Technical SEO is the backbone of search engine optimization. It is the process of optimizing your website for the crawling and indexing phase of search engines. It includes optimizing your website’s structure, URL structure, internal linking, sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript, HTML, and more.

Here are some of the most important components of technical SEO for beginners:

1. Website hierarchy: Refers to the hierarchical organization of your website, from general (homepage) to specific (blog post).
2. Crawl, index, render: Your site architecture is the first step to ensuring Google can properly crawl and index your website.
3. Consistent URL structure: There’s no need to overthink your URL structure.
4. Spot indexing issues: Your first step is to find any pages on your site that search engine spiders have trouble crawling.
5. Internal link to “deep” pages: Internal linking helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the importance of each page .

Beginner Steps in Technical SEO

Here are some steps to get started with technical SEO:

1. Make a Google Search Console account if you haven’t already. This will help you monitor your website’s performance and identify any issues that need to be addressed.
2. Create a robots.txt file. This file tells search engines which pages to crawl and which ones to ignore .
3. Build an XML and HTML sitemap. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website and find all of your pages.
4. Use HTTPS. This is a secure version of HTTP that encrypts data between the user’s browser and the website.
5. Establish an SEO-friendly navigation. This helps search engines understand the structure of your website and the importance of each page.
6. Follow an SEO-friendly URL structure. This helps search engines understand what your pages are about and how they relate to each other.
7. Develop a mobile-friendly website. This is important because more and more people are using their mobile devices to browse the web.
8. Optimize page speed. This is important because faster-loading pages tend to rank higher in search engine results .

Mistakes to avoid in technical SEO

Here are some common technical SEO mistakes to avoid:

1. Overlooking the value of SEO strategy. Many small businesses lack an SEO strategy .
2. Failing to be specific with demographics .
3. Following ineffective SEO activities .
4. Producing and sharing samey, disengaging content. Online content should be original, useful, engaging and relatable .
5. Overlooking the relationship of SEO and user experience .
6. Forgetting to measure SEO success .