A high level walk through on technical SEO.

1. What You Need To Know
About Technical SEO
WordCamp Denver
June 27th,2020

2. @nikers85
● Head of SEO
● Local SEO
● Technical SEO
● SEO Coaching/Training
● Speaking

3. Agenda
Technical SEO Basics
Technical Audit Walkthrough
Technical SEO Scorecard

4. SEO Explained

5. ● Optimization
● Keywords
● Content
● Meta Data
On-Page SEO

6. ● Google My Business
● Reviews
● Social Media
● Citations
Local SEO

7. ● Crawled
● Indexed
● Performance
Technical SEO

8. Crawling a Website
Discovery process

9. Crawling a Website
Crawl Budget

10. Crawling a Website
WP Page Bloat
● Media Attachment Pages
● Tag Pages
● Category Pages
● Archive Pages
● Author Pages

11. Crawling a Website
Robots.txt
● Allow access to some areas
● Block areas of the site
● Sitemap declaration

13. Crawling a Website
Sitemap
● Sitemap should be XML
● Submit to Google Search Console
● No redirects
● No errors

14. Crawling a Website
Log Files
● What bots are crawling
● Crawl frequency

15. Indexing Website Content

16. Indexing Website Content

17. Indexing Website Content

18. Indexing Website Content

19. Indexing Website Content

20. Make Crawling Easy

21. Crawling & Indexing
● Eliminate page bloat
● Check the robots.txt
● Have an XML sitemap
● Upload sitemap to Google Search Console
● Monitor indexation
● Make it easy for Google to crawl your site

23. Redirects
● 301 Redirects
● 302 Redirects
● Redirect Chains

24. Redirects
● Permanent
● Passes 90-99% of link equity
301 Redirects

25. Redirects
● Temporary
● Good for testing
302 Redirects

26. Redirects
● Wastes crawl budget
● Crawl issues
● Page speed
● Link equity
Redirect Chains

27. Redirects
● When a 301 won’t work
● Combine pages
○ Products or categories
● Can set this in Yoast
Canonical
http://example.com/wordpress/seo-plugin/
http://example.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/

28. Crawl Errors
● Page is inaccessible
● Google will crawl occasionally
404

29. Crawl Errors

30. Crawl Errors

31. Crawl Errors

32. Redirects & Crawl Errors
● Avoid redirect chains
● Redirects should make sense
● Fix crawl errors
● Customize your 404 page

34. Links
● Navigation
● Link Equity
● Anchor text
● rel="nofollow"
Internal

35. Links
● Authority
● Relevancy
● Popularity
External

36. URL Structure
● Parameters
● Trailing slash vs. non-trailing slash
● Upper/lowercase
http://www.example.com/category-keyword/subcategory-keyword/primary-keyword

37. Structured Data
● JSON-LD
● Structured Data Types
● Article/Blog
● Product
● Review
● LocalBusiness
● FAQ
● Job
● Event

38. Structured Data

39. Structured Data

40. Structured Data
● Schema Generator
● Structured Data
Testing Tool
● Yoast
● Rank Math
● SchemaApp
● Google Tag Manager

41. Links and Structured Data
● Be thoughtful about internal linking
● Backlinks = quality over quantity
● URL structure matters
● Structured data makes a difference
● Use structured data generators
● Test structured data

43. Mobile
Mobile First Index

44. Mobile Mobile Friendly

45. Page Speed

46. Page Speed
Hosting
● Managed WordPress Hosting
● CDN

47. Page Speed
Image Optimization
● Serve images in next-gen formats
● Properly size image
● Defer offscreen images

48. Page Speed
Image Optimization Plugins
● ReSmush.it
● EWWW Image Optimizer
● ShortPixel Image Optimizer

49. Page Speed
Eliminate render-blocking resources
● Deferring all non-critical JS/style
● Keep plugins in mind

50. Page Speed
Caching
● Especially helpful for sites with repeat
visitors
● GoDaddy prevents caching

51. Page Speed
Caching Plugins
● WP Rocket
● W3 Total Cache
● WP Super Cache

52. Page Speed
● Test multiple pages
● Hosting makes a difference
● Optimize images
● Caching helps

55. Technical SEO Scorecard
Make a copy of the Audit Scorecard - https://bit.ly/tech-seo-scorecard

56. Tools
● Screaming Frog
● Sitebulb
● SEMRush
● Ahrefs
● Rank Ranger
● Chrome Extensions
● Google Search Console
● Lighthouse
● Page Speed Insights
● Structured Data Testing Tool
● WebPageTest
● WordPress Plugins

57. Tools Screaming Frog
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
● Free up to 500 URLs
● Reasonably priced
● Custom Extractions
● Scheduled Crawls
● Sitemap Crawls
● GA/GSC Integration

58. Tools Rank Ranger
https://www.rankranger.com/?m=ba&k=nmosier
● Free Trial
● Starts at $69/month
● 10 Campaigns
● 350 Daily Keyword Tracking
● 2 Search Engines Per Campaign

59. Tools Sitebulb
https://sitebulb.com/
● $25/month
● Crawl visualization
● 2,000,000 URLs
● Compare crawl data
● PDF reporting

60. Tools LightHouse
https://developers.google.com/web/tools/lighthouse/
● Free
● Open Source
● Audits:
○ Performance
○ Accessibility
○ progressive web apps

61. Tools Webpagetest
https://www.webpagetest.org/
● Free speed testing tool
● Accurate
● Test by device
● Test by location
● Detailed performance metrics

62. Tools Chrome Extensions
● SEO Minion
● Schema Builder
● SEOInfo
● Link Checker
● Keyword Surfer
● Keywords Everywhere

63. Tools WordPress Plugins
● Yoast SEO
● Rank Math
● Broken Link Checker
● WP Rocket
● Really Simple SSL
● Better Search Replace
● Redirection
● Site Kit by Google

64. Tools Additional Resources
● Google YouTube SEO Videos
● DistilledU
● SEMRush Courses
● Denver/Boulder SEO Meetup
● SearchCon
● Moz Whiteboard Friday
● Kinsta Blog

67. Technical SEO Audit
Audit Checklist - https://www.distilled.net/technical-seo-audit-checklist/

68. niki@twooctobers.com
linkedin.com/niki-mosier
twitter.com/nikers85