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.
A Simple Guide to .htaccess
The .htaccess file on mod_rewrite enabled servers (usually Unix-based but sometimes decent Windows hosts) can be an SEOs dream (and sometimes nightmare). The small file that should be found in the root folder is what you will use to fix a lot of the crawling errors with rewrites and redirects. On small, static sites, they can even be used to create more usable, pretty URLs. An introduct...
Canonicalization: How to Fix Common Issues
Why is canonicalization important & how do you implement it on your site? Here are steps for creating 301 redirects in Apache, IIS, PHP, JSP, ASP and Coldfusion.
SEO Health Checks - Regular Housekeeping Tasks for Your Website's SEO
Technical problems, errors and surprise releases are all regular features in the day to day management of a website when you’re an SEO. There’s no doubt that maintaining a quick, error free and well optimised site can lead to long term traffic success. Here are some of my tips for regular checks you should be doing to stay on top of your website to maximise your search engine performan...
Pagination: Best Practices for SEO & User Experience
We've been getting a lot of questions in Q+A and on the road at events like last week's Miva Merchant conference, Online Marketing Summit and the YCombinator conference about h...
The Elements of an HTML Link
Links. We often talk about why we want them and how to get them, but today I'd like to go back to basics and look at the constituent parts of the HTML code behind them. This is definitely a post for the new SEO, or web-developer looking to expand their experience, but even experienced search marketers may want to comment the nuances of some parts of the humble anchor tag's attributes.Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
Moz Academy Training
Complete courses to master SEO basics
Keyword Research Master Guide
Learn Keyword Research like the pros
Guide to SEO Competitor Analysis
Win rankings and traffic from your competition
Testing How Crawl Priority Works
A SHORT INTRODUCTION... We all know that the search engine robots more frequently visit popular pages, i.e. those that have the largest number of incoming links, both internal and external ones. The architecture of a website is usually correlated with the popularity of these pages expressed by number of backlinks:Home page has the most backlinks,1st ...
It's a Feeding Frenzy for Keyword-Rich Domains
It's a well-known fact in the SEO world that Google shows enormous favoritism in its rankings to domain names that contain one or more of the keywords being searched for. If your domain name is a close match to the search keywords all glued together, it's as easy as fishing with dynamite to get on page 1 of the SERPs for that search phrase.&...
Making Website URLs SEO Friendly... and Pretty
Inspired by the Anatomy of a URL post, a pretty URL is great for SEO but requires more from a custom website than installing changing a wordpress setting. Luckily, the setup is not that difficult since most websites have two primary levels of design: a webpage, and a filter. For the technical folks, we will be using a feature...
Diagrams for Solving Crawl Priority & Indexation Issues
Yesterday night I stayed up way too late authoring a post on Google's Indexation Cap. Today, despite getting up way too early, I wanted to follow up and answer some of the questions from the comments, Twitter and my email. I think SEOs who read the post rightly asked for more direction in solving this problem - a fair request.
Rethinking Duplicate Content
This post is about three pretty interesting things in my book; opportunities at SEOmoz, a new kind of duplicate content, and me. Despite the cleaver title, this post is not about SEO. You've been warned, OK?