Technical SEO

Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.

Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.

If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.

On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.

The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.

MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.

The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.

Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.

Most Recent Articles on Technical SEO

Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps
Rand Fishkin

Canonical URL Tag - The Most Important Advancement in SEO Practices Since Sitemaps

Technical SEO

The announcement from Yahoo!, Live & Google that they will be supporting a new "canonical url tag" to help webmasters and site owners eliminate self-created duplicate content in the index is, in my opinion, the biggest change to SEO best practices since the emergence of Sitemaps. It's rare that we cover search engine announcements or "news items" here on SEOmoz, as this blog is devoted more towards tactics than breaking headlines, but this certainly demands attention and requires quick education.

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?
Casey Henry

Do Sitemaps Affect Crawlers?

Technical SEO

Like any other person out there, I fall into habits, good and bad. Recently while working on a client’s website, I created a Sitemap and submitted it to the search engines, like I always do. I started to think if this really helps the site out and what’s the effect when I submit a Sitemap on the site.

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URL Tagging: Clean Up Your Act
Rishi Lakhani

URL Tagging: Clean Up Your Act

Technical SEO

It was quite by chance I stumbled upon this issue early last year, while working on a project (and to be honest, it was the team at Latitude that picked up on it). Basically, one of the sites I was working on with them had some serious bloat in search results, and after digging into the situation, the solution was pretty simple. Although I cannot mention the site here because of NDA’s, I can give you an example of a site that suffers the same problem, and hopefully will give you an idea into how to manage the problem for your own/client sites.

What Quantum of Solace Can Tell Us About Information Architecture
D

What Quantum of Solace Can Tell Us About Information Architecture

Technical SEO

I've said it before, and no doubt I'll say it again: in my opinion, the number one reason for websites failing online is because they have a poor information architecture. Don't worry, I'm not going to compare myself to Bond. Instead, I'm going to use Quantum of Solace to demonstrate how something as simple as categorizing a new action movie can lead to some serious problems in your site architecture. (Just for the record, I tend to use the phrases 'site' or 'information architecture' interchangeably to cover a multitude of sins.)

Why New Content Briefly Flickers Out Of Google
B

Why New Content Briefly Flickers Out Of Google

Technical SEO

A few days after new content shows up in Google, it will sometimes flicker out of the SERPS for a few hours. Apparently, this is common knowledge to some SEOs. This is not common knowledge to programmers like me, and I nearly made a tin foil hat in preparation for the googlicopters when I learned the project (Linkscape) that I'd worked on for months had disappeared from all SERPs on th...

Programmers Deserve Love Too
Andrew Miller

Programmers Deserve Love Too

Technical SEO

If you are like most SEO's I meet, you are probably not doing the majority of the programming and development work for your clients or company. Those of us from the marketing side of the business frequently rely on professionals to do the heavy lifting during the implementation stages of an SEO campaign. I've had the privilege of working with very smart and talented web developers in my...

IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results
J

IIS Case Folding, Robots and Results

Technical SEO

For the last few years, I've been doing some SEO on Apache sites. Suddenly, this year, I've had a clutch of IIS sites to handle and I'm seeing some puzzling and worrying things, which appear to be caused by the way that Microsoft defaults to "caseless" file systems. Worrying things as in "damaging to search engine results". I can't find any guidance from Micr...

Seven Things That Reality Could Borrow From The Internet
Jane Copland

Seven Things That Reality Could Borrow From The Internet

Technical SEO

The Internet, as fragile and infuriating and enigmatic as its features can be, certainly has some great features that I'd really like to see implemented, at least for beta testing, in reality. Redirecting phone numbers. When I moved to Seattle (two years ago last Saturday), I acquired a local number. In the days before Facebook became microchipped into everyone's forehead, I had lit...