SEO: Basic Overview

There are 3 different types of SEO:

Technical
On-page
Off-page

We'll cover the 3 different aspects throughout this training.

What Is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is website and server optimizations that help search engines crawl and index client sites more effectively which in turn helps improve organic rankings.

Search engines give preferential treatment in search results to websites that display certain technical characteristics. These include things like:

a secure connection
a responsive design
fast loading time
clean crawling of the site (no redirects, broken links, missing images, etc)

Technical SEO is the work we need to do to ensure client websites meets these characteristics. Some of the types of technical SEO pieces we use are below.

Redirects (300 errors)

A redirect is a directive that tells a search engine about a change of address for a piece of content. Essentially, when someone visits "page a" and that URL has changed, they are sent to "page b", the new location. Redirects are sometimes necessary on a website as in the case mentioned, but we want as few as possible.

When we crawl a website and find these old URLs within the content, we want to fix them so that the bot doesn't encounter this incorrect link. Some large sites can have thousands of these and each one slows down the bot and disrupts your crawl.

400 & 500 Errors

We have all encountered a "404 error" which is page not found. These are broken links. In some cases the content was actually just moved, but no redirect was set up to properly send visitors to the new location. Other times content is just removed and not relocated. Either way, somewhere on your website you have a link pointing to that piece of non-existent content. We want to remove all such instances, including any other "400" errors such as 403 (forbidden).

Broken Images

By now you have surely seen a website with the little icon denoting that the image is broken or missing. It's annoying. Additionally, the image would probably help the content have a better appearance, thus improving conversion likelihood. We want to find all of them and replace the image with one that is available, optimized correctly of course.

Citing Sources

SEO Plugin Configurations

SEO Basic Components & Technical SEO