TECHNICAL SEO:
The Complete Guide
This is a complete guide to technical SEO.
In this brand-new guide, you will learn everything about:
- Crawling and indexing
- XML sitemaps
- Duplicate content
- Structured data
- Hreflang
- Lotas more
If you want to ensure your technical SEO is effective, this guide will provide you with a lot of value.
Contents
4. Thin and Duplicate content
5. Page Speed
6.Extra Technical SEO Tips
7.Technical SEO Case Studies
Chapter 1:
Technical SEO Fundamentals
Let’s start things off with a chapter on the basics.
Specifically, in this chapter, I’ll cover why technical SEO is still crucial in 2025.
I’ll show you what is (and isn’t) considered “technical SEO.”
Let’s dive in.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the procedure of confirming that a website meets the technical necessity of recent search engines with the goal of developing organic rankings. Momentous elements of technical SEO involve crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architectonics.
Why Is Technical SEO Important?
You can have the best site with excellent content.
But if your technical SEO is messed up?
Then you’re not going to rank.
At the maximum basic level, Google and other search engines want to be able to find,
crawl, render, and index.
But that’s just scratching the periphery. Even if Google MAKE indexes all of your site’s content, this doesn’t mean your work is done.
That’s the reason, that for your site to be completely optimized for technical SEO, your site’s pages want to be secure, mobile optimized, free of duplicate content, fast-loading, and meet basic Web Vitals essentials. And a chiliad and other accessories that go into technical optimization.
This goes without saying that your technical SEO doesn’t have to be perfect to rank.
But the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better your ranking chances.
How Can You Improve Your Technical SEO?
As I said, “Technical SEO” is not right crawling and indexing.
To improve the technical optimization of your site, you want to take into account:
Robots meta tags
- Structured data
- Robots meta tags
- Duplicate content
- XML sitemaps
- Canonical tags
- Site architecture
- JavaScript
- Thin content
- URL structure
- Hreflang
- 404 pages
- 301 redirects
And I’m emran forgetting a few 🙂
Fortunately, I’m going to cover all of those things (and more) in the rest of this guide.
Chapter 2:
Structure and Navigation
In my counsel, your site’s structure is “gradation #1” of something technical SEO adventure.
(Yes, exactly coming previously crawling and indexing)
Why?
First of all, a poorly designed site structure causes a lot of crawling and indexing issues. Then if you get this gradation right, you used to have to worry as much about Google indexing all the pages on your site.
Second, is your site structure emotion everything you do to optimize your site… from URLs to your sitemap to using robots.txt to block search engines from assured pages.
It also helps prosperity the user experience.
The undermost rank here is: that a potential skeleton makes every other technical SEO persuasive much easier.
With that, let’s get to the steps.
Use a Flat, Organized Site Structure
Your site structure is how every one of the pages on your website is organized.
In common, you need a structure that’s “flat”. In other sound: your site’s pages should be only a few links away from one another.
Why is this significant?
A plain structure makes it easier for search engines to crawl 100% of your site’s pages.
This is not a huge deal for a blog or local SEO shop website. But for an e-commerce
site with 125k product pages? A plane architecture is a BIG deal.
You also want your structure to be excellent organized.
In other words, you don’t need a site masonry like this:
This dirty structure usually makes “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links pointing to them).
Consistent URL Structure
Particularly if you run a small site (like a blog) you don’t need to overthink your URL structure.
That said: you want your URLs to follow a consistent, rational structure. This helps users access otherwise they are on your site.
Putting your pages under several categories away Google spare context about each page in that category.
Breadcrumbs Navigation
There’s no furtive that breadcrumbs navigation is excellent and SEO-friendly.
That’s because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to categories and subpages on your site.
So whereas it is ready emotion, I recommend using breadcrumbs navigation.
Chapter 3:
Crawling, Rendering and Indexing
This chapter is all about relation construction it is SUPER soft for search engines to find and index your complete site.
In this section I’ll display to you how to find and fix crawl mistakes… and how to send a search
engine arachnid to grave pages on your website.
Spot Indexing Issues
Your first place footstep is to search any pages on your site that search engine arachnid have trouble crawling.
Here are 3 ways to do that.
Page Indexing Report
Your first place footstop should be the “Page Indexing Report” in the Google Search Console.
This information lets you know if Google is important to fully index or render pages that you need to be indexed.
Internal Link to “Deep” Pages
Most people don’t endure any revision getting their homepage indexed.
It’s which deep pages (pages that are various links from the homepage)
tend to have motive problems.
A plain architecture generally prevents this issue from happening in the first position.
After all, your “deepest” page will only be 2-3 clicks from your homepage.
Either avenue, if there’s a specific deep page or kit of pages that you want to be indexed,
nothing beats an excellent old-fashioned internal link to this page.
Particularly if the page you’re linking from has a lot of authority and grows crawled constantly.
Use an XML Sitemap
In this age of mobile-first indexing and AMP work Google still needs an XML sitemap to find your site’s URLs.
Yup.
A Google repertory explained that XML sitemaps are the “second most important source” for finding URLs.
(The one)? That didn’t say. But I’m proud of external and internal links).
If you need to double-check that your sitemap is all helpful, head over to
the “Sitemaps” feature in the Search Console.
These will display the sitemap Google is hearing for your site.
GSC “Inspect”
Is a URL on your site not acquirement indexed?
Authority, the GSC’s reconnoiter feature can help you get to the bottom of things.
Not only will it tell you why a page is not acquirement indexed…
Hat way, you can double-check that Google is able to crawl and index 100% of the content on that page.
Chapter 4:
Thin and Duplicate Content#
If you writing singular, main content for a whole page on your site then you possibly don’t necessity to worry about duplicate content.
This said:
Duplicate content can technically crop up on any site… particularly if your CMS created many translations of the same page on various URLs.
And it’s the same story among thin content: it’s not an expression for most websites. But it can lose your overall site’s rankings. So it’s value finding and fixing.
In this chapter, I’m going to reveal to you how to proactively fix duplicate and thin content expression on your site.
Use an SEO Audit Tool to Find Duplicate Content
Dyad tools work a GREAT job at upshot duplicate so thin content.
The first is the Gimp Tools Site Auditor.
It takes your site because of duplicate content (or thin content). And accept you know
which pages disinterest to be updated.
The Semrush site audit tool moreover has a “Content exorcism” department that shows you
if your site has the same content on various pages.
Noindex Pages That Don’t Have Unique Content
Most sites are going to endure pages with some duplicate content.
And that’s OK.
That becomes a problem when those duplicate content pages are indexed.
The resolution? Add the “no index” tag to those pages.
The no-index tag tells Google and other search engines not to index the page.
You perform duplicate-check that your no index tag is installed exactly using the “Inspect URL property” in the GSC.
Popular in your URL and click “exam Live URL
For example, certain posts at emranbd used to have paginated comments.
If those pages are indexed with Google, we’d endure duplicate content expression up the wazoo.
That is why we add a no-index tag to each one of those pages alone.
Note: You can also block search engine spiders from crawling the page
altogether by blocking their crawlers in your robots.txt file.
Use Canonical URLs
Maximum pages same endure duplicate content should get the old
no-index tag joined to them. Or endure the duplicate content being replaced with unique content.
But there’s a third local: canonic URLs.
Canonic URLs are formality for pages
with much similar content on them with minor differences in pages.
For example, let’s tell you run an e-commerce site that encash cup.
And you endure a product page set up quite for cowboy cup.
Not excellent.
Fortunately, you can use the canonic tag to let Google know same the
vanilla translation of your product page is the “primary” one. And all the others are alternatives.
Chapter 5:
PageSpeed
Progressing your page speed is one of the several technical SEO tricks that can right away impact your site’s rankings.
That’s not to say that a quick-loading site will rocket you to the top of Google’s first page.
(You want backlinks for that)
However, improving your site’s loading speed can do a significant dent in your organic traffic.
In this chapter, I’ll display 3 simple ways to help your site’s loading speed.
CDNs. Cache. Idle loading. Lessen CSS.
I’m assured you’ve fallen about these refugees a millennium earlier.
But I don’t view almost as much as people say about a page speed factor that’s just as momentous:
Web page shaped.
When we ran our large-scale page speed study, we found that a page’s
complete shape correlated with load times more than some other factor.
I made the conscious decision to live by slower loading times. I rather endure a
slow, awesome-looking page vs. a fast page with grainy images.
Which will hurt our scores on Google PageSpeed Insights.
But if progressing your site speed is a top priority, then you need to do whatever you
can to slim down your page’s total shape.
Test Load Times by and Without a CDN
One of the most surprising findings from our page speed study was that
CDNs were associated by worse load times.
That is likely since many CDNs aren’t kit up correctly.
So if your shape uses a CDN, I confer testing your site’s speed on
webpagetest.org by the CDN on or off.
Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts
Each 3rd party script same page has adds an average of 34ms to its load time.
Some of this scripts (like Google Analytics), you likely want.
But it never hurts to look over your site’s scripts to see if there’s something you
can get rid of.
Chapter 6:
Extra Technical SEO Tips
Now it’s time for something fast technical SEO
tips.
In that chapter, we’ll cover redirects, structured data,
Hreflang, and more.
Implement hreflang for International Websites.
Does your shape endure different translations of your page
for other countries and languages?
If so, the Hreflang tag can be a HUGE boost.
The only expression by the Hreflang tag?
It’s tough to kit up. And Google’s documentation on how to use it isn’t super clear.
Check Your Site for Dead Links
Having dead links on your shape won’t make or break your SEO.
Google even said the same broken links are “not an SEO problem”.
But if you endure broken internal links?
That’s another story.
Broken internal links can make it harder for Google to find and crawl your site’s pages.
You can follow this step-by-step emran audit on your site and acquire similar results.
Set up Structured Data
Do you think that setting up Schema directly helps your site’s SEO?
No.
Our search engine ranking factors reading found no correlation between Schema and first-page rankings.
Noindex Tag and Category Pages
If your shape runs on WordPress, I highly recommend that you do not index categories and tag pages.
(Unless, of course, which pages bring in lots of traffic).
These pages don’t usually add much value to users. And they can cause duplicate content expression.
If you use Yoast, you can easily index these pages with a unique click.
Check for Mobile Usability Issues
Google’s mobile-first indexing initiative is finally complete. So I don’t want to tell you same your shape should be mobile-optimized.
This said:
Even shapes that are super mobile-friendly can run into expression.
And if users do not start emailing you complaints, these issues can be hard to spot.
That’s where the beacon comes in.
Lighthouse is an automated weapon that scans your site for issues touching mobile usability. It doesn’t just drop out the matters—it gives you detailed, actionable insights to fix them.
For example:
- Are your buttons too close together?
- Is your text too small to read?
Make content overflow the viewport?
Same way, you know exactly what to fix.
Bonus Chapter:
Technical SEO Case Studies
Let’s cap off this guide with a kit of brand-new technical SEO case studies.
Specifically, you’ll view how four emran readers increased their Google rankings with:
- Date Schema
- Internal linking
- FAQ Schema
- Website migration best practices
So without further ado, let’s get right between the case studies.
Case Study #1
How Felix Used Internal Linking to Help Organic Traffic with 225%
When Felix Norton audited one of his clients’ websites (an event hiring
marketplace) for technical SEO expression, one thing stood out:
They weren’t using something internal links! And the internal links the shaped DID endure didn’t
use keyword-rich anchor text.
At this drop, that client had been with Felix’s agency for 3 months. Felix and his
team had been publishing The US of high-quality content on their client’s blog. But
traffic and rankings were stagnant.
Well, during my audit, Felix realized that none of this awesome content was linked
together. Also worse: the content didn’t link to important product and service pages.
This is at what time Felix explicitly added internal links to their high-priority content pieces.
And pieces of related content.
Case Study #2
How emran Reversed a Disastrous Website Migration
emran SEO services, Only Way Online, took on a new client whose rankings had completely tanked.
As it turned out, the site migrated their website to the latest translation of Magento.
They even explicitly combined this migration with a handful of changes to their website (like removing URLs that were getting search traffic) without considering the impact on organic search.
The shape went from about 15,000 monthly visitors to as low as 1,500 visitors a month in a span of 2 months.
At what time Neil did a full SEO shape audit to figure out what went wrong, he found a host of technical SEO issues like:
- Pages without internal links pointing to them (orphan pages)
- Pages that were canonicalizing themselves to index pages
- Pages redirecting to a page are then redirected to another page (redirect chains)
- Broken internal and external links
- Sitemap including pages that should not be indexed
- Poorly-optimized title and description tags
And you can begin to veiw an uptick in organic traffic in the weeks following these technical SEO fixes.