Technical SEO
How does your site stack up today? Get a free Technical SEO analysis here
Technical SEO Tools
Here are Huckabuy's recommended tools that can help you improve the technical SEO for your website.
Google Search Console
Helps you identify a variety of optimization points for your website, including Page Experience and Core Web Vitals optimizations.
Google PageSpeed Insights
Helps to identify how well your site is performing for users and how fast your web pages are loading.
Google Rich Results Test and Schema Markup Validator
These two tools replaced the Structured Data Testing Tool, and help you test which Rich Results your site is ranking for and how well Schema markup is executed on your website.
Screaming Frog Audit
SEO spider tool that crawls your website and provides valuable insights to help you identify technical SEO issues such as broken links, redirect issues, duplicate content, and missing meta descriptions.
Ahrefs Site Audit
Powerful tool that scans your website to identify technical SEO issues and optimization points. It helps find broken links, missing metadata, duplicate content, and other on-page issues that may be affecting your site's performance.
Technical SEO Checklist
Don't know how to approach technical SEO? Here's a series of tasks to help you improve your technical SEO!
Find Errors
Perform a technical SEO site audit and use technical SEO tools to identify and fix errors on your website.
Revise Site Structure
Organize your website's structure in a logical and hierarchical manner to make it easy for users and search engines to navigate. Use tools like a sitemap to help you plan and visualize your site structure.
Eliminate Duplicate Content
Identify and remove duplicate pages or content on your site to avoid confusing search engines and hurting your SEO. Use tools like Copyscape or Siteliner to help you identify duplicate content on your site.
Improve Site Speed
Optimize your website's performance to improve site speed. You can do this manually or use a site enhancement tool to help you.
Improve Security
Serve your website through HTTPS to improve site security. You can also use security plugins or services to protect your site against attacks.
Introduce Device-Friendly Design
Use responsive design best practices to ensure your website looks and functions well on different devices.
Use Structured Data
Implement structured data manually or automate the process via a third party software like Huckabuy to help search engines better understand and present your content.
Characteristics of a Technically Optimized Website
A technically optimized website is fast, secure, mobile-friendly, and easy for search engines to crawl.
Core Web Vitals
The Core Web Vitals are a set of Google ranking signals that Google began to roll out in June 2021. The Core Web Vitals measure the page experience — including how a user experiences page speed and overall page performance. Read this article to learn how to fix the Core Web Vitals.
Introduction to Largest Contentful Paint for SEO
Largest contentful paint is a key metric in Google’s new set of “Core Web Vitals” that measures how long it takes for the primary piece of content above the fold to be usable by a visitor. It could be a text block, image, video, or some other element — whatever is largest. Anything that extends beyond the initial viewport is not taken into consideration. Continue reading to learn more.
Frequently Asked Technical SEO Questions
What is technical SEO?
+How is technical SEO different from other types of SEO?
+Technical SEO Terms Glossary
API
An application programming interface (API) is a set of programming code that can be used across different software platforms and comes with a defined set of rules and conventions to follow.
Caching
The act of storing data in a caching memory. Search engines store a pre-rendered version of a page in caching to serve pages to users more quickly.
CDNs
Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) are globally dispersed locations where data is stored. They are often used to solve page loading issues associated with the geographical distance between a user and a host.
CLS
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) is a page experience metric that measures the load speed for all elements of a page. It measures visual stability.
Cloaking
Cloaking is a spam technique meant to trick a search bot. Cloaking happens when the content on the page on the user-facing side is different than the content presented to the search bot.
Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals (CWV) consists of three metrics: LCP, FID, and CLS. These three metrics measure page experience and overall page speed.
Crawl Budget
The number of pages that Google will crawl on your site in a day. Crawl budget can vary from site to site.
Critical Rendering Path
The steps a browser takes to convert HTML, CSS and JavaScript into a page that can be viewed by a user.
DNS
A Domain Name System (DNS) connects URLs with their corresponding IP address. Web browsers process data in numbers and a DNS is the thing that matches a searchable domain name (like Huckabuy.com) into a string of numbers that the browser can process.
Dynamic Rendering
The process of serving a client-side version of your site for users and a separate, server-side version for Search Bots. On the server-side, javascript content is converted into a flat HTML version preferred by Search Bots. Dynamic rendering is not cloaking.
Edge SEO
The practice of utilizing CDNs to speed up the delivery of content to users.
FID
First Input Delay is a Core Web Vitals page experience metric, and it measures the page load time it takes until the first user input (whether they click, tap, or press any keys).
Google Lighthouse
One of the Google Webmaster tools that can be used to measure page performance and page experience.
HTML
Hypertext Markup Language is a standardized system for tagging text files to achieve design effects on web pages.
Javascript
A programming language typically used to create interactive effects and dynamic elements on web pages.
JSON-LD
JavaScript Object Notation for Linked Data (JSON-LD) is a format for structuring the data of a web page to better communicate with search engines. There are other structured formats, but JSON-LD is the one preferred by Google.
LCP
Largest Contentful Paint is a Core Web Vitals page experience metric, and it measures that measures the page load time it takes for the largest image or text block on a page to render. To a user, LCP is when the loading of a page visually appears to be complete.
PageSpeed Insights
One of the Google Webmaster tools that measure page speed.
Rich Result
Also called a rich snippet, a rich result is a snippet of information (be it an image, video, a review, etc.) that appears on the top of a SERP above the 10 blue links.
Sitemap
A file that explains the connections between various pages on your website.
Structured Data
Another way to say “organized” data (as opposed to unorganized). Schema.org is a way to structure your data, for example, by labeling it with additional information that helps the search engine understand it.
Technical SEO
Refers to optimizing your site for the crawling and indexing of search engines, but can also refer to any technical changes you make to your site to help your site appear better in search results.
URL Routing
The practice of defining URLs and their destinations.