Most people view search engine optimization or SEO as having two parts: on-site optimization and off-site optimization. Both of these are related to content, keywords and links, but very often technical SEO gets overlooked. Many people are either not educated enough about the subject, or get nervous when they hear technical terms.
So what is technical SEO? This is essentially a more involved optimization tweak to help give your content the best chance of ranking for relevant keywords and phrases. Technical SEO allows you to focus on analyzing how well search engines are crawling and accessing your website.
If search engines are able to easily access your website, it will be easier for you to rank with on-site and off-site optimization.
Technical SEO Tools
Google Webmaster Tools
Screaming Frog
Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
Sightliner
SEO Browser
Google Webmaster Tools
Google Webmaster Tools (GWT) is probably the technical SEO SEO Audit Tool use most. It has a lot of great features to use when implementing technical SEO. Arguably its most useful feature is its ability to pinpoint 404 errors, or pages on your website that are not visible to website visitors. Since a problem like this can seriously hamper the marketing performance of your website, it is important to detect these errors and 404 redirect to the correct page.
Additionally, Google Webmaster Tools allows you to check the robots.txt file (a file on your website that prevents search engines from listing certain pages in search results) to make sure it’s To ensure that no important page is being blocked from search engines.
It also allows you to see whether the sitemap of your website is error free or not. This is important, as a sitemap full of errors can create an unpleasant user experience for website visitors. Among other things, it also allows you to select duplicate page titles and descriptions so that you can go into the website and fix them to avoid ranking penalties by search engines.
Screaming Frog
The Screaming Frog is also a tool I use almost every day. If you haven’t downloaded this tool, I strongly recommend that you do. Why? It crawls so many aspects of a domain that will really help you in your technical SEO process.
It primarily helps with on-page SEO — by finding duplicate page titles and descriptions, as well as examining URL structures to determine what needs to be fixed.
Google’s PageSpeed Insights
Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool allows you to analyze the site speed of a specific page and the user experience with that site speed. It analyzes it on
- mobile devices and
- desktop devices.
Additionally, it will show you how to fix any errors to help improve speed or user experience.
Google’s Mobile Friendly Testing Tool
As of April 2015, Google released an update to its mobile algorithm that would rank websites higher that had a responsive or mobile website. Plus, they come up with a mobile-friendly testing tool to help you cover all your bases to ensure that your website won’t lose rankings with this update. Additionally, if the page you’re analyzing doesn’t meet the standards, the tool will show you how to fix it.
Sightliner
Siteliner is a tool find duplicate content your website. All you have to do is insert your domain and the tool crawls up to 250 pages.
Sightliner analyzes Duplicate Content your website.
Additionally, it will tell you which pages have duplicate content and the percentage of duplicate content. You can then further analyze each page to make the necessary changes to avoid too much duplicate content.
SEO Browser
SEO Browser allows you to view your website the way search engines see it. This allows you to make sure that all of your content is appearing the way you want it to and that the search engines are finding everything you are trying to tell. For one reason or another, search engines can’t pick up on something important and this website will help you find out what it is.