Technical SEO for Developers | 2023 Checklist

Summary

In this informative video, Alex from Prismic discusses the importance of technical SEO for developers, emphasizing its role in enhancing user experience and improving website visibility. He outlines key strategies such as optimizing core web vitals, managing images, ensuring accessibility, and using clean URL structures. Additionally, he highlights the significance of metadata, SSL certificates, and regular site audits to maintain high SEO standards and drive organic traffic, ultimately benefiting business growth.

Takeaways

• 🛠️ Technical SEO is crucial for both search engines and users to understand the content better.
• 🌐 Optimize website structure, page speed, and user experience to improve technical SEO.
• 🎨 Focus on core web vitals: Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift for better user experience.
• 🖼️ Optimize images for faster load times, using responsive images, modern formats, and lazy loading techniques.
• ♿ Accessibility improvements benefit both users and SEO, such as using alt text and proper heading structure.
• 📱 Ensure mobile responsiveness to cater to the majority of mobile users and improve search rankings.
• 🔍 Reduce JavaScript usage to improve First Input Delay and overall page interactivity.
• 📄 Use clean, keyword-rich URLs for better content understanding by both users and search engines.
• 📃 Include relevant metadata like title, description, XML site maps, structured data, canonical tags, and open graph meta tags.
• 🔒 Implement SSL certificates (HTTPS) to secure user data and improve search rankings.
• 🔍 Regularly perform site audits to maintain and update SEO practices according to best practices.

Q & A

What is the primary goal of SEO?

The primary goal of SEO is to improve the visibility and ranking of websites in search engine results, thereby attracting more organic traffic.

What are the two main components of the SEO equation?

The two main components of the SEO equation are content and technical SEO. Content SEO focuses on creating high-quality content, optimizing titles and descriptions, while technical SEO deals with optimizing website structure and page speed.

Why is user experience (UX) important for SEO?

User experience is important for SEO because Google prioritizes websites that offer a good user experience. Factors such as page load time, layout stability, and interactivity can influence a site's ranking in search results.

What are the three core web vitals that Google uses to measure user experience?

The three core web vitals are Largest Contentful Paint, First Input Delay, and Cumulative Layout Shift. These metrics assess loading time, interactivity, and layout stability, respectively.

How can optimizing images improve both user experience and SEO?

Optimizing images can reduce page load times and improve the Largest Contentful Paint score. Techniques include compressing images, using responsive image sizes, modern formats like AVIF and WebP, and lazy loading off-screen images.

What is the significance of using semantic HTML elements for SEO?

Using semantic HTML elements helps search engines understand the structure and content of a webpage better, which can improve SEO. It also enhances accessibility and user experience by making content more organized and comprehensible.

Why is mobile responsiveness crucial for a website?

Mobile responsiveness is crucial because a significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices. Google favors mobile-friendly sites in search rankings, and a non-responsive site can lead to a poor user experience on mobile.

How can reducing JavaScript improve a website's SEO?

Reducing JavaScript can improve First Input Delay, a core web vital. Less JavaScript means faster processing times and a more responsive page, leading to a better user experience and higher SEO rankings.

What is the role of structured data in SEO?

Structured data provides additional information about the content of a webpage to search engines, allowing for rich results in search listings. This can include details about articles, products, events, and more, enhancing the visibility and吸引力 of the site.

How do open graph meta tags indirectly help with SEO?

Open graph meta tags improve the appearance of shared links on social media platforms, which can lead to higher click-through rates. More clicks and shares can result in more backlinks, which Google considers as a positive signal for SEO rankings.

What are the benefits of conducting regular site audits for SEO?

Regular site audits ensure that all SEO best practices are being followed and that the site is performing optimally. They help identify and fix issues related to core web vitals, metadata, backlinks, and other factors that can impact search rankings and user experience.

Outlines

00:00

🌐 Introduction to Technical SEO

Alex introduces the importance of Technical SEO in web development, emphasizing that while building attractive websites is crucial, ensuring they are discoverable by users is equally important. He uses the analogy of a well-built store in a desert to illustrate the futility of neglecting SEO. Alex outlines the two halves of SEO—content and technical—and delves into the three main categories of technical SEO: user experience, metadata, and administrative tasks. He stresses that developers are responsible for the technical aspects of SEO and promises to cover everything needed to improve a site's SEO.

05:01

🛠️ Improving User Experience for SEO

Alex discusses the significance of user experience (UX) in technical SEO, highlighting that Google prioritizes sites that offer a good user experience. He lists eight ways to enhance UX, focusing on core web vitals: largest contentful paint, first input delay, and cumulative layout shift. Alex explains the importance of optimizing images, including using responsive images, modern formats like Avif and WebP, and lazy loading off-screen images. He also touches on the necessity of setting image dimensions to prevent layout shifts and emphasizes the developer's role in ensuring image optimization.

10:02

🎯 Accessibility and Mobile Responsiveness

Continuing on the theme of user experience, Alex underscores the SEO benefits of accessibility practices, such as using alt text for images, which aids low-vision visitors, error recovery, and search engines. He advocates for proper heading structures and semantic HTML elements to enhance content understanding. Alex stresses the importance of mobile responsiveness, noting that a significant portion of web traffic comes from mobile devices, and advises on reducing JavaScript to improve first input delay scores. He also cautions against relying solely on JavaScript for content loading, advocating for pre-rendering content and server-side rendering for better SEO.

15:04

🔍 Enhancing Metadata for Better SEO

Alex moves on to metadata, starting with the basics of title and description tags, emphasizing the need for uniqueness on each page. He introduces XML site maps as a tool to help Google understand site structure, especially useful for larger sites. Structured data is next, with Alex explaining how it provides Google with detailed information about content, leading to rich search results. He advises using schema.org to generate structured data and mentions the importance of canonical tags for handling duplicate content. Alex also discusses the indirect SEO benefits of open graph meta tags, which improve social media sharing and potentially lead to backlinks.

20:05

🛠️ Administrative Tasks for SEO Maintenance

In the final section, Alex covers essential admin tasks for maintaining SEO. He starts with the importance of SSL certificates for security and Google rankings, followed by managing redirects to avoid broken links that can harm SEO. A useful 404 page with search functionality is recommended to assist users. Alex suggests having a robots.txt file to guide Google's crawler and mentions Google's preference for such files. He concludes with the importance of regular site audits using tools like Chrome Lighthouse, Google PageSpeed Insights, and SEO analysis plugins to ensure ongoing compliance with SEO best practices and to monitor site performance.

🚀 Wrapping Up Technical SEO Insights

Alex recaps the key points of the video, reinforcing that technical SEO is the developer's responsibility and that it significantly aids in improving a site's search rankings and user experience. He emphasizes the importance of optimizing user experience, including relevant metadata, and handling administrative tasks. Alex reminds viewers that SEO is dynamic and requires staying updated with best practices. He concludes by encouraging viewers to engage with the content and look forward to future web development insights.

Keywords

💡SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving a website's visibility in search engine results pages (SERPs). In the context of the video, SEO is crucial for developers to ensure that their websites are not only visually appealing but also easily discoverable by users. The video emphasizes the importance of both content and technical SEO to enhance a site's search rankings and user experience.

💡User Experience (UX)

User Experience (UX) refers to the overall experience a user has while interacting with a website, including its usability, accessibility, and navigation. Google considers UX as a significant factor in its ranking algorithm because a positive user experience leads to higher user satisfaction and engagement. The video highlights that improving UX through core web vitals, image optimization, and accessibility practices can directly impact technical SEO.

💡Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of three metrics introduced by Google that measure the quality of user experience on the web. These include Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), First Input Delay (FID), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS). These metrics are critical for technical SEO because they directly reflect the usability and responsiveness of a website, which in turn affects its search engine rankings.

💡Image Optimization

Image optimization involves techniques to reduce the size and improve the format of images for faster loading times without compromising quality. This is an essential aspect of technical SEO because images are often the largest files on a webpage and can significantly impact page speed and user experience. Proper image optimization ensures that pages load quickly and efficiently, enhancing both SEO and UX.

💡Accessibility

Accessibility in web development refers to making a website usable by as many people as possible, including those with disabilities. This involves using semantic HTML, providing alt text for images, and ensuring proper heading structures. Accessibility not only benefits users with disabilities but also improves SEO because search engines can better understand the content of the page.

💡Mobile Responsiveness

Mobile responsiveness is the ability of a website to adapt its layout to fit different screen sizes, ensuring a good user experience on both mobile devices and desktop computers. With a majority of web traffic coming from mobile devices, Google prioritizes mobile-friendly sites in search results. Developers must ensure their sites are responsive to improve both user experience and SEO.

💡JavaScript

JavaScript is a scripting language used to create interactive features on websites. While it enhances user experience, excessive or poorly managed JavaScript can slow down page load times and negatively impact SEO. The video advises developers to optimize JavaScript usage to improve first input delay and overall site performance.

💡URL Structure

URL structure refers to the format and organization of web addresses. A clean, logical URL structure is easier for users and search engines to understand, which can improve SEO. It involves using short, descriptive, and keyword-rich URLs that clearly communicate the content of the page.

💡Metadata

Metadata is data about a webpage's content that is used by search engines to understand and categorize the content. It includes elements like title tags, description tags, and structured data. Properly implemented metadata can enhance a website's visibility in search results by providing search engines with additional context about the page's content.

💡SSL Certificates

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificates, also known as HTTPS, are security measures that encrypt data between the user's browser and the website. They ensure that user data is secure and are a ranking signal for Google. Having an SSL certificate is essential for user trust and improving a site's SEO.

💡Site Audits

Site audits are comprehensive evaluations of a website's performance, security, and SEO. They help identify issues and areas for improvement. Regular site audits ensure that a website remains optimized and up-to-date with the latest SEO best practices, leading to better search rankings and user experience.

Highlights

SEO is essential for developers who want their apps and websites to be seen by people.

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing website structure and page speed, which developers need to handle.

User experience (UX) is crucial for SEO as Google prioritizes sites that offer a good user experience.

Core Web Vitals are three metrics used by Google to measure user experience on a website.

Optimizing images by making them responsive and using modern formats like Avif and WebP improves page speed and SEO.

Accessibility practices not only help users with disabilities but also benefit SEO by making content more understandable for search engines.

Mobile responsiveness is a must-have for SEO, with around 60% of visitors accessing sites via mobile devices.

Reducing JavaScript usage can improve first input delay score and overall user experience.

Content should not rely on JavaScript to load; it should be accessible even with JavaScript disabled for better SEO.

Using clean, keyword-rich URLs helps both users and search engines understand the content of the page.

Metadata such as title and description tags are fundamental for SEO and should be unique for each page.

XML site maps help Google understand the structure of a site and are almost necessary for sites with many pages.

Structured data provides Google with detailed information about content, leading to rich details in search results.

Canonical tags help Google understand the preferred version of duplicate content, avoiding penalties.

Open graph meta tags indirectly help SEO by encouraging social shares and potential backlinks.

SSL certificates or HTTPS are necessary for user security and can boost a site's SEO ranking.

Regular site audits ensure that SEO best practices are followed and help maintain high search rankings.

Transcripts

Alright, don't get me wrong, search

engine optimization isn't

why I became a developer

either. I want to build cool apps and

websites, but I would also

like for people to see those

cool apps and websites, and yeah, SEO

really does help in that

regard. Okay, for a minute,

just pretend that you were in

construction and a company

hires you to build them a store,

and you do it. You build them a beautiful

store, the store that they

asked for, it's wonderful,

and then you put it in a desert where no

roads or sidewalks or

anything lead to that store.

You would know that that's not what the

company wanted, but you're

doing the same thing. If you

build a site that is good, it looks

really nice, it's pretty, but it doesn't

have any good technical

SEO. You're doing the same thing. I'm

Alex, I lead the developer experience

team here at Prismic,

and today we are talking about technical

SEO, and I'll cover

everything you need to know to improve

your site's SEO.

Now, there are two

halves to the SEO equation, content and

technical. Content SEO

deals with creating high quality content,

optimizing titles and

descriptions, and this is

typically handled by writers or content

teams. Then there's

technical SEO. That's all about

optimizing your website structure and

page speed, and you, the developer, need

to take care of this.

I put things into three main categories

of technical SEO. I'm going

to touch on user experience,

metadata, and all those admin tasks that

you've got to do just to

maintain your website, especially

for technical SEO. All right, first big

category is user experience, user

experience, or as the kids

call it, UX.

You might be surprised to

hear that Google actually

cares quite a bit about user

experience. You might think it's a search

engine, what does it care

about users using it? But

Google actually wants to give users the

best site possible, so if

your site takes forever to load,

shifts around a whole bunch when it's

coming in, and it's just a poor

experience for your users,

they're not going to recommend your page.

So here are eight things you

can do to improve your user

experience that will also improve your

technical SEO. First up,

core web vitals. These are three

metrics that Google uses to see just how

good the user experience is

going to be on your website.

The first core web vital is largest

contentful paint, and that's

essentially the amount of time

it'll take for the largest content

element like a hero image or a heading to

become visible. This

is essentially when a page looks like

it's done loading. The next core web

vital is first input

delay, and that's the amount of time

until the page is interactive. So if a

user clicks on a button

while your page is first loading, this is

basically how much time

does it take until that button

actually does something. And the third

core web vital is

cumulative layout shift. Basically,

how much does the page shift around as it

loads? There is nothing

worse than trying to click

something, then the page loads and it

shifts around, and you click

something entirely different.

That's what this measures, and it is the

most grating thing when it

happens, and so it's very

good that Google measures that because

it's not a good user

experience. Google takes these three

core web vitals into account when it is

ranking pages, so we need to

make sure that we are making

really good scores on all three of these.

A lot of the things we cover

in this section will affect

these core web vitals. So next up, number

two, we need to optimize our images.

Images will probably

be the largest files you send to your

client, and big files can

slow down your page speed, so

huge images that aren't compressed aren't

optimized are going to wreck your largest

contentful paint score. Make sure your

images are responsive for

their screen size. You should be

sending small images to mobile devices

and bigger images to desktop screens. You

should also be using

the most modern format that the user's

browser can handle.

Formats like Avif and WebP are so

much smaller and still look great

compared to JPEG and PNG alternates. By

using source sets with your

images, you can handle different formats

and sizes. You should

always, always, always lazy load

off-screen images. If your user might not

see that image, don't load

it, especially not right at the

beginning when your page is first loading

in. Defer that load to

later and you'll have a much

faster initial page load. This next one

is huge for cumulative

layout shift. Make sure you're

setting height and width on your images.

If you don't set it, your

content's going to shift around

because the browser doesn't know how big

that image is until it loads it in and

then it finds out and

then stuff pops all over the place. That

sounds like a lot of work

to do for each image though,

and you're not the one that's going to be

uploading images for all time, right?

You're going to have

editors and content teams coming in to

upload images. So how do

you accomplish all this? Well,

there's a few ways. One, your page

builder or CMS might have a feature. Here

at Prismic, we have a

built-in image CDN. So anything that an

editor uploads will

automatically be processed and

optimized in the way that you set it up

in the code. Similarly,

you can use image CDNs like

ImageX or Cloudinary and do similar

things by setting parameters

in the code to change those

images as they are displayed on the site.

These image CDNs can

handle the resizing of images.

It can handle serving up AVIF to browsers

that can handle it

and then falling back to

older standards of images for other

browsers. They're wonderful,

wonderful tools, but you've

also got frameworks like Next and Nuxt,

which have image tools built

in now, but no matter which of

these tools you choose to use, bottom

line is no editor, no

content team should ever be able to

ship a huge uncompressed JPEG to your

homepage. It is on you, the

developer, to make sure that

images are being processed. So make sure

you're using some kind of

a tool, some way of letting

them, the editors, the content team,

upload whatever they're

trying to upload, and then you

are filtering it or optimizing it and

then giving the viewer passing to the

browser an optimized

performant image. That's on us, the

developers. We have a lot of

tools up our sleeves now. Make

sure we're doing it. All right, we're on

to tip number three. Work

on your accessibility. Many

accessibility practices also actually

benefit SEO. Think about it. People who

are using screen readers

are using a device to understand that

page better. If you help that device

understand the page better

by using things like alt text and other

things that we'll touch

on, you also tell Google what

that page is about. By helping devices

understand the content of the page,

you're helping everyone.

So one accessibility must have is alt

text on images. It helps

three groups of people understand.

Visitors with low vision, visitors who

encountered an error

when that image loaded,

and search robots like Google. Dog with

eyebrows image, dog in a blue hoodie

image, unlabeled image.

You are currently on an unlabeled image.

Without that alt text,

those three groups are left

wondering if that image added anything to

the content. Another best

practice that helps with

both accessibility and SEO is using

proper heading structure. This means

you're organizing your

content and using H1 elements for the

topic, H2 elements for

subtopics, and so on. In fact,

you should be using semantic HTML

elements all over your site.

Headings are great, but so are

lists and nav elements and article

elements and asides. Really, this

benefits everyone and helps

everyone understand your content better.

Use semantic HTML.

Alright, we've covered some of

the accessibility things. Moving on to

number four, mobile responsiveness.

Honestly, you and I both

know this is a must have, right? Like we

get this. Around 60% of visitors are

coming in on a mobile

device. Pages are ranking higher if

they're mobile friendly because Google,

of course, is going to

show those pages more frequently than

sites that are not mobile

friendly. Because once again,

a lot of folks are using mobile devices

these days. My friend

Kevin Powell says that websites

are responsive by default. They ship out

of the box as responsive, so

they're only not responsive

when we break them. So you can do this. I

believe in you make your

site responsive. Also part of

being mobile friendly is having a proper

viewport meta tag and also

a readable font size on all

devices. Don't make it so that when the

screen gets small, so does

your font and we've got to,

we've got to check it out. Don't do that.

Make it fake. Make it

nice. Alright, number five,

reduce JavaScript. I know it hurts to

hear. I know we want to

throw JavaScript at everything,

but the more that we send, the worse our

first input delay score is going to be.

It's going to take longer for all that

JavaScript to process for and for

anything to actually happen

on our page. So part of that is checking

your bundle, seeing how

big that bundle coming from

next or next or whatever framework you're

using is. Can you drop any

of those packages? Can you

tidy them up somehow beyond your

framework? Make sure that you are

reducing trackers that can slow

down your site. Every single tracker that

you put in hurts your page

speed hurts that first time to

interactive, right? If you're adding the

Bing pixel and the Facebook

pixel and the Myspace pixel and

the TikTok pics, if you're adding all of

that stuff, that is a lot

of JavaScript that you're

adding on top and it's going to really,

really hurt your page

speed. It really hurt your user

experience and Google is going to dock

you for it. So you need to make sure you

find a balance between

having every tracker in the world and

having a really speedy site

that Google is going to rank

well on search pages. Alright, this one

is big. Do not require JavaScript to

actually load in the

content of your page. The page should

load its content even if I have

JavaScript disabled. When

it comes to SEO, statically generating

the page or server-side rendering that

page is so much safer

than rendering it only on the client.

Yes, Google's crawler can run JavaScript,

but what if my buggy

JavaScript breaks when Google tries to

crawl my page? I would

rather it break and still get all

my content than break and just have a

completely empty contentless

page. Make sure you are pre

rendering your content and then, you

know, sprinkling JavaScript on top.

Alright, number seven,

when talking about a good user experience

that also helps with SEO,

use a clean, nice, sensible

URL structure, clean URL structure. That

means you're using short,

descriptive and keyword rich

URLs. Look at these two URLs here. Look

what I got here. Green Genie IO/G/01 or

Green Genie IO/Guides/How

to Install Green Genie. Which one do you

think is more clear to

users, more clear to Google

when it comes to trying to figure out

what the content on these

pages is? Don't get cryptic,

don't get shorthand or whatever. Make

sure you're using good

keyword rich URLs when you are using

your URL patterns. Alright, we are into

our next section and that is

talking all about metadata.

So these next five, if you're a big

metadata head, you're

going to love these.

Alright, we're going to start off with

something you probably have

already, but that's a title and

description. It's kind of the bare

minimum when it comes to

metadata, but at the same time, you

really need them because they are just

what show up when you

Google for a page. It's the title

and the description. For these, you're

going to use a title

element and a meta tag with name

description. The important part that

people get wrong here though, is that

they have to be unique

for every page. Don't put the same

description on every single page, same

title on every single page.

Make sure these are getting changed up

for each and every

single page. Otherwise,

Google is going to think it's all the

same content. Or at least

it's not going to help you out.

Alright, number nine on our full list,

XML site maps. This is kind

of what it sounds like. It is

a site map that maps out all the pages of

your site and guess what

format it's in? XML, baby.

You don't need one of these as long as

your site's been submitted to Google.

Google is really good

about crawling through links and finding

most of the pages of your

site, but it does help Google

understand the structure of your site.

And it is very, very helpful

and almost necessary. If you

have hundreds or thousands of pages, it

just gives Google a nice list

of saying, Hey, these are all

the pages I have. I would like you to

index all of these, please. Alright,

number 10, structured

data. This is a type of metadata that has

a specific structure to

give Google information

about articles, products, local

businesses, events, reviews, recipes, and

it really helps Google

provide rich details in search results.

So when you search for

things and Google doesn't just

kind of give you like a list of links,

but it gives you more details, images,

all that kind of stuff

that is coming from this structured data.

Google really likes giving

those kinds of rich results.

So make sure that you are putting

structured data in wherever it makes

sense for you. You go,

Alex, I don't know how to do that. How do

I do that? No problem.

Go to schema.org. Find the

category for the thing that you have.

Maybe it's a product. Maybe it's a

recipe. You're building a

site for a recipe site, right? And you go

in there, find the exact

category that you're looking for,

and just fill in the information. Like I

said, it's structured. They'll kind of

walk you through it.

And then all you got to do is add that

metadata to the appropriate pages and

Google will be able to

understand what you're sharing with it a

lot better. All right.

Number 11, canonical tags.

If you have duplicate content across your

site, canonical tags

basically let you tell Google

which one is the preferred version so

that Google doesn't penalize you for

having duplicate content.

This is also helpful if you've posted

blog posts across the

internet, like on dev.to,

you can use a canonical tag to tell

Google, hey, the one that's on my site,

that's the canonical

or like the real version. All right.

Number 12, open graph meta

tags. Now you might be saying,

Alex, that doesn't directly impact SEO.

Google doesn't care

about open graph stuff.

That's Facebook and Twitter and Slack.

And yeah, I agree with

you. Uh, it doesn't actually

directly help SEO, but it does indirectly

help SEO. Let me explain

first open graph metadata is

the information that tells Slack and

Facebook and Twitter, what

image and what description

and everything to show when that link is

shared on those social

platforms. So I'm sure we've both

had the experience where we share a link

and a beautiful image

comes up and a rich description

comes up and it looks really appealing

and people want to click on

it. And then we've also shared a

link where none of that happened and they

just see a URL and that's

it. People are much more likely

to click on the link that has the open

graph data, but she gives

it images and description

to entice people to click. And the more

people that click on it on

social, the more people will

see it. And the more people that see it,

the more likely they are to

link to it in their own blog

posts, link to it on their own sites. And

that my friend is what we

call a backlink and Google

really likes backlinks. So they are going

to bump your site up in

the search rankings. So once

again, this is an indirect way of

improving your SEO. All right.

We're into the last category.

We're looking at some admin tasks.

We're starting off with number 13, SSL

certificates or HTTPS.

You might know this as the little lock in

the URL bar or the thing

that yells at you in Chrome when

a site doesn't have it or their

certificate expired. This

is incredibly necessary. This

helps keep your users secure when

visiting your website. So

it's kind of a must have.

Now Google will give your site a boost if

you have one of these,

but since everyone has one,

since everyone's using HTTPS these days,

you don't want to be the one

person with the one site in the

world that doesn't have that and is not

getting that boost from

Google. It's pretty much like

you're getting punished. If you don't

have one, you probably do

hosts like Netlify and Vercel

give you one of these pretty much out of

the box. If you don't have

one, check out letsencrypt.org

for a free one. It's also what Netlify

uses to give you yours.

It's a wonderful service.

Make sure you're using HTTPS. Number 14,

manage redirects. So yes,

it happens that pages change,

pages move, you have a better URL

structure and you want to

shift page A over to URL/B.

Make sure you're managing that redirect,

however you're doing it

with your framework and your

hosts and all that stuff. You've got to

do this because Google

doesn't want to send people to a

dead site. Broken links can absolutely

tank your SEO numbers. A

well-performing blog post

that you used to have that you change the

URL on can absolutely just

disappear off the face of

Google if you don't manage your

redirects. In that same vein, number 15,

have a useful 404 page.

People like to have 404 pages that are

quirky and fun and neat and all that

stuff, but that's fine.

But make sure that 404 page is also doing

its job and trying to get

users to the page that they

were at. It's not enough just to go,

oops, you should really make

sure that your 404 page has

some kind of search functionality or

something so that when a

user does find it, and they

shouldn't find it too often, they can

actually get to the

content they were looking for. So

make sure that if you have that 404 page,

it's doing something.

All right. Number 16,

have a robots.txt page. Honestly, every

site should have one. Why?

Because Google wants you to.

Google recommends it. Sites should have

these robots.txt files,

especially because it is where

you show Google where your XML site map

is. So without it, you

know, Google can guess at where

that site map is, but you want to be

specific. You want to tell

Google exactly where stuff is.

So have a robots.txt file, even if you're

accepting robots. And by robots, we mean

Google's crawler. Even if you're

accepting those on every single page,

still have a robots.txt that

allows Google to search everything or to

index everything and

point it to your XML site map

specifically. All right. Number 17, the

final point site audits.

This is how we make sure that

everything we've done, all the work we've

put into this, that it is

exactly how it needs to be,

that we are giving Google everything at

once to give us a really

good high page ranking. First

and foremost, we want to check for our

core web vitals, those three

metrics that Google holds above

all the rest and says, if you're nailing

these three, you probably

have a good user experience.

If you run your site through Chrome

Lighthouse or Google page

speed insights, both of those will

give you that information and let you

know how you're doing on

those three metrics and a whole

bunch of other stuff. Not only will they

give you a score, but to give you

specific feedback on the

link you bought to some Google docs that

will help you to fix up

whatever might be low.

There are also a lot of other good tools

that test all kinds of

things like backlinks and all

the metadata on your page and lots of

other good stuff. Personally, I use a

Chrome plugin by Woo

Rank called SEO analysis and website

review that I can link in the

description. There are also tools

that will help more with the content

side, but you as the

developer should probably at least

help set those up, let your content team

know how to get in there.

Something you should be aware of.

First and foremost for that is Google

search console page says

that Google search console

tools and reports help you measure your

site, search traffic and performance,

fix issues and make your site shiny.

Google search results.

Your content team can submit the site map

itself and they can make

sure that pages are getting

ranked and listed in there. It is kind of

like a transparent way of

seeing what does Google have

indexed and what are they doing about it?

Is there anything that

Google doesn't like about certain

pages? It gives you a lot of feedback.

It's kind of a must have beyond that.

There are also tools

like SEMrush and Ahrefs that I like to

use just to make sure I'm

getting a kind of robust amount

of data. All right. And with all those

tools, the key is to scan the site

routinely. And remember,

SEO is a moving target. You've got to

make sure you're keeping up

to date on all the SEO best

practices because what might have you at

number one today, you might

not be there tomorrow just

because Google might've changed what it's

looking for. Google might've

changed something about the

core web vitals. Who knows, right? You

need to make sure that

you are keeping up to date

and then keeping your sites that you're

maintaining or that you're

working on up to date as well.

All right, we made it. That is all the

points I have for you, but

let's just recap real quick.

Remember, technical SEO is on you, the

developer. It helps Google

and your users understand the

content better. In order to get better

technical SEO, you're going

to want to optimize your user

experience. You're going to make sure you

include all relevant

metadata and handle all those

administrative tasks. And over time,

you're going to see improved search

rankings and organic

traffic, enhanced user experience and

engagement, and even increased

conversions and business growth,

all that good stuff. So thank you so much

for watching. If you

found this video helpful,

please click that like button. And if you

want more web development

content, I'd love it if you

subscribed, my name is Alex. Take care.

I'll see you next time.