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.
The World Series Spidering Problem
The issue I want to talk about is geo-delivery i.e. delivering different content to different visitors depending on their geographic location. When you don't know more information about the visitor (from sign-up information, cookie, etc.), the only way of doing this is through determining their location from their IP address. Whenever you start talking about selectively delivering content based on IP address, the topic of cloaking inevitably comes up.
SEO-Friendly FLEX Websites
When building a FLEX( Flash ) application that must be available to the user via Internet, always comes the next question : Will the website containing the application be SEO friendly?And the answer is NO. Google and other search engines cannot see inside your FLEX( Flash ) website/application and and index your pages. If SEO is important to you, and it should be important, you...
Removing ?PHPSESSID from a URL
You’ve worked hard to prevent any duplicate content on your website. No copy-paste on your copy, no two url’s returning the exact same webpage due to incorrect usage of mod_rewrite and so on. But then, a couple days after the big launch, Google starts getting cluttered with dozens of references to your website, which harms your rankings. All due to an incorrect and insecure alternat...
Controlling Search Engine Access with Cookies & Session IDs
We've talked plenty in the past about methods to control search engine spiders' access to documents on your website, and we've discussed cloaking in several depths as well. But I feel that an under-utilized and extremely powerful methodology for serving unique content in different ways to visitors and search engines, based on the different experiences sought by the two, is critical to advanced ...
The Complete Introduction to Joomla SEO
Hey All. At the suggestion of a few people in the Joomla community I decided to site down and write a beginner's guide to optimizing a Joomla site for SEO. The bad news: the default version of Joomla i...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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Rewriting the Beginner's Guide to SEO: Redirection, Server, & Hosting Issues
I'm currently in the process of re-authoring and re-building the Beginner's Guide to Search Engine Optimization, section by section. You can read more about this project here. Redirecting Pages f...
How to Make a Spider Crawl Backwards
First off, we need to begin with the usual disclaimers and warnings -- not that they are necessarily necessary -- but just in case ... your mileage may vary, no claims made, use at own risk, don't try this at home, performed on a closed track with professional driver, and so on. And please note that these ideas are strictly conceptual, at least that I'm aware, and have not been te...
Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website (from an SEO perspective)
The Question: I'm starting a new site and have no idea what I should do for software. Do I need to use a content management system, and if so, should I build my own or use someone else's? The Answer: It depends... I want to try taking a new tact with this blog post and give some direction about how to approach this issue. There's no way to tack...
Robots Exclusion Protocol 101
<p>The Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) is a conglomerate of standards that regulate Web robot behavior and search engine indexing. Despite the "Exclusion" in its name, the REP covers mechanisms for inclusion too. The REP consists of</p><ol><li>The original REP from <a href="http://www.robotstxt.org/orig.html">1994</a>, extended <a href=&qu...
12 Ways to Keep Your Content Hidden from the Search Engines
Here at SEOmoz, we're usually talking about how to make your content more visible to the search engines. Today, we're taking a different direction. It may seem unusual, but there are plenty of times when content on your website needs to be protected from search indexing and caching. Why? Many reasons: Privacy Duplicate Content Issues Keyword Cann...