SEO técnico: la guía definitiva

backlinko.com /guia-tecnica-seo

El SEO técnico se refiere a la optimización de sitios web y servidores para ayudar a los
rastreadores de motores de búsqueda a indexar su sitio web de manera eficiente para
impulsar las clasificaciones orgánicas.

Esta es una guía completa de SEO técnico.

En esta nueva guía, aprenderá todo sobre:

Rastreo e indexación
mapas de sitio XML
Contenido duplicado
Datos estructurados
Hreflang
Mucho más

Entonces, si desea asegurarse de que su SEO técnico esté al día, debe obtener mucho
valor de la guía de hoy.

Contenido

1/74
Capítulo 1
Fundamentos técnicos de SEO

Capitulo 2
Estructura del sitio y navegación

Capítulo 3
Rastreo, representación e indexación

2/74
Capítulo 4
Contenido delgado y duplicado

Capítulo 5
Velocidad de página

Capítulo 6
Extra Technical SEO Tips

3/74
Bonus Chapter
Technical SEO Case Studies

Chapter 1:Technical SEO Fundamentals

Let’s kick things off with a chapter on the basics.

Specifically, in this chapter, I’m going to cover why technical SEO is still SUPER
important in 2022.

I’ll also show you what is (and isn’t) considered “technical SEO”.

Let’s dive in.

What Is Technical SEO?

4/74
Technical SEO is the process of ensuring that a website meets the technical requirements
of modern search engines with the goal of improved organic rankings. Important elements
of technical SEO include crawling, indexing, rendering, and website architecture.

Why Is Technical SEO Important?

You can have the best site with the best content.

But if your technical SEO is messed up?

Then you’re not going to rank.

At the most basic level, Google and other search engines need to be able to find, crawl,
render and index the pages on your website.

But that’s just scratching the surface. Even if Google DOES index all of your site’s
content, that doesn’t mean your job is done.

That’s because, for your site to be fully optimized for technical SEO, your site’s pages
need to be secure, mobile optimized, free of duplicate content, fast-loading… and a
thousand other things that go into technical optimization.

That’s not to say that your technical SEO has to be perfect to rank. It doesn’t.

But the easier you make it for Google to access your content, the better chance you have
to rank.

How Can You Improve Your Technical SEO?

5/74
Like I said, “Technical SEO” isn’t just crawling and indexing.

To improve your site’s technical optimization, you need to take into account:

And I’m probably forgetting a few 🙂

Fortunately, I’m going to cover all of those things (and more) in the rest of this guide.

Chapter 2:Site Structure and Navigation

In my opinion, your site’s structure is “step #1” of any technical SEO campaign.

(Yes, even coming before crawling and indexing)

Why?

6/74
 First off, many crawling and indexing issues happen because of poorly-designed site
structure. So if you get this step right you don’t need to worry as much about Google
indexing all of your site’s pages.

Second, your site structure influences everything else you do to optimize your site…
from URLs to your sitemap to using robots.txt to block search engines from certain
pages.

The bottom line here is this: a strong structure makes every other technical SEO task
MUCH easier.

With that, let’s get into the steps.

Use a Flat, Organized Site Structure

Your site structure is how all of the pages on your website are organized.

In general, you want a structure that’s “flat”. In other words: your site’s pages should all
be only a few links away from one another.

Why is this important?

A flat structure makes it easy for Google and other search engines to crawl 100% of your
site’s pages.

7/74
This isn’t a big deal for a blog or local pizza shop website. But for an ecommerce site with
250k product pages? A flat architecture is a BIG deal.

You also want your structure to be super organized.

In other words, you don’t want a site architecture like this:

This messy structure usually creates “orphan pages” (pages without any internal links
pointing to them).

8/74
It also makes it hard to ID and fix indexing issues.

You can use the Semrush “Site Audit” feature to get a bird’s eye view of your site
structure.

9/74
This is helpful. But it’s not super visual.

To get a more visual look at how your pages are linked together, check out Visual Site
Mapper.

It’s a free tool that gives you an interactive look at your site’s architecture.

10/74
 Consistent URL Structure
There’s no need to overthink your URL structure. Especially if you run a small site (like a
blog).

That said: you do want your URLs to follow a consistent, logical structure. This actually
helps users understand “where” they are on your site.

And putting your pages under different categories gives Google extra context about each
page in that category.

11/74
For example, the pages on our SEO Marketing Hub all include the “/hub/seo” subfolder to
help Google know that all of these pages are under the “SEO Marketing Hub” category.

12/74
Which seems to work. If you Google “SEO Marketing Hub”, you’ll notice that Google adds
sitelinks to the results.

13/74
As you might expect, all of the pages linked to from these sitelinks are inside of the hub.

Breadcrumbs Navigation
It’s no secret that breadcrumbs navigation is super SEO-friendly.

That’s because breadcrumbs automatically add internal links to category and subpages
on your site.

14/74
Which helps solidify your site architecture.

Not to mention the fact that Google has turned URLs into breadcrumb-style navigation in
the SERPs.

So when it makes sense, I recommend using breadcrumbs navigation.

15/74
Chapter 3:Crawling, Rendering and Indexing

This chapter is all about making it SUPER easy for search engines to find and index
your entire site.

In this chapter I’ll show you how to find and fix crawl errors… and how to send search
engine spiders to deep pages on your website.

Spot Indexing Issues

Your first step is to find any pages on your site that search engine spiders have trouble
crawling.

Here are 3 ways to do that.

Coverage Report
Your first stop should be the “Coverage Report” in the Google Search Console.

This report lets you know if Google is unable to fully index or render pages that you want
indexed.

16/74
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is the world’s most famous crawler for a reason: it’s really, really good.

So once you’ve fixed any issues in the Coverage Report, I recommend running a full
crawl with Screaming Frog.

17/74
Semrush Site Audit
Semrush has a sneaky good SEO site audit tool.

18/74
What I like most about this feature is that you get info on your site’s overall technical SEO
health.

Site performance report.

19/74
And issues with your site’s HTML tags.

20/74
Each of these 3 tools have their pros and cons. So if you run a large site with 10k+ pages,
I recommend using all three of these approaches. That way, nothing falls through the
cracks.

Internal Link to “Deep” Pages

Most people don’t have any issues getting their homepage indexed.

It’s those deep pages (pages that are several links from the homepage) that tend to
cause problems.

21/74
A flat architecture usually prevents this issue from happening in the first place. After all,
your “deepest” page will only be 3-4 clicks from your homepage.

Either way, if there’s a specific deep page or set of pages that you want indexed, nothing
beats a good old-fashioned internal link to that page.

Especially if the page you’re linking from has a lot of authority and gets crawled all the
time.

Use an XML Sitemap

In this age of mobile-first indexing and AMP does Google still need an XML sitemap to
find your site’s URLs?

Yup.

In fact, a Google rep recently stated that XML sitemaps are the “second most important
source” for finding URLs.

22/74
(The first? They didn’t say. But I’m assuming external and internal links).

If you want to double check that your sitemap is all good, head over to the “Sitemaps”
feature in the Search Console.

23/74
This will show you the sitemap Google is seeing for your site.

24/74
 GSC “Inspect”
Is a URL on your site not getting indexed?

Well, the GSC’s Inspect feature can help you get to the bottom of things.

Not only will it tell you why a page isn’t getting indexed…

But for pages that ARE indexed, you can see how Google renders the page.

25/74
That way, you can double check that Google is able to crawl and index 100% of the
content on that page.

Chapter 4:Thin and Duplicate Content

26/74
 If you write unique, original content for every page on your site then you probably don’t
need to worry about duplicate content.

That said:

Duplicate content can technically crop up on any site… especially if your CMS created
multiple versions of the same page on different URLs.

And it’s the same story with thin content: it’s not an issue for most websites. But it can
hurt your overall site’s rankings. So it’s worth finding and fixing.

And in this chapter I’m going to show you how to proactively fix duplicate and thin
content issues on your site.

Use an SEO Audit Tool to Find Duplicate Content

There are two tools that do a GREAT job at finding duplicate and thin content.

The first is the Raven Tools Site Auditor.

It scans your site for duplicate content (or thin content). And lets you know which pages
need to be updated.

27/74
The Semrush site audit tool also has a “Content Quality” section that shows you if your
site has the same content on several different pages.

That said:

28/74
These tools focus on duplicate content on your own website.

“Duplicate content” also covers pages that copy content from other sites.

To double check that your site’s content is unique, I recommend Copyscape’s “Batch
Search” feature.

Here’s where you upload a list of URLs and see where that content appears around the
web.

If you find a snippet of text that shows up on another site, search for that text in quotes.

If Google shows your page first in the results, they consider you the original author of that
page.

29/74
And you’re good to go.

Note: If other people copy your content and put it on their website, that’s their duplicate
content problem. Not yours. You only need to worry about content on your site that’s
copied (or super similar) to content from other websites.

Noindex Pages That Don’t Have Unique Content

Most sites are going to have pages with some duplicate content.

And that’s OK.

This becomes a problem when those duplicate content pages are indexed.

The solution? Add the "noindex" tag to those pages.

The noindex tag tells Google and other search engines to not index the page.

You can double check that your noindex tag is set up correctly using the “Inspect URL
feature” in the GSC.

Pop in your URL and click “Test Live URL”.

30/74
If Google is still indexing the page, you’ll see a “URL is available to Google” message.
Which means that your noindex tag isn’t set up correctly.

But if you see an “Excluded by ‘noindex’ tag” message, then the noindex tag is doing its
job.

31/74
(This is one of the few times you WANT to see a red error message in the GSC 🙂)
Depending on your crawl budget, it can take a few days or weeks for Google to re-crawl
the pages you don’t want indexed.

So I recommend checking the “Excluded” tab in the Coverage report to make sure your
noindexed pages are getting removed from the index.

32/74
For example, certain posts at Backlinko have paginated comments.

33/74
And every single comments page has the original blog post on it.

If those pages got indexed by Google, we’d have duplicate content issues up the wazoo.

Which is why we add a noindex tag to every single one of those pages.

34/74
Note: You can also block search engine spiders from crawling the page altogether by
blocking their individual crawlers in your robots.txt file.

Use Canonical URLs

Most pages that have duplicate content on them should get the ol’ no index tag added to
them. Or have the duplicate content replaced with unique content.

But there’s a third option: canonical URLs.

Canonical URLs are perfect for pages that have very similar content on them… with
minor differences between pages.

For example, let’s say you run an ecommerce site that sells hats.

And you have a product page set up just for cowboy hats.

35/74
Depending on how your site is set up, every size, color and variation can result in different
URLs.

Not good.

Fortunately, you can use the canonical tag to let Google know that the vanilla version of
your product page is the “main” one. And all the others are variations.

36/74
Chapter 5:PageSpeed

37/74
 Improving your pagespeed is one of the few technical SEO strategies that can directly
impact your site’s rankings.

That’s not to say that a fast-loading site will rocket you to the top of Google’s first page.

(You need backlinks for that)

But improving your site’s loading speed can make a significant dent in your organic
traffic.

And in this chapter I’ll show you 3 simple ways to boost up your site’s loading speed.

Reduce Web Page Size

CDNs. Cache. Lazy loading. Minifying CSS.

I’m sure you’ve read about these approaches a thousand times before.

But I don’t see nearly as many people talk about a page speed factor that’s just as
important:

Web page size.

38/74
In fact, when we ran our large-scale pagespeed study, we found that a page’s total size
correlated with load times more than any other factor.

The takeaway here is this:

When it comes to pagespeed, there’s no free lunch.

You can compress images and cache the heck out of your site.

But if your pages are huge, then they’re going to take a while to load.

This is something we struggle with here at Backlinko. Because we use lots of high-res
images, our pages tend to be ginormous.

39/74
I make the conscious decision to live with slower loading times. I rather have a slow,
awesome-looking page vs. a fast page with grainy images.

Which does hurt our scores on Google PageSpeed Insights.

40/74
But if improving your site speed is a top priority, then you want to do whatever you can to
slim down your page’s total size.

Test Load Times With and Without a CDN

One of the most surprising findings from our pagespeed study was that CDNs were
associated with worse load times.

41/74
This is likely because many CDNs aren’t set up correctly.

So if your site uses a CDN, I recommend testing your site’s speed on webpagetest.org
with the CDN on or off.

Eliminate 3rd Party Scripts

Each 3rd party script that a page has adds an average of 34ms to its load time.

Some of these scripts (like Google Analytics), you probably need.

But it never hurts to look over your site’s scripts to see if there’s any that you can get rid
of.

Chapter 6:Extra Technical SEO Tips

42/74
 Now it’s time for some quick technical SEO tips.

In this chapter we’ll cover redirects, structured data, Hreflang, and more.

Implement hreflang for International Websites

Does your site have different versions of your page for different countries and languages?

If so, the hreflang tag can be a HUGE help.

The only issue with the hreflang tag?

It’s tough to set up. And Google’s documentation on how to use it isn’t super clear.

43/74
Enter: Aleyda Solis’s Hreflang Generator Tool.

44/74
This tool makes it (relatively) easy to create an hreflang tag for multiple countries,
languages and regions.

Check Your Site for Dead Links

Having a bunch of dead links on your site won’t make or break your SEO.

In fact, Google even said that broken links are “not an SEO problem”.

But if you have broken internal links?

45/74
That’s another story.

Broken internal links can make it harder for Googlebot to find and crawl your site’s pages.

So I recommend doing a quarterly SEO audit that includes fixing broken links.

You can find your site’s broken links using pretty much any SEO audit tool, like Semrush:

Or Screaming Frog.

46/74
As you can see, I don’t have any problems. What can I say? I’m good at SEO 😉
Set up Structured Data
Do I think that setting up Schema directly helps your site’s SEO?

No.

In fact, our search engine ranking factors study found no correlation between Schema
and first page rankings.

That said:

47/74
Using Schema CAN give some of your pages Rich Snippets.

And because Rich Snippets stand out in the SERPs, they can dramatically improve your
organic click through rate.

Validate Your XML Sitemaps

If you run a huge site, it’s hard to keep track of all of the pages in your sitemap.

In fact, many sitemaps that I look at have pages with 404 and 301 status codes.
Considering that the main goal of your sitemap is to show search engines all of your live
pages, you want 100% of the links in your sitemap to point to live pages.

So I recommend running your sitemap through the Map Broker XML Sitemap Validator.

Just enter a sitemap from your site.

48/74
And see if any of your links are broken or redirecting.

Noindex Tag and Category Pages

49/74
If your site runs on WordPress, I highly recommend noindexing category and tag pages.

(Unless, of course, those pages bring in lots of traffic).

These pages don’t usually add much value to users. And they can cause duplicate
content issues.

If you use Yoast, you can easily noindex these pages with a single click.

Check for Mobile Usability Issues

It’s 2022. So I don’t need to tell you that your site should be mobile optimized.

That said:

Even sites that are super mobile-friendly can run into issues.

And unless users start emailing you complaints, these issues can be hard to spot.

That is, unless you use the Google Search Console’s Mobile Usability report.
If Google finds that a page on your site isn’t optimized for mobile users, they’ll let you
know.

50/74
They even give you the specific things that are wrong with the page.

51/74
That way, you know exactly what to fix.

Bonus Chapter:Technical SEO Case Studies

52/74
 Let’s cap off this guide with a set of brand new technical SEO case studies.

Specifically, you’ll see how four Backlinko readers increased their Google rankings with:

Date Schema
Internal linking
FAQ Schema
Website migration best practices

So without further ado, let’s get right into the case studies.

Case Study #1
How Felix Used Internal Linking to Boost Organic Traffic By 250%

When Felix Norton audited one of his clients’ websites (an event hiring marketplace) for
technical SEO issues, one thing stood out:

They weren’t using any internal links! And the internal links the site DID have didn’t use
keyword-rich anchor text.

53/74
At this point, this client had been with Felix’s agency for 3 months. Felix and his team had
been publishing A TON of high-quality content on their client’s blog. But traffic and
rankings were stagnant.

Well, during that audit, Felix realized that none of this awesome content was linked
together. Even worse: the content didn’t link to important product and services pages.

That’s when Felix decided to add internal links to their high-priority content pieces.

Product pages.

And pieces of related content.

54/74
Which resulted in a 250% traffic boost within a week of adding these strategic internal
links.

Case Study #2
How Salman Used Date Schema to Double His Page’s Google Traffic

Backlinko reader Salman Baig runs a tech review site called Voxel Reviews.

One of Salman’s most important keywords is “Best Gaming Laptops under 500”.

This might sound like a long tail keyword. Because it is.

But it’s a highly-specific keyword with high search intent. Which means that it was worth
Salman’s time to find a way to increase the rankings for that term.

And when he looked at the SERPs for that keyword, he saw an opportunity. An
opportunity that he could use technical SEO to tap into.

Specifically, he noticed that most of the pages on the first page had the current month and
year in their title tag.

55/74
However, many of these pages weren’t actually updating the page (or the “published”
date in their HTML).

For example, this page adds the current month to its title tag like clockwork.

56/74
But if you search for that page’s URL with a date range…

…you can see the actual date Google has saved for this article:

57/74
That was the opportunity that Salman saw:

Adding the current month to his title tag may help his organic CTR. But Google clearly
ignores it.

But if Google could see that Salman’s page was legit updated, he might get a rankings
boost.

And to show Google that his page was actually up-to-date, he added the date to the top
of his post.

He also updated his Schema to update the “datePublished” and “dateModified” dates.

58/74
This change helped Salman’s site get picked up by a Featured Snippet.

59/74
That Featured Snippet, plus a rankings boost for his target keyword, increased traffic to
that page by more than 200%.

60/74
 Case Study #3
How Neil Reversed a Disastrous Website Migration

Neil Sheth’s SEO agency, Only Way Online, took on a new client who’s rankings had
completely tanked.

As it turned out, the site migrated their website to the latest version of Magento.

They also decided to combine this migration with a handful of changes to their website
(like removing URLs that were getting search traffic) without considering the impact on
organic search.

The site went from about 30,000 monthly visitors to as low as 3,000 visitors a month in a
span of 2 months.

And when Neil did a full SEO site audit to figure out what went wrong, he found a host of
technical SEO issues like:

Pages without internal links pointing to them (orphan pages)

Pages that were canonicalizing themselves to noindex pages
Pages redirecting to a page that is then redirected to another page (redirect chains)
Broken internal and external links
Sitemap including pages that should not be indexed
Poorly-optimized title and description tags

And you can start to see an uptick in organic traffic in the weeks following these technical
SEO fixes.

61/74
In fact, from July 2019 to October the site has increased organic traffic by 228%.

Case Study #4
How Bill Boosted His Clicks by 15.23% Using FAQ Schema

Bill Widmer runs a blog about RVs called The Wandering RV.

And one of Bill’s most important pages was this RV insurance guide:

62/74
Unfortunately, keywords like “RV Insurance” are dominated by mega brands like Geico
and Bankrate.com.

63/74
So the chances of Bill’s one-man blog ranking above these sites was pretty slim.

Fue entonces cuando Bill se dio cuenta de que no necesariamente tenía que superar a
su gran competencia de marca. Podría usar el esquema de preguntas frecuentes para
obtener más clics orgánicos.

Entonces, Bill agregó el esquema de preguntas frecuentes a la sección de preguntas

frecuentes de su página, lo que lo ayudó a obtener un fragmento enriquecido .

64/74
Y ese solo cambio aumentó el tráfico de Google a esa página en un 15,23%.

Ahora es tu turno

65/74
Eso es todo por mi guía de SEO técnico.

Ahora me gustaría saber de ti:

¿Qué consejo de esta guía quieres probar primero?

¿Vas a centrarte en acelerar tu sitio web?

¿O tal vez quieres encontrar y arreglar enlaces muertos?

De cualquier manera, házmelo saber dejando un comentario.

66/74
67/74
68/74
69/74
70/74
71/74
72/74
73/74
74/74