Technical SEO Basics: What you need to know before you start learning
Starting note: If you just would like to read the basics of Technical SEO, you can start reading from the “Technical SEO Basics” heading. At the beginning of the article, I talked about my own story.
When I started publishing articles on the internet at the age of 14, I had no idea about SEO. Over time, when I started to analyze where and how the traffic coming to the site came from, I started to learn what SEO is.
I made many changes within the article, within the page, to write content that Google would love. I learned a lot of things in a short time, from including keywords in the subtitles of the images to making an H sorting in accordance with the title hierarchy.
I was introduced to technical SEO when I was 16–17 years old. I’ve noticed that even if you do great work for the page, if your site has too many 404 pages, if you navigate to URLs that don’t get traffic, you don’t get good rankings on Google even if you write the best content.
When I saw the Technical SEO title in the Growth marketing Mini-degree course at CXL, I clicked on it with excitement and attended the training. In this content, I will talk about the basics of Technical SEO, respectively.
Technical SEO Basics
There is a famous image of an iceberg, from that image you can see how huge the part of the iceberg is below, and this metaphor is used for most subjects. Technical SEO is one of them. On the technical side of the site, the speed of the site, sitemaps, meta tags, HTML, link structure, s protocol, status codes, internal link structures, redirects are just a few of the topics covered by this 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.”
Tehnical SEO is the basis of a site that wants to get traffic from search engines. If a website without technical problems, good content, interconnected content, good link building and a website with backlinks in its field, its Authority will increase. Here, each step feeds and strengthens each other.
To get started with technical SEO, you can analyze the site structure and content, or you can use tools to make it easier. On a website with thousands of pages, it is not possible to check each page individually.
For technical analysis of your site, you can take a look at the analysis of tools such as Semrush, Ahrefs, but I will talk about three tools that focus entirely on audit at the beginning or that you can access cheaper in this field.
In HTML, the Head section is the basic section that allows the search engine to analyze the technical structure of your content. The body is the section where your content is located and the extra areas in your content are located. Technical SEO work should be done on both Head and Body.
With which tools can you audit your site?
Google Search Console: “Search Console tools and reports help you measure your site’s Search traffic and performance, fix issues and make your site shine in Google Search results Start now”
Bing Webmaster: “Get your site’s performance data, take advantage of free SEO tools and analyse insights to improve your page rankings on Bing search results.”
Screaming Frog: Screaming Frog is a tool to analyze the technical structure of your website. With this tool, you can crawl up to 500 URLs for free. If you have more than 500 pages, pay 120+ USD if you want to crawl them all with Scream Frog.
There are a few terms to know before you start learning technical SEO
I have included the terms you need to know along with the definitions shared by some sources. By pressing the Source buttons, you can go to the sources and see the details.
HTML: “The HyperText Markup Language, or HTML is the standard markup language for documents designed to be displayed in a web browser. It can be assisted by technologies such as Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and scripting languages such as JavaScript.” Almost all the operations you will do will be done with HTML codes. The content is in the body part of the HTML.” Source
Meta tags: “Meta tags are snippets of text that describe a page’s content; the meta tags don’t appear on the page itself, but only in the page’s source code. Meta tags are essentially little content descriptors that help tell search engines what a web page is about.” ”When you search for something on Google, the title that comes up is called the meta title, and the description is called the meta description.” Source
Open Graph: “Open Graph is an internet protocol that was originally created by Facebook to standardize the use of metadata within a webpage to represent the content of a page.” Source
HREFLang: “The hreflang attribute (also referred to as rel=”alternate” hreflang=”x”) tells Google which language you are using on a specific page, so the search engine can serve that result to users searching in that language.” Source
On-page Optimization: “On-page optimization (AKA on-page SEO) refers to all measures that can be taken directly within the website in order to improve its position in the search rankings.” Source
I believe that someone who wants to specialize in technical SEO should definitely know front-end. Because if you don’t fully understand and organize the terms, something will always be missing. Technical SEO studies, which are done without knowing what the terms mean, do not give the same results on every site and can lead to bad results.
I am also a student in Technical SEO. Every week I try to advance myself in this field and make my projects better in the technical field. I will continue to share details on this subject with different articles. See you with a new article in next week.
