Whether you’re just an SEO rookie or you’ve been playing along for years, you probably know that SEO is all about keywords, content, and links.
To “do SEO,” all you need is a website, some content, and you need to figure out how to get some links so your site can rank. The more you have of each, the more successful you’ll be (as long as you don’t do anything stupid.)
That’s it… Or is it?
While keyword sleuthing, golden content, and lots of trustworthy links will lead to some SEO success, that will only take you so far. There is another fundamental layer of SEO that is less well-known and too often misunderstood: technical SEO.
What is Technical SEO?
Technical SEO is the practice of optimizing a website’s code structure, navigational architecture, and ability to be fetched and rendered by browsers and bots. All this impacts how search engines crawl, index, rank, and display a site’s content.
That was a mouthful! In other words, technical SEO is the process of designing, building, and maintaining websites so their content will attract as much search traffic as possible.
Unlike keywords, content, and links; great technical optimizations on their own won’t attract traffic. Instead, they act as a multiplier for a website’s SEO. And best of all: most types of technical optimizations have a site-wide effect. Unlike optimizing the content of a page, the results are multiplied.
Technical SEO is kind of like the bass line in a good song. It brings everything together and makes each part better at the same time.
The goal of this post is to introduce this concept for further posts that will cover the topic in more depth.
The next post will discuss content management systems because it requires relatively less technical knowledge than other aspects and because CMSs are the bridge between content and code—a perfect entryway into the technical side of SEO.