Technical SEO For Beginners (Tutorial-1)

The first part of our tutorial series on search engine optimization deals with the topic of technical SEO. While part 2 and part 3 deal with content in the form of OnPage optimizations and reputation management in the OffPage area, the first part deals with technical questions and problems with the optimization of a website - both for Google and for the user.

The fact that the technical search engine optimization is the first part of our tutorial has a certain reason: Many factors that start with the technical SEO start already before the other optimization measures, partly already with the registration of the domain or the configuration of the content management system.

Technical SEO for beginners

Select the correct domain

The domain name was once a very important factor for weighting a page in the Google search results. Over time, however, Google has become more and more aware of the more reliable factors that allow the quality of a page and its content, so the domain name has little influence on the ranking.

Nevertheless, the domain name should be chosen in such a way that it already represents a brand name or a brand name, or that it informs the search engine used on the results page which topic the website is addressing. In this way, you can increase the click-through rate resulting in better user signals leads and can also positively influence the rankings of your website.

The choice of the top-level domain also plays a very minor role in search engine optimization. Although country-specific top-level domains (TLDs) have small advantages in the respective countries, they are so small that, in principle, any Top Level Domain that is available can be chosen. NTLDs, ie new top-level domains, such as .berlin, .hamburg or .xyz, can also be selected without this having a negative effect on the ranking of a website.

Technical SEO for beginners

Web hosting provider and server location

Choosing the right web host is difficult, because it has to be a middle way of price/performance ratio and server performance/equipment to be found. With one of the major providers such as Strato, 1 & 1, All-Inclusive. Or a comparable host, you do not have anything wrong in the beginning, but there are also differences in the quality of service and other factors.

Even if the Internet connections are getting faster and the following factor is hardly important for large pages, the server location of the Webhoster should be Germany or the country by the main page. This primarily has performance advantages, as no long lines have to be crossed if, for example, the content is delivered from a server in the US to the user to Germany.

Technical SEO for beginners

HTML or CMS website?

Basically, it does not matter whether a page is based on HTML or a content management system like WordPress, Drupal, Typo3 or another software. For dynamic websites like blogs, magazines or online shops, content management systems (also known as CMS) are quite suitable, since content can be imported very easily and no HTML or CSS knowledge is required.

Pure HTML pages, on the other hand, have the great advantage that they can be loaded very much by visitors , since no queries have to be made to a database and no scripts have to perform any functions on the server. For simple company pages or static "business cards in the network", HTML pages are excellent.

Technical SEO for beginners

PageSpeed and mobile friendliness

When creating your website, it is important that you keep in mind the website speed (page speed) and the adaptability of the finished page to mobile devices (mobile-friendly). These two factors have become more and more important for Google Ranking criteria and in the past. These factors will continue to play a major role in the future.

The PageSpeed is particularly important in today's world, where many users access mobile sites through websites. Mobile Internet is often not very fast and the limited data volume of most tariffs makes further demands on the performance of a website. Important optimization points for the PageSpeed are for example:

Reduce server requests (requests)
Caching (eg via PlugIns)
Compress images (See: Images SEO)
CSS and JavaScript files

The mobile-friendly update has also become more important thanks to Google's mobile friendly update. As many sites already account for more than half of their traffic via mobile devices, Google gives websites with a strong mobile version a ranking advantage. When selecting the CMS-Themes you should pay attention to responsiveness.

Whether your website has a good PageSpeed value or is mobile-friendly to Google's perception is easy to find, because Google provides two services: the PageSpeed Insights and the test for mobile friendliness.

Technical SEO for beginners

Robots.txt, and .htaccess file

Two files, which should be located in the root directory of the website server, are very important for technical SEO: The Robots.txt file and the .htaccess file.

Especially the Robots.txt file is important because it determines the handling of crawlers with your site. Crawlers are computer programs that are initialized by a search engine operator to discover sites and include them in the search engine index. With the help of the Robots.txt file, you share a crawler with important information about your site.

It can prevent the reading of certain files by the crawler, such as the GTC or an internal member area. Under no circumstances should media files such as images, JavaScript, or CSS be blocked when they are required to render a bottom. If Google can not render a page, it will depreciate it . A Robots.txt file might look like this:

These instructions tell you that all crawlers should be addressed (user agent: *). The second line is followed by the statement that the / wp-admin / folder is not indexed because it is reserved for administration areas at WordPress. All other directories are then allowed. In the last line, we tell the crawler the URL of our sitemap .

Technical SEO for beginners

The .htaccess file (for Apache Webserver) serves the search engine optimization , because this file can be used to switch forwarding of no longer existing subpages. If a page is deleted, Linkjuice, which points to this page, is missing, because Google does not have any links that flow into nothing at all. Redirects can be implemented as follows:

RedirectPermanent /alte-index.html http://www.domain.com/directory_name/neue-index.html

First, the command "RedirectPermanent" is entered into the line and then, separated by a space, first the old URL and then the new one. You can switch as many redirects as you want - for each redirect, simply specify a new line with a new Redirect command . Absolute paths (ie with http: // at the beginning) can also be entered.