Technical SEO is all about improving a website’s architecture by tweaking the technical aspects of a website. Effective implementation of technical SEO will ensure your site has better visibility and performs well on different search engines. Whether you’re trying to rank your website on Google, Bing, or Yahoo, technical SEO implementations will ensure it gets the exposure it deserves.

Technical SEO often requires collaboration between an SEO specialist and a developer. Since it requires creating schema markups and adding them at the backend of a website, technical SEO requires a developer to implement those by working collaboratively with an SEO specialist.

Practically, a myriad of other implementations require the intervention of a developer, such as optimizing pages for load speed, site architecture, security, and internal linking.

All such implementations are done to ensure that every friction point is technically removed and its site optimization doesn’t hinder search bots from crawling, indexing & rendering.

How is Technical SEO Different from On-Page and Off-Page SEO?

We have to explain how technical SEO is different from on-page SEO or off-page SEO. In that case, technical SEO is designing and maintaining a site’s technical health. On-page SEO revolves around other concepts, such as keyword research and content creation.

Off-page SEO is totally different. It’s the science of link-building. An SEO specialist must work on blogger outreach and digital PR and implement effective link-building strategies to boost external authority signals pointing back to a particular website. Technical SEO majorly focuses on code-level deployment.

These small deployments often target to improve crawlability for quicker & extensive content indexing. To a certain degree, concepts of technical SEO often overlap organic SEO; for example, in on-page SEO, specialists usually examine web pages and ensure that metadata items such as title tags, meta descriptions, H1s, and H2s are appropriately mapped on relevant keywords.

Meanwhile, a technical SEO specialist also focuses on factual code errors related to metadata. They are tasked with removing long page titles or missing meta descriptions without going through the same drill of writing metadata repeatedly.

How Complicated is Technical SEO?

Not exactly. If you’re clear on the fundamentals, technical SEO is not difficult to master.

But before we get into the details of how technical SEO works, let’s first understand how crawling works.

What is Crawling?

In simpler terms, crawling is the process where a search engine crawls through a website page content and checks the page on different signals. It also follows the link on a particular page to identify the other pages of the same website.

A robot.txt file explains to search engine crawlers the URLs crawlers can access on a particular website. The purpose of a robot.txt file is to ensure one avoids overloading the site with too many unnecessary requests.

There are certain pages that people often don’t want the crawlers to crawl on their website, and therefore, SEO specialists often add the no-index or password-protect feature to the page to stop it from crawling online.

Do you know Google can still crawl pages labeled as no-index pages just because they have crawled a link on a particular page pointing back to the specific website?

What is Crawl-Rate?

Now that we know how crawling works let’s understand the crawl rate. A crawl rate is the number of requests a search engine crawler generates for a website daily.

The crawl rate was introduced in order to reduce the server overload.

Do you know there’s a crawl-delay directive that you can use in robots.txt, which many crawlers support? A crawl-delay directive defines how often a search engine crawler can crawl your website pages.

However, Google doesn’t respect the crawl-rate directive to be altered in the robots.txt. Instead, an SEO specialist has to manually change the crawl rate directly from the Google Search Console.

How SEO Specialists Place Access Restrictions?

There are certain pages that businesses want users to see but not the search engines to find out. Here are three possible steps that you can take as an SEO specialist to prevent this from happening:

You can set up a login system for your website page.
You can use HTTP authentication (which is technically password-protected).
You can apply IP whitelisting (which allows only specific IP addresses to access pages).

SEO experts often implement such implementations to establish internal link networks, member-only content, or website pages in staging, testing, or development phases.

Can We Check Crawl Activity?

To check what Google is crawling on your website, you can check with the “Crawl stats” reports within the Google Search Console.

It gives you complete details on how Google has successfully crawled each of your web pages. If you want to see the entire crawl activity of your website, you will need to check server logs and possibly use a crawl analysis tool to analyze better the data provided by Google.

To access logs, contact your hosting provider to provide cPanel access. Attach a tool like AWStats and Webalizer to analyze server logs, monitor visitor activity, track error logs, etc.

What is Crawl Budget?

Every website has a limited crawl budget. It’s a combination of how many times Google wishes to crawl your website and how many times your website is allowing Google to crawl it.

Some website pages are popular and are crawled relatively more than websites that are not altogether popular or well-linked. Such pages are less crawled and require more effort to become crawlable.

If a Google crawler finds stress elements while crawling a particular web page, it will likely slow down or even stop the crawling process until the conditions for the page are improved.

As soon as Google’s crawler crawls pages, they are rendered and sent to indexing. An index is a master list of all the relevant pages which can be returned for search queries.

Now that we know what crawling is, let’s learn about indexing. Later, we will explain why crawling and indexing are important to understanding technical SEO.

What is Indexing?

Indexing is the process of letting search engines know the information that you’ve recently put up on your website. It’s unarguably a part of the normal search engine process because if a content is not indexed, it won’t become a part of the ever evolving Google’s database and will less likely rank on searches.

Now, there are two parts of Indexing; Robots Directive and Canonicalization.

What are Robots Directives?

Robot directives is a robots meta tag that is added as an HTML snippet to crawl or index a certain page. It’s often found within the <head> section of a web page and looks somewhat like this:

What is Canonicalization?

Canonicalization only happens when Google identifies duplicate content on the same site. This usually happens when there’s multiple versions of the same content existing on the same website.

An SEO specialist will apply canonical tags to a certain web page which Google will show in search results. Google use a mix of signals to select the best canonical URL such as:

Canonical Tags
Duplicate Pages
Internal Links
Redirects
Sitemap URLs

The best way to check whether Google has indexed a page or not is through the URL Inspection tool. It’s particularly available in Google-selected canonical URLs showing up in the Search Console.

How to Check Indexing?

Previously, we have discussed all about crawling and what indexing is. Now, to better understand other elements of Technical SEO, we are going to shed light on how you can check whether the pages you want people to find on your website are actually indexed in Google or not. You can check this by following an Indexability report in Site Audit.

The Site Audit tool will help you find pages on your website which cannot be indexed. In fact, this tool will also help you find the reasons why. You can access the Site Audit tool for free in Ahrefs Webmaster Tools kit. To run a free test, simply enter your domain name and it will pull up relevant data on Noindex & Noindex follow pages.

How to Reclaim Lost Links?

Often, websites tend to change their URLs over time. As a result, old URLs that are linking to other websites are lost and no longer appear on your pages. If those links aren’t redirected to your current pages, you can lose all that you’ve achieved on those pages over the years from the SEO standpoint. Therefore, it’s never too late to apply redirects and easily reclaim those lost links; you can think of it as the fastest link-building strategy.

You can find Site Explorer tools in almost all of the SEO marketing tools available. One decent tool where you can find Site Explorer is the Ahrefs tool, which allows you to enter your domain and navigate to the Best by Links report. Just add a “404 not found” in the HTTP response filter, and it will organize links by “Referring Domains.”

For lost links, it’s a great idea to apply 301 redirects to any of the old URLs so they point back to your current locations. You can reclaim lost value by simply applying this permanent redirect.

It will make your old URL count as new in Google’s eyes.

How to Add Schema Markup?

Schema Markup, it’s a usable code which enables search engines to understand your content better.

Think of it as a translator between your content and the search engine. This little code includes many important features to help your website stand out from the rest in search results. By exploring the Google search gallery, one can explore which search features do their website require as schema for their site to become eligible.

Here’s an example of Schema Markup (structured data) for a local business (e.g., a digital marketing agency):

{

“@context”: “https://schema.org”,

“@type”: “LocalBusiness”,

“name”: “RankHive Digital Agency”,

“url”: “https://www.rankhive.com”,

“image”: “https://www.rankhive.com/logo.png”,

“description”: “RankHive is a leading digital transformation agency specializing in AI-driven solutions, web design, and marketing.”,

“address”: {

“@type”: “PostalAddress”,

“streetAddress”: “1234 Marketing Ave”,

“addressLocality”: “New York”,

“addressRegion”: “NY”,

“postalCode”: “10001”,

“addressCountry”: “US”

“contactPoint”: {

“@type”: “ContactPoint”,

“telephone”: “+1-800-123-4567”,

“contactType”: “customer service”

“sameAs”: [

“https://www.facebook.com/RankHiveDigital”,

“https://twitter.com/RankHiveDigital”,

“https://www.linkedin.com/company/RankHiveDigital”

“openingHours”: “Mo-Fr 09:00-18:00”,

“priceRange”: “$$”

}

</script>

Common terms used within the schema markup:

@context: Defines the vocabulary (Schema.org).
@type: Specifies the entity type (LocalBusiness).
name: The business name.
url & image: Website and logo.
description: A brief business description.
address: The business location.
contactPoint: Customer service contact details.
sameAs: Links to social profiles.
openingHours: Business hours.
priceRange: Estimated pricing.

A few lesser ranking factors directly/indirectly impact the overall user experience.

They might not directly correlate to the quick wins for different technical SEO implementations, but they may have less benefit than previous ones. It doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider it, but optimize these technical aspects.

Technical SEO – Page Experience Signals

What are Core Web Vitals?

Part of Technical SEO is Core Web Vitals, a set of metrics used to measure real-world user experience. It focuses on the site’s loading performance, the site’s interactivity and whether the page has visual stability or not.

Core Web Vitals is an integral part of Google’s Page Experience signals used to measure user experience.

The metric measures the website pages across various elements which are:

Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how long it takes for the largest visible content (like an image or text block) to load and appear on the screen. A good LCP is under 2.5 seconds.
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Tracks unexpected shifts in page elements while loading, causing a poor user experience. A good CLS score is less than 0.1.
First Input Delay (FID): Measures the time it takes for a webpage to respond to the first user interaction (e.g., clicking a button). A good FID is less than 100ms.

From the Technical SEO standpoint, it is highly recommended that site owners achieve a decent score in Core Web Vitals to ensure website viewers and visitors ensure they deliver a great overall digital user experience.

Why Is Having HTTPS Important?

HTTPS protocol ensures there’s a privacy protected communication channel established between the browser and the server for secure data transfer. This particular protocol ensures the site’s communication does not get intercepted by any unwanted cyber attacker. It’s practically followed when users transmit sensitive data such as by logging into a bank account, email service or health insurance providers. If a website has any form of login credentials, you will probably find the “lock” icon adjacent to the URL in the address bar.

This will show that your website is protected under the HTTPS protocol.

How to Check Mobile Friendliness of a Website?

Another important aspect of technical SEO to ensure the website ranks on the top searches is mobile friendliness. Mobile friendliness is the process of ensuring your websites appear consistent across different mobile screens.

If you want to check the mobile-friendliness of a website, you can check it by running the website on Google Search Console. You can generate a mobile-friendliness report by simply extracting it using the “Mobile Usability.”

Moreover, the report also offers detailed reports on other mobile-friendliness issues.

What Are Interstitials?

Interstitials are basically elements which block the user from viewing content. They often appear as pop ups which cover the main content; it requires a user to interact with the content before they vanish from the screen.

These overlays and dialogue boxes can often obfuscate the underlying content which can increase the site’s bounce rate. Such boxes often interrupt users and frustrate them, eventually eroding their interest in your site.

When adding popups and other interstitials to your website, make sure that you follow the best Google guidelines.

What is Hre-Flang?

Hreflang is an HTML attribute which is commonly applied to specify the language and geographical targeting of a web page. When you have multiple versions of the same page appearing in different languages, using the Hreflang tag will tell search engines such as Google to talk about these variations to serve the correct version to the user.

Technical SEO Tools

Now that we are aware of the technical SEO aspects, we will now discuss the essential tools to improve the different technical aspects of a website. By using these tools, we will ensure that your site starts ranking on the SERPs.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console also known as the Google Webmaster Tools is a free service used by many SEO experts to monitor and trouble site appearance in Google’s Search Results Page. SEO specialists with the GSC tool also lets users fix technical errors, submit sitemaps, check structured data problems and perform other relevant tasks. While Google has Google Search Console, Bing and Yandex have their own versions. There is also the Ahref Webmaster Tools, which is actually a free tool, which altogether improves the site’s overall SEO performance.

With the following tools, you can:

Monitor your website’s SEO health.
Check for 100+ SEO issues.
View all your backlinks.
See all the keywords you rank for.
Find out how much traffic your pages are receiving.
Find internal linking opportunities.

If you’re limited in exploring the technical answers of your website on the GSC, you can always use the Ahrefs Webmaster tool to gather more detailed insight.

Google’s Mobile Friendly Test

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test is a tool which allows users to check how often a visitor uses your page on a mobile device. The Google’s Mobile Friendly Test tool offers you the ability to find specific mobile-usability problems.

Mobile Friendliness often involves problems such as text which is appearing too small on the screen, or the usage of incompatible plugins and so on. The Mobile-Friendly Test also shows what Google sees when it crawls a page.

You can also use the Rich Results Test to check the content Google shows for desktop or mobile devices.

Chrome DevTools

There’s also a built-in webpage debugging tool called the Chrome DevTools which helps in debugging the page speed issues, improving the web page rendering performance and more.

If you’re aware of the technical SEO elements, you will realize that this tool has endless uses.

Ahref SEO Toolbar

Ahrefs’ SEO Toolbar works as a free extension for Chrome and Firefox.

It offers useful information on SEO data about the pages and website which you visit.

A few of the free features of Ahref SEO Toolbar are:

On-page SEO report
Redirect tracer with HTTP headers
Broken link checker
Link highlighter
SERP positions

PageSpeed Insights

The PageSpeed Insights helps with analyzing the loading speed of your website pages. It helps with analyzing the performance score, and also suggests actionable recommendations to make the page load faster.

Take Charge of Your Website’s Technical SEO Today!

Mastering technical SEO is not just about improving rankings—it’s about ensuring your website runs efficiently, loads quickly, and remains accessible to both search engines and users.

By optimizing crawling, indexing, and site structure, you set the foundation for long-term online success.

Want to make sure your website is technically sound and primed for higher rankings?

Start by running a site audit, fixing crawl errors, and optimizing for indexing. Need expert help? Contact our SEO specialists today and take the guesswork out of technical SEO!

What is Technical SEO and How Does It Work?