Technical SEO
Traditionally, the phrase Technical SEO refers to optimizing your site for crawling and indexing, but can also include any technical process meant to improve search visibility.
Technical SEO is a broad and exciting field, covering everything from sitemaps, meta tags, JavaScript indexing, linking, keyword research, and more.
If you’re new to SEO, we recommend starting with the chapter on Technical SEO in our Beginner’s Guide. Below are the latest posts on technical SEO, and we’ve included a few top articles here.
On-Site SEO : What are the technical on-page factors that influence your rankings? Our free learning center will get you started in the right direction.
The Web Developer's SEO Cheat Sheet : This handy—and printable—cheat sheet is invaluable for anyone building websites. Contains several useful references that cover a ton of technical SEO best practices.
MozBar : This free Chrome extension is an advanced SEO toolbar that helps you to examine and diagnose several technical SEO issues.
The Technical SEO Renaissance : Is it true that technical SEO isn't necessary, because Google is smart enough to figure your website out? Mike King puts this rumor to rest, and shows you what to focus on.
Technical SEO: The One Hour Guide to SEO : Want a quick introduction to the basics of technical SEO? Our guru Rand has you covered—all in about 10 minutes.
How to Use Robots.txt and Redirects the Wrong Way
I got inspired by Rebecca Kelley's post about Newbie Mistakes and instantly two and a half newbie mistakes came to my mind. They are a bit on the technical side of things, but not too much to be understood by all of you mozzers :-)1. Robots.txt is no security layer...
XML Sitemaps: Guidelines on Their Use
Over the past couple of days I have been putting together some internal guidelines on various aspects of our jobs. This should ensure that we are giving consistent information to our various clients. Most of these guidelines have been fairly straightforward with nothing in them to write home about. However, one of the hardest guidelines to write has been the one talking about xml sitemaps. ...
An SEOmoz PRO Tip (For Everyone) & Feedback About the PRO UI
Lots and lots of people sign up for SEOmoz's PRO membership, and I have to tell you that on a personal level, every single one makes me feel honored, humble and yes, even a bit guilty about reading comic books last night instead of working on new tools/q+a/tips/etc. One of the big frustrations PRO members have, though, is that they can't find (or don't even know about) a lot of the cool st...
Flash and SEO - Compelling Reasons Why Search Engines & Flash Still Don't Mix
I know, I know. Google's indexing Flash and Flash developers can rejoice now that their content is SEO-friendly. Sorry - I don't buy it for a second. Flash content is fundamentally different from HTML on webpage URLs and being able to parse links in the Flash code and text snippets does not make F...
How to Turn Yourself from a Great Developer to a Great SEO
The work done by developers rarely hits the headlines but can often be the difference between success and failure in an SEO project. The following list may not be groundbreaking but then SEO often isn't. I think the following all fall under the heading of advanced common sense...Level Up Your SEO Skills With Our Free Training
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White Hat Cloaking: It Exists. It's Permitted. It's Useful.
A quote from Google's Guidelines on Cloaking: Serving up different results based on user agent may cause your site to be perceived as deceptive and removed from the Google index. ...
What Google Doesn't See CAN Hurt You (Update: But, in this case, it was cloaking)
It's been a big month for false positives and getting caught with spam, and I've never been one to break up a theme. Short post, but an important one that every dev team should be aware of. The story starts with a smart SEOmoz member, Per Svanström, getting stumped by a perfectly legitimate, white hat subdirectory, with plenty of ...
The World Series Spidering Problem
The issue I want to talk about is geo-delivery i.e. delivering different content to different visitors depending on their geographic location. When you don't know more information about the visitor (from sign-up information, cookie, etc.), the only way of doing this is through determining their location from their IP address. Whenever you start talking about selectively delivering content based on IP address, the topic of cloaking inevitably comes up.
SEO-Friendly FLEX Websites
When building a FLEX( Flash ) application that must be available to the user via Internet, always comes the next question : Will the website containing the application be SEO friendly?And the answer is NO. Google and other search engines cannot see inside your FLEX( Flash ) website/application and and index your pages. If SEO is important to you, and it should be important, you...
Removing ?PHPSESSID from a URL
You’ve worked hard to prevent any duplicate content on your website. No copy-paste on your copy, no two url’s returning the exact same webpage due to incorrect usage of mod_rewrite and so on. But then, a couple days after the big launch, Google starts getting cluttered with dozens of references to your website, which harms your rankings. All due to an incorrect and insecure alternat...