Introduction to Technical SEO - DMI

Hi everyone, and welcome to today's webinar. I am Rob Farrell, your digital marketing tutor here with the Digital Marketing Institute. In today's session, we're joined by Barry Adams from Polamic Digital. Barry is an SEO expert and his company is responsible for SEO consultancy in Belfast in Northern Ireland. So it's really, really a privilege to have Barry on today's webinar. Hi Barry, good morning.

Good morning, Rob. How are you?

I'm fantastic. Thanks very much. How are you?

I'm good. I had my first cup of coffee, so I feel human again.

Are you feeling wide awake and ready to go?

Absolutely.

Fantastic. So just for you guys out there around the world, it's in— we're in Ireland at the moment and it's morning time. So I'm sure for some of you in different time zones, it's evening time or it's even nighttime. So thanks for taking the time to come along today. Barry, before we kind of talk a bit more about technical SEO, perhaps you could tell us a little bit about your company.

Yeah. I started Polemic Digital a year and a half ago after working in-house and agency side for quite a few years. Because I decided I didn't like having a boss and I had a really good boss at the time. So it wasn't the boss's fault. It was my fault. So decided to embark on the adventure of self-employment and get my hands dirty again with day-to-day SEO stuff. Which I've always loved doing and I've been doing on and off for about 17 years now. And it's been going really well. I've really managed to establish myself as a good SEO practitioner here in Northern Ireland, not just with local clients, but also clients all across Europe and even one or two in America. So I seem to be doing okay. I do the odd conference speaking gig here and there. I'm actually just back from Milan where I spoke at a conference. In October, I was in Las Vegas for a conference, which is not a bad place to be either. And I do some lecturing as well for the Ulster University and Queen's University to share the knowledge and share my expertise with the up-and-coming generation of digital marketers.

That's fantastic. So you've spent a lot of time both in Ireland and around the continent. And what are the kind of key things then that you can tell us from the point of view of technical SEO and why is it important for us to know these things?

I think SEO nowadays, a lot of people seem to believe that it's just about generating really good content and getting links pointing to your website. But, uh, it starts very early on when you design and build a new website, especially if it's a larger scale website. When Google approaches a website, despite everything you might hear and being written about SEO, it's not the same as how a human browser would approach a website, especially for larger websites with detailed navigation and lots of different pages. How Google can crawl and index your content is very, very important because if Google can't find your content in the first place, it won't be able to rank it. And that's why technical SEO is so important. You need to understand how Google approaches your website, how Googlebot differs from a normal browser and how it interacts with your website and the kind of issues that can arise from having, for example, layered navigation, faceted navigation on your website, or Having JavaScript-generated aspects of your website that Google might struggle to come to grips with, which look perfectly fine for your normal users, but might have negative repercussions for your SEO. And I think that is what technical SEO for me is about, to make sure your website is as Googlebot-friendly as it can be and make sure you have certain allowances built in to enable Google to find the right content and not waste time crawling the wrong content.

And so if we are having technical SEO issues or problems, how can we identify these?

Um, it's not always easy to find out what exactly the problem is. You usually get some indications by looking at how well Google can crawl and index your website. Uh, the index status report in Google Search Console tends to be a really good start, but it doesn't give you the whole picture. Um, I use third-party tools like DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog to help me with my analysis as well, because sometimes things may look great superficially, but under the hood there might be all kinds of different problems with it. I'll give you an example from a recent client site of mine, which looked fine. It had about 50,000 pages in Google's index, but then when I did a crawl on it, it found out that with the tool, uh, DeepCrawl, that it found over 200,000 pages, 150,000 of which were not being indexed at all. So that then presented a bit of a problem and I needed to find out why there were 150,000 pages on that website. That weren't being indexed, but were being crawled by Google and other crawlers. So you need to rely on multiple data sources. Uh, Google Search Console is always a good place to start because you can look at the index status report. You can look at the sitemaps report to see how well Google is keeping your site. You can look at crawl errors report, which is very important because that's where Google tells you if it finds 404 not found pages or other server errors on your website when it tries to crawl your site. But Google Search Console alone is not able to give you the whole picture because it focuses primarily on data about index levels, not necessarily about crawl problems or crawl waste issues. And that's why third-party tools like DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog and other SEO crawlers can come really handy.

And so when we're taking a look at our website, then how important is it that we have valid HTML codes? For the SEO perspective?

I think having completely valid HTML code is not absolutely crucial, but it is a very important step towards making your website more technically sound. Um, 'cause I, I think if a web developer strives to get this code as compliant as possible and make it as, as, as lean and as, as, as comprehensive as possible, it reduces the risks of errors creeping in and Google having problems, uh, identifying what is content versus what is navigation versus what is other aspects of your webpage. I think it makes it easier for Google to come to grips with the content of an actual webpage and not having to struggle to understand all the different elements if the page markup and the code that generates the page is as close to completely W3C compliant as it can be. Also, you know, developers need to make sure that the JavaScript and CSS that they use is as valid as it can be. Not only to prevent problems with browser compatibility, which is a real risk, but also because Google now uses JavaScript and CSS to render the browser in their data centers and see how the page actually is formatted, where different elements of content sit on a page, so they can assign more value to the body content of a page and less value to other elements of the page that might be hidden in the footer or in the sidebar of the page. So having fully compliant code, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, is pretty important to at least strive for. It's very hard to achieve because of all the browser compatibility issues. Something might work in Internet Explorer, but might break in Chrome and vice versa. So developers will have to use levels of shortcuts and then some workarounds that might make the code slightly invalid. But you should always strive for a minimum amount of errors. on your page when you use a tool like the W3C validator.

Excellent. And so we've looked at HTML, but when it comes to JavaScript and SEO, what are the kind of big issues that we need to be aware of?

Yes. A lot of web developers don't seem to realize that Google can actually execute JavaScript. It used to be the case that when you put something in JavaScript, Google wouldn't see it because it was unable to actually execute the code and do anything with it. That's not really the case anymore. Having said that, Google isn't perfect at executing JavaScript either. So you have to find a bit of a middle ground when you build a website using JavaScript frameworks or building it on AJAX technology. You will have to make some allowances for how Google can crawl and index that website. And Google offers a whole wealth of resources about how developers can make sure that the JavaScript-focused websites can still be fully crawled and indexed and that Google doesn't get lost. Or is it able to find the content on the page? Just for example, in a lot of e-commerce websites, you see faceted navigation on the side where people can select certain attributes like size or color of products that's being generated by JavaScript. And it used to be the case that Google wouldn't be able to follow those links because it couldn't do anything with the JavaScript. But now Google can actually. And that can lead to all kinds of problems with indexing, where Google will try and crawl all those different variations of product lists and basically see the same list of products, just slightly differently filtered. And that doesn't really add any value for SEO and can lead to all kinds of duplicate content problems in Google's index. So you need to be aware of that and make extra allowances to ensure Google won't inadvertently try to crawl all those filtered pages and perhaps cause issues with SEO on your site. So it's really important to understand how Google can now interact with JavaScript. And there's really good websites out there like jscrawlability.com, which will tell you what certain JavaScript frameworks and approaches will actually be crawled and indexed by Google and which ones won't just yet, but may in the future. And I think if you as a web developer are working with JavaScript, it's good to keep an eye on, on those developers— developments and see how advanced Google is becoming. in actually executing and using JavaScript on the website.

Okay. And so I have another couple of questions. But before I get into that, I'd just like to remind the audience that if you guys have any questions for Barry, please do feel free to put them in on the comment section. So as you're looking at the webinar right now, there's a comment section just on the right-hand side of your screen, put in your questions in there, and Barry and I will be happy to take them. So Barry, let's kind of get back into it. So when we're talking about different tools, I mean, you've mentioned a lot of really great ones, DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, and then the Google Search Portal. But are there any other kind of really good tools for technical SEO that you can recommend?

I think it really depends on the context and the type of situation you want to analyze. When it comes to technical SEO, tools are a great way to help you what basic issues could be, but you'll need to do a lot of digging yourself and find out really particular issues using the tools at your disposal. Like I said, DeepCrawl and Screaming Frog are probably my 2 favorite ones, but you have to know how to use them and have to use your own common sense and your own knowledge and experience to use them in the right context. I'll give you an example. One of the first things I tend to do when I analyze a website for technical issues is take the website's XML sitemap. And use Screaming Frog to crawl that to see if it gives me any strange pages or status codes. In an ideal world, when you crawl an XML sitemap, all you should get is 200 OK code. That means that all the pages in that sitemap can be fully crawled by Google and can be indexed and represent an actual unique piece of content on your website. Sometimes you get 301 redirects resulting from a URL in a sitemap, and that is a bit of a waste of Google's time because then You give that sitemap to Google, Google will find those URLs, but then your website will tell Google, no, you need to use another URL. That's the 301 redirect. And that is a bit of a waste of Google's time and might cause the actual destination URL that you want to be indexed to not be crawled and indexed. And sometimes even when things are superficially correct, things can be going wrong behind the scenes. I did a crawl recently on the client website. In their XML sitemap, I got all 200 OK status codes. So theoretically, that should be okay. The sitemap contained only valid URLs, so Google could very easily crawl and find all those URLs. But then all those pages also had a canonical tag. And the canonical tag is one of those meta tags that tells Google that, you know, if you have duplicate versions of a specific piece of content, you need to use only this content in your index, in your search results. And when I did a check on that, it turned out that some of the canonical tags didn't match up with the URLs in the sitemap. Screaming Frog couldn't tell me that cuz it only told me the 200 OK status codes. I had to do a, a bit of a comparison in Excel to find out that the canonical tag didn't actually match up with the URL in the sitemap. So it's that sort of thing that, you know, you'll find out as you start exploring these issues and as you start analyzing websites for technical SEO problems, you will come across. And there's no real hard and fast rule. There's no single tool that will tell you everything that can go wrong. From a technical point of view. It's just about unraveling the puzzle. It's a bit like, you know, ongoing troubleshooting with a website where you always try to pick holes in it and see what is going wrong, what is going right. And it also is a case a bit of diminishing returns. You know, you can always find something wrong with a certain website to try and make it even more perfect for Google, but you also have to then make that evaluation. Is this fix worth the slightly extra benefit from an SEO point of view? Or will we spend way too much development time making one small thing right to help Google just a little bit? Whereas rather we could spend that money and that effort on other efforts, like maybe writing great blog posts or getting more links pointing to the website. So it's very easy to get lost in that maze. And I'm saying this as a technical SEO guy, you always need to find that cost-benefit balance with anything that you do on the website, whether or not the fix is going to be worth implementing or whether you can live with that and focus your efforts on other issues.

Okay. So let's take a look at some of our students. They're, they're looking for free online tools and we have Screaming Frog, Deep Crawl. We have Crawlability. Are there any other ones or even any ones that you think have a very small fee attached something that's maybe very modest, but you really recommend those websites? Because I'm just thinking about maybe the guys want to go out and do some work at the weekend and check out their own websites.

Yeah, the W3C validator is a free tool that you can use. The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium, and they basically set the standards for how HTML and how CSS should work. And they have a free online validator where you can put the URL of a website in. And it will tell you how valid your code is and where any errors with your code might pop up. So that might be worthwhile just to check to see how many errors your website has in the W3C validator. It's not necessary, like I said before, to have zero errors, but you should strive for as few errors as possible. As a rule of thumb, I tend to say 50 errors or less is good to aim for with the W3C validator. And the more complex your website, the more errors you'll find creeping in. And these can be pretty unavoidable just to make sure that the website works properly on all browsers. Another tool I like, which is completely free, is webpagetest.org. Google has its own load speed testing tool, Google PageSpeed Insights, which tells you how fast your website is loading. And that's also pretty important for SEO. But I find the data that you get out of Google's own PageSpeed Insights tool to be fairly limited. I prefer webpagetest.org because it gives you a lovely waterfall view of all the different elements of your website, and you can see exactly where things take more time than they should. For example, you might have a very big banner image on your website that takes 3 seconds to load, and that slows down the whole rest of the page. Or you might use some external JavaScript that takes another couple of seconds to load, which slows down how certain social media buttons on your website might load. So that's a really good free tool as well that you can use. Screaming Frog, like I said before, is great. It has an annual fee, but there is a free version which you can use for up to 500 URLs. So it is also really quite useful, especially for smaller websites, and doesn't cost you anything in the initial stages.

Excellent, Barry. Brilliant stuff there. So just to let you guys know who are watching this, Barry's given us a lot of really, really good tools. I'm going to put out an announcement through the news forums with all those tools. in there so you can check them. So Barry, we have a couple of questions that have come in and I'd like to just read them out one at a time. So the first one came in from Emma and Emma asks, when you're setting up a new website, are there any technical SEO rules that she should follow?

It really depends on the type of website. When you launch a basic brochure website, you have different concerns than when you launch an e-commerce website or a big news website. Generally speaking, I'm always a fan of making sure that for any piece of content, you have only one single URL. You see that, for example, with some e-commerce websites that use the categories where the product sits as part of the URL. I'll give you an example. I actually wrote a blog post about this, which is due to go live next week on State of Digital. You have a website that sells safety boots and you have a safety boot that is both waterproof and has steel toes. Now you can have a URL for that product page that has safety boot/waterproof in it and safety boot/steel toe in it. And then followed by the product name, but they could then be duplicate versions of the same product. Um, you know, that is one of the issues that, that Google can really stumble across if you have different URLs for the same piece of content on your website. And that is one of the main issues that you'll need to prevent when a website goes live. This is why you always need to think really hard about the structure of your website, how it's designed, the information architecture, where each piece of content sits and how it's categorized, and whether or not that can cause issues currently on the current size of the website or how it's going to grow and evolve over time. And you can run into issues where one piece of content sits under multiple categories, in which case you might have to think, right, we need to find a different way to generate these URLs, to generate these pages. So that for any given piece of content, we only have one destination URL for Google to crawl and index. Um, and often also with websites that use parameters in their URLs to generate pages, filtered lists of products, filtered lists of articles, you need to make sure that again, there's only one valid canonical URL, as we call it, for Google to rank for any given piece of content, be it a list of pages or a blog article. And if you think about that before you even start building the website, you find out that you'll be preventing a lot of issues, both when the website launches and later on when the website keeps growing and evolving and expanding.

Okay, Barry. So we have another question that's come in, and thanks for your answer. We have one coming in from Kevin, and Kevin asks, what are the benefits of long-tail keywords and phrases?

Long-tail keywords are really good to focus on for blog content and product pages and things like that, because you might not get a lot of traffic on a very specific long-tail keyword if you rank for it, but you get very qualified traffic from it. Someone who uses a long-tail search term knows exactly what they're looking for and has a very clear need and requirement for either a piece of information or a specific product or whatever it is they're looking for. And if you as a website can deliver that, then you're very likely to turn that visitor into a paying customer or some form of lead if your website is set up to convert those visitors well. Whereas on more generic keywords, you might get a lot of traffic on them, but people who type the more generic keywords into Google are just looking for stuff often and are just in the early stages of investigating what they really need and might not have a clear commercial intent at that stage yet. So long-tail search terms, specific and will give you much less traffic, but that traffic is more likely to convert into a paying customer or lead.

Excellent. Thanks again, Barry. So we have another question from Kevin, and Kevin's asking, is it best to use a single keyword for each page and URL?

Ideally, but nowadays Google has become very advanced. So if you have like 2 or 3 keywords that are very closely related, ways of saying the same thing, you should try to combine them in a single page and make that page as high quality and in-depth as you possibly can. But ideally, yes, for every keyword or very small set of closely related keywords, you should have a single page on your website that talks about that. Um, and what I see with a lot of websites is that they spread the keyword value out too broad across all their pages and try to make every page on the website relevant for the same keyword. That doesn't work, of course, cuz Google never ranks websites. It ranks web pages on the website. So every page on your website needs to be unique and needs to be targeted at either a single keyword or a, a set of very closely related keywords and not compete with other sections on your same website for the same keywords. I think that's what a lot of websites go wrong, that they try to optimize all their pages for keywords that are too similar and end up competing with themselves in Google search results. And in the end, the only winner is your competitor. who only has one page that focuses all their keyword value.

Brilliant. So we have another question in from Kevin and he asks, is it best to use your blog URLs to fine-tune optimal search criteria to provide better search possibilities?

Not sure what he means by that actually, but the blog is a really good way to generate different types of URLs for specific long-tail searches, for example. With the right content in them, of course, that matches those particular searches to see whether there's any ranking benefit to those. Um, I also actually like using Google AdWords and small campaigns with small budgets for very specific long-tail searches to see if there's any sort of interest in that and see if that helps you generate any sort of traffic and any sort of traction. It can be very useful to have a little bit of a budget set aside for pay-per-click advertising on Google to see how you can then discover new and interesting long-tail searches for you to focus on, maybe on your product pages or on your blog content.

We have another one came in from Maria, and she asks, does making a short URL using something like TinyURL hurt your SEO to your website or social media?

It depends on the context. Generally speaking, any link you put on a social media platform like Twitter or Facebook tends to have the nofollow tag associated with it, which means there's no real inherent SEO value in that link. They also tend to then use a 301 redirect to get to your final destination URL on your website. Having said that, you should try not to use too many short URLs because people might use them and share those URLs on their blog rather than your actual destination URL that you want them to. And that will then present a bit of a loss of value because any keyword value, any relevance value you have built up in your own destination URL pretty much lost when someone uses that short URL on their own blog or website to link to your website. And Twitter, for example, you don't need to use short URLs on Twitter anymore because Twitter will automatically shorten them. Facebook never has had any limit on using short URLs. So I'm not necessarily a fan of using shortened URLs unless you really have to, unless it becomes like a branding exercise. You have your own branded short URL, but, you know, standard short URLs, I wouldn't necessarily recommend using them unless you really have other interests in mind. Like for example, you want to be able to change the link afterwards, after you've initially shared it.

Okay. Thanks, Barry. So I just want to let you guys know that we're going to begin to wrap up in the next couple of moments. So if you could just put in any more questions that you have and we can send them in to Barry. So while you're writing in those questions, I have one for you, Barry, as well. So if there's one or two really good blogs out there for technical SEO, can you recommend them to us?

Um, follow my writing. I write a lot about technical SEO, primarily on State of Digital. Keep an eye out on that. And there's other bloggers on State of Digital that write a lot about technical SEO. Um, a guy called AJ Cohn has a blog called Blind Five-Year-Old, and he writes really good stuff about technical SEO. He's definitely worth following. Uh, some writers on the Moz blog, like Cyrus Shepard, write really good stuff about technical SEO regularly as well, and they're worth keeping an eye on. Um, and Search Engine Land sometimes has little bits and pieces about technical SEO, not very often though. They tend to write more about general SEO stuff. Um, but generally speaking, you'll find out there's a couple of really good technical SEO practitioners out there that if you follow them on Twitter, they regularly share new content and new insights that is worth keeping an eye on.

So who would you take a look at yourself? I mean, do you have anything that comes into your email on a weekly or a monthly newsletter? something that you can say to the guys, that's the 2 or 3 to go for?

Yeah, it really depends. There's no one real technical SEO resource to follow. Like I said, AJ Cohen is a good one to follow. Uh, Cyrus Shepard, Gianluca Fiorelli, um, uh, Russ Jones at Moz also writes really good stuff. Um, uh, there's a few other ones that I can't really remember off the top of my head, but I can maybe send you a list afterwards for you to share with your, uh, With your students. I think always start with following me, obviously. And beyond that, I can give you lots of recommendations.

That's it. Perfect. We'll be going straight to your website now. We'll be going to it absolutely in the next while. So guys, just to let you know about Barry's website, just to give it to you, it's Polemic Digital, P-O-L-E-M-I-C Digital, D-I-G-I-T-A-L. polemicdigital. So Barry, we have one or two more questions and then we have to let you get back to it because I know you're very busy. So, um, we have one or two and sorry, I'm just— I have a couple. I'm trying to just see them as they, as they pop up on screen. And we have Bernard asking, would it be possible to get some tips for optimizing for local SEO?

Yeah. Local SEO is an interesting one. Um, it's, it's slightly different than how standard Google search works. Uh, first, of course, you need to make sure that your, your business is listed in, in Google Maps, Google My Business, uh, and make sure it's fully accurate and up to date and that your address and phone number details and et cetera, et cetera, are all correct. The next step is actually to get your business listed on local business directories. And this is one of those very few scenarios where you actually do need business directories. Generally speaking, I'm not a fan of using business directories for SEO. But in this case, you sort of have to, you need to make sure you're listed on a few fairly reputable business directories, like maybe Yellow Pages or whatever it is that is locally relevant to your country or your area. And make sure that how your business is listed is exactly the same as how it's listed in Google Maps, that the address is the same, the phone number is the same, the website is the same, et cetera, et cetera. Uh, it also helps to get positive reviews on Google Maps to your business. Websites that, or businesses that have positive reviews in Google Maps tend to perform slightly better. Generally speaking, how close you are to the center of a given city is very important to how well you rank in Google local results for any query that has a city name in it. And that's not something you can very easily influence, of course, because it's very hard to change your parameters just to get a higher ranking in Google search. But it is very important. Google tends to look at the at businesses close to the city center. If you want to rank for a query, for example, someone looking for PR agency Dublin, the agency that is closest to the city center is much likely to rank in Google Maps than an agency that's on the outskirts of Dublin. And aside from that, Google still pays attention to classic SEO signals, like how authoritative your domain is and how many links you have pointing to your website to rank you in Google local search results as well.

Perfect. So we have one last question, guys. I'm really, really sorry we couldn't get to all of them. And we just have had so many participation questions. It's been brilliant. And one of the guys is asking, Barry, you don't have a lot of really large images on your website. Is there a reason for that?

Yes, I like to keep my load speed very, very low. So very big images tend to make the website a bit slower, especially when people use mobile devices and they're on the go. You know, even on 4G networks, it can't always be super fast. internet speeds. So you want to make sure that if you do use images on your website, they don't take up so much space and so much bandwidth that people will wait forever to try and load them. So I like to keep things short and snappy and easy to load. And maybe if I think there's value in that, give them an option to click through to the higher resolution version of an image to see the whole thing.

Brilliant, brilliant stuff. Barry, I'd love to talk to you now for, for such a long time, but unfortunately we have run out of time. And Barry Adams, thank you very much for coming along today on today's live tutorial. where we've been looking at technical SEO. To you guys at home and around the world, our students at DMI, thank you all for coming along. Thank you for your questions. And I hope you enjoy the rest of the course. Thanks very much, Barry.

Thank you, Rob.

Cheerio. Bye-bye.

Bye.