What is Technical SEO?

• Can search engine bots crawl/find your page? (includes topics such as status codes, sitemaps, information architecture, robots.txt, facets)
• Can search engine bots index your page? (includes: meta robots)
• Can search engine bots render your page? (includes: JavaScript, the DOM, page speed)
• Can bots understand content on your page? (includes: structured data (Schema.org, HTML), accessibility)
• Are you sending search engines the proper signals for dealing with ranking content? (e.g., canonical tags, dealing with pagination)
• Is this page worthy of ranking? (includes: content relevance, authority, HTTP, UX, mobile-friendly, site latency)”

The big technical SEO topics are:

• Crawling
• Rendering
• Indexation
• Mobile
• SSL
• Structured data
• Migrations
• Page speed
• Content optimization
• Status codes
• Site structure

Quite a lot, isn’t it? When I learned SEO, Google was much simpler. If you enter SEO nowadays, you surely feel overwhelmed.

Then, dive deeper into the big topics:

• Crawling: log file analysis, XML / HTML sitemaps, mobile bot crawl behavior
• Mobile: AMP, Progressive Web Apps, Responsive design
• SSL: HTTPS, HTTP/2
• Structured data: Schema markup, Microdata & JSON-LD, Rich Snippets
• Migrations: domain migrations, relaunches, CMS changes, HTTP to HTTPS
• Page speed: rich media and script compression, CSS sprites, CDNs, server speed optimization, parallel downloads and minify, caching
• Rendering: critical rendering path/lazy loading, DOM rendering, Javascript frameworks rendering
• Content optimization: entity optimization, duplicate content, thin content
• Status codes: 3xx, 4xx, 5xx
• Indexation: canonicalization, robots.txt, meta-tags
• Site structure: internal linking, URL structure, taxonomy