Technical SEO: A Beginner's Guide

Technical SEO focuses on helping search engines access, understand and index the right pages. It is the foundation that lets good content be found.

What to review

• Status codes and broken pages.
• Redirects, especially chains of redirects.
• Canonical tags.
• Robots.txt and noindex directives.
• XML sitemaps.
• Structured data such as Article, Product and FAQ.
• Internal links.
• Mobile rendering and speed.

Large sites and marketplaces

Large marketplaces should also control filter URLs, duplicate product pages, pagination and expired listings, so search engines do not waste time on near-identical pages.

Tools

Search Console reports and crawling tools help find issues.

Fix the important things first

Fix problems that affect many pages or important pages first, like checkout, categories and top articles.

Technical SEO has limits

Technical improvements support discoverability but cannot make up for pages that provide little value to visitors.

Frequently asked questions

What is structured data?

Code that describes page content, such as products or FAQs, so search engines can understand it better.

What does noindex mean?

An instruction telling search engines not to include a page in search results.