count all the links that are
pointing to the old URL as if they're
pointing to the new URL instead a
temporary redirect doesn't always have
the same effect there have been studies
that show that using temporary reader
routes lead to lower rankings than using
permanent redirects however if the
change in url really is only temporary
then using a temporary redirect is the
right choice so it depends on the
situation
but there might be a big opportunity
here to turn these temporary redirects
into permanent ones and improve some of
Casper's rankings and traffic as a
result
then we have duplicate content we
already talked about this a little but
basically if you have duplicate content
it might mean you're dividing your
ranking power
if you have two or three blog posts or
web pages that all basically say the
same thing you'll often get better
results if you combine them into one and
redirect the weaker pages to the
stronger one using permanent redirects
or if you need those pages to stay on
the website for users but you only one
of them to rank on Google you can use a
Rel equals canonical tag
and that's the next item here Pages
canonical to other page
this means there are over a thousand
pages on the Casper site that basically
say to Google hey don't show this page
to people show them that other page
instead so again this is potentially an
issue but it can also be used on purpose
e-commerce sites tend to have a lot of
these because they have a lot of
internal search results pages and things
like that
I'm going to skip past the rest of these
but we'll cover some of them in the
other reports
back to the overview tab let's quickly
talk about what the other thematic
reports cover
https is pretty much a pass fail here is
the site encrypted with https or does it
use HTTP using https is more secure
better for users and it's also a Google
ranking Factor so you should use it then
we have international SEO
this is mostly about href laying tags
which you should use if you have
multiple versions of web pages in
different languages these tags help
Google serve the right pages to the
people who speak those languages
the core web vitals report uses a Google
tool called Lighthouse to measure
website performance in terms of user
experience
it looks at how fast the web pages load
how fast they respond when users click
on them and how much their layout shifts
when users interact with them
core web vitals are another ranking
factor that also impacts users so it's
good to improve this score
as you can see this report gives a lot
of specific advice to improve
performance like removing unused
JavaScript and removing or optimizing
third-party code like plugins
two other common high impact ways to
improve your website performance are to
compress your images and cache your
content
you can compress your images with a
service or Plugin like tiny PNG or short
pixel to effectively reduce their file
size without hurting their quality
and lots of web hosts offer an option to
Cache your website which basically saves
your website content so it will load
faster when people visit it
cloudflare is another Super common
option for caching that you can use
the next report is site performance
which uses some of semrush's own
measurements to look at loading speed
and things like that
it's a little different from the core
web vitals report but there's a decent
amount of overlap
the internal linking report gets into
more detail about internal links which
we touched on already in the issues tab
but it's pretty important so let's dive
into it a little more
the first widget in this report is Pages
crawl depth crawl depth means how many
clicks it takes to navigate from the
website's home page to another page on
the site ideally you want every page on
the site to be reachable within three
clicks from the home page a lot of
Casper's web pages take four or more
clicks to reach clicking on the red part
of this graph would show us all those
pages but we don't need to do that right
now
the important thing is to understand how
to avoid this problem and there are a
few ways to do that but the best way is
generally to have a good website
architecture you can structure your
website even if it has a million Pages
or more so that every page is three
clicks or less from the home page
imagine the ideal structure of a website
as the home page at the top of a pyramid
and links pointing down to maybe 100
Pages below that that's one click and
then each of those pages links to
another 100 Pages that's two clicks and
we're already up to ten thousand Pages
if every one of those pages links to a
hundred others you can reach a million
Pages within three clicks you can also
add internal links contextually
this is really common in blog posts for
example it helps show Google which pages
are related by topic and it can help
Point users to additional resources also
and it can help improve your rankings if
you have a web page that you want to
rank better pointing more internal Links
at it will often help quite a bit
back to the site audit overview page
again the last thematic report is a
markup
there are different types of markup but
in general markup is additional code
that you can add to your web pages that
can help your SEO efforts in two ways
first markup helps Google understand
what your web pages are about which can
lead to them showing up more often and
in different places on Google
and markup can also help your search
Snippets stand out more via something
called Rich Snippets
Rich Snippets add additional information
and visuals to a regular search snippet
so for example these recipe Snippets
contain star ratings cook times and
images
Rich Snippets help attract users
attention which can lead to more traffic
as they click through more often there
are lots of other ways that markup can
help improve the way your web pages are
represented on Google so it's great to
use
and the markup report can help you find
pages that aren't using markup so that
you can add it
and that wraps up this lesson on
technical SEO
you may not feel like a total expert on
it but now you know about some of the
most common technical issues and how to
use semrush to find and diagnose many
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