Basic Technical SEO For Beginners

Basic Technical SEO, also known as SEO in the technical network, is one of the three most important pillars of any SEO campaign, alongside content and backlinks. For your website pages to rank higher on search engines, they must be found, read, and indexed by Google bots. But beyond crawling and indexing, what other technical aspects should you focus on to see faster, more effective results? This translated article from TOS will help clarify these questions and provide detailed reference materials to guide you through the process.

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Part 1: Basic Knowledge of Technical SEO

Since this guide is designed for beginners, let’s start with the most fundamental concepts of Technical SEO.

What is Technical SEO?

Technical SEO is the process of optimizing your website so that search engines like Google can find, read, understand, and finally index your site. The ultimate goal is to make your website discoverable and capable of ranking on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Is Technical SEO complicated?

The answer is both yes and no. At the basic level, beginners can still handle fundamental Technical SEO tasks. However, as you dive deeper, the level of complexity naturally increases. In this article, TOS will simplify everything as much as possible to make it easy to understand and apply.

Part 2: Understanding Search Engine Robots (Crawlers)

In this section, we’ll explore how to ensure search engines can effectively access and read your website.

How Crawlers Work

A crawler (or robot) scans the content on one page of your website, then follows the links on that page to discover other pages within the same domain. Over time, this process allows the crawler to read and index all the content across your website. In this part, we’ll go through a few key mechanisms that determine how this process works.

URL Sources

Crawlers or robots read the content on your website through two main mechanisms:

• By following the URLs they find within your page content.
  
• By reading the sitemap file, which can be manually created or generated automatically using tools like Screaming Frog or Yoast.

Crawl Queue

All URLs that need to be crawled (either for the first time or for re-crawling after content updates) are placed into a Crawl Queue, a prioritized list of URLs for Googlebot to visit and read. In simple terms, the crawl queue is a structured list of pages waiting to be fetched and processed by Google.

Crawler

A crawler (also called a web crawler, spider, or bot) is a system used to find and read content from web pages across a website.

Processing Systems

These systems handle various backend processes such as canonicalization (which will be explained later), rendering the page into a complete web version as seen in browsers, and extracting new URLs found on the page for further crawling.

Renderer

The renderer’s purpose is to load the website in the same way a browser would, including JavaScript and CSS. This allows Google to “see” and interpret your page content just like a human user would when visiting your website.

Index

The index is the database of pages that Google stores and retrieves to display as search results when users make a query.

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Controlling Crawling Activity

If you want to control which pages on your website can be crawled by robots, there are a few options you can use:

Robots.txt File

The robots.txt file tells search engines where they are allowed or disallowed to access content on your site. A common question is why Google still indexes some pages even after being blocked in robots.txt. The detailed robots.txt usage guide will help you understand this behavior better.

Crawl Rate

For most search engine crawlers (other than Google), the crawl rate specifies how often they should revisit your website. However, Googlebot doesn’t strictly follow this parameter. If you want to adjust Google’s crawl rate, you need to do it directly via Google Search Console.

You can refer to the official Google documentation for detailed instructions.

Access Restrictions

Sometimes you may not want search engines to crawl certain pages — for instance, content limited to specific users, staging or testing environments, or unfinished web development areas.
In such cases, indexing provides no value.
You can prevent crawlers from accessing these pages in three main ways:

• Using a CMS login system (e.g., WordPress, Sapo, etc.).
• Implementing HTTP authentication (requiring login to view content).
• Restricting site access by IP, allowing entry only from trusted addresses.

How to Check Crawling Activity

For Google specifically, you can use Google Search Console and view the Crawl Stats report to monitor your website’s crawl activity.

If you want a more detailed overview of all crawling behavior, you’ll need access to your server logs and analysis tools. If your hosting service provides a control panel like cPanel, you can review crawl logs and other metrics using tools such as Awstats or Webalizer. However, this is a more advanced topic beyond the scope of this beginner-focused article.

Crawl Adjustment

Each website is allocated a certain crawl budget, the amount of data Googlebot is willing to crawl and index. This budget is influenced by two main factors:

• How often Google wants to crawl your website.
• How frequently you want crawlers to access your site.

Typically, websites that update content regularly are crawled more often. Conversely, sites that rarely update content or lack optimized internal links tend to be crawled less frequently.

In addition, if crawlers encounter technical difficulties when trying to fetch or read your website’s content, the crawl rate may slow down, or in worse cases, Google may temporarily stop crawling your site until the issues are resolved.

Once the pages have been crawled and their content processed, Google proceeds to render them (load visuals, JavaScript, and CSS) and then adds them to the index list. This index contains all the pages that can appear in search results for relevant user queries.

Learn more: Onpage SEO: Website Optimization Checklist for Beginners in 2025

Part 3: Understanding Indexing

In this section, we’ll learn how to ensure your website is properly indexed and how to check whether your content has been indexed.

Robots Directives

The robots meta tag is an HTML element that instructs search engines on how to crawl and index a particular page.
It is usually placed inside the <head> section of a webpage, as shown below:

<meta name=”robots” content=”noindex” />

Canonicalization

When a webpage has multiple versions of the same content (for example, an e-commerce product with four color variants), Google will choose one preferred version to index. This process is known as canonicalization, and the chosen URL, the canonical URL  is the one that appears in search results.

Some key signals Google uses to determine the canonical URL include:

• The canonical tag (<link rel=”canonical” href=”…”>)
• Duplicate content pages
• Internal links pointing to a preferred version
• Redirects
• URLs declared in the sitemap

To easily check which canonical URL Google has selected for a specific page, use the URL Inspection Tool in Google Search Console.

Part 4: How to Optimize Technical SEO Effectively and Quickly

There are quite a few tasks involved in optimizing Technical SEO, so where should you start? Which elements should be prioritized to make the most significant impact on your rankings and website traffic? Here are some key priorities you should focus on first.

Check Indexing Status

It’s essential to ensure that the pages you want users to see on Google are actually indexed. That’s why the previous sections of this guide focused heavily on crawling and indexing, because if a page isn’t indexed, it simply can’t appear in search results.

There are several tools you can use to check index status, such as the Site Audit tools from Semrush and Ahrefs. These tools help identify which pages are not indexed and whether those pages are important for your website’s SEO performance. Both are powerful platforms that every SEO practitioner should take advantage of.

Recover Lost Links

Over time, websites often undergo URL structure changes. For example,
kien-thuc-technical-seo might be updated to huong-dan-technical-seo.

However, when URLs are changed without proper redirects, any external websites linking to the old URLs will lead to broken links. As a result, you’ll lose all the backlink value and SEO authority those links provided.

If your website currently has a group of pages with updated URLs but no redirects in place, you should fix this immediately. Setting up redirects is one of the fastest link-building recovery strategies you can implement.

To identify lost backlinks, you can use two powerful SEO tools, Semrush and Ahrefs. In Semrush, navigate to the Backlink Audit section and create a new project for your website. The tool will then track and generate a detailed report showing which backlinks have been lost.

For Ahrefs, you can follow these steps:
Go to Site Explorer → enter your website → Pages → Best by Links, then apply the filter “404 not found” and sort the results by “Referring Domains.”

This process will help you identify broken URLs that still have backlinks pointing to them, allowing you to restore valuable link equity by setting up proper redirects.

Below is an illustration from Ahrefs.

Add Internal Links

Internal links are one of the most effective on-site SEO techniques. Imagine your website as a house and each article as a brick, then internal links are the cement that holds the structure together. The better your internal linking is optimized, the easier it will be for search engines to crawl your website pages, improving your site’s overall ranking potential.

Add Schema Markup

Schema markup is a type of structured data code that helps search engines clearly understand the content you provide (e.g., Schema for recipes, product pages, or user reviews). Pages with properly implemented Schema markup can appear richer and more attractive in search results, such as with clickable pop-ups, star ratings, or additional details. You can explore Google’s official Schema library to find which types of structured data are eligible for enhanced display.

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Part 5: Additional Technical SEO Optimization Areas

Below are some additional technical areas that, while offering excellent results, usually require more time and resources to implement. You can prioritize them after completing the optimizations mentioned in Part 4.

User Experience (UX) Signals

Optimizing this section primarily serves your website visitors, not just search engine ranking. In SEO, this is commonly referred to as User Experience (UX), the measurement of how users interact with and feel while navigating your website.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are performance metrics closely tied to the user experience signals in Google’s Page Experience update. You can view these reports directly in Google Search Console (GSC). The main metrics include:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures how quickly the main visual content (such as images or banners) loads.
  
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Evaluates the visual stability of a page, ensuring that elements don’t move unexpectedly during loading.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures how responsive a page is when users first interact with it (for example, clicking a button or link).

HTTPS

HTTPS is a secure protocol that protects the connection between your web browser and the server from potential hacker attacks. It ensures all data transmitted across the internet is authenticated, encrypted, and private.

Therefore, a website using HTTPS is always considered more secure and trustworthy than one using HTTP. A quick way to check if your website is protected with HTTPS is by looking for the padlock icon next to the address bar.

Mobile-Friendly Optimization

It’s not enough for your website to display well on desktop, it must also perform smoothly and display correctly on mobile devices. Optimizing for mobile ensures users can easily navigate, read, and interact with your site regardless of screen size.

To check whether your website is mobile-friendly, go to the “Mobile Usability” report in Google Search Console (GSC). This report will show you any errors or issues that may affect how your site performs on smartphones and tablets.

You’ll be able to identify whether any pages on your website have mobile-friendliness issues that need fixing, a very useful insight.

Website Security

You must ensure that your website is safe for users, free from hacks or malicious code that could harm visitors’ browsing experience or data security.

Advertisements

Make sure that ads on your site do not negatively impact user experience, especially intrusive pop-up banners that may block important content while users are reading.

Hreflang Tag – For Multilingual Websites

The hreflang tag is an HTML attribute used to indicate the language and regional targeting of a webpage. This means that if your website has multiple language versions, you should use hreflang tags to help search engines like Google display the correct version to users based on their language and location.

Website Health Check

Performing regular technical checks ensures that your website remains healthy, maintains strong keyword rankings, and provides a smooth user experience.

Fixing Broken Links

Broken links are links on your website that lead to a non-existent page (404 error). These can be:

• Internal links – pointing to missing or deleted pages on your site.
• External links – pointing to domains or URLs that no longer exist.

To find and fix broken links, you can use tools like Semrush or Ahrefs to run a Site Audit report, which will list all broken URLs for easy correction.

Redirect Chains – Continuous Redirect Paths

In this section, the term “Redirect Chains” refers to the number of times a user or search engine is redirected from the original URL to the final destination URL. The more redirects there are, the longer the page takes to load, which negatively impacts user experience.

Redirect chains can also be identified in the Site Audit reports of tools such as Semrush and Ahrefs.

Section 6: Essential Technical SEO Tools You Should Know

These are the fundamental technical SEO tools you need to start improving your website’s technical performance and overall SEO score.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console (formerly known as Google Webmaster Tools) is a completely free tool from Google that allows you to monitor and fix technical issues related to how your website appears on search engine results pages (SERPs).

Some basic technical SEO tasks you can perform with this tool include:

• Submitting your sitemap to help Google crawl and index your website more efficiently.
• Identifying and fixing technical errors that may affect visibility or performance.
• Checking structured data issues, ensuring your schema markup is implemented correctly for enhanced search result displays.

Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test

This is the tool that helps you determine whether your website is mobile-friendly based on various usability factors, such as whether the text is too small to read, or if any plugins conflict when the site is accessed via mobile devices.

The results from this tool will show you exactly how your website appears on mobile, allowing you to identify and fix any issues. Additionally, it’s a good idea to use the Google Rich Result Test to check how your site displays on both desktop and mobile, and to verify whether Google can detect your schema markup properly.

Chrome DevTools

By right-clicking on a webpage and selecting “Inspect” while browsing with Google Chrome, you can access this tool. It’s a debugging tool that allows you to check issues related to page loading speed, rendering, and other performance aspects.

In general, this tool is extremely useful for beginners learning the basics of technical SEO, as it helps identify how your website behaves and performs in real time.

Ahrefs Toolbar

Ahrefs Toolbar is a must-know extension for anyone learning basic technical SEO. It can be used on both Google Chrome and Firefox, providing valuable SEO data for any website you’re analyzing.

With this tool, you can:

• View on-page SEO optimization details
• Check for redirect links
• Identify broken links
• Highlight all links on a page (both internal and external)
• See ranking information on search results pages

PageSpeed Insights

PageSpeed Insights Use this tool to measure your website’s speed performance on both mobile and desktop devices. Then, based on the recommendations provided in the report, you can start optimizing to significantly improve your page loading speed.

Conclusion

The content above covers the fundamental concepts of Technical SEO that every SEO practitioner should understand to enhance both search performance and user experience. This article was translated and adapted from “The Beginner’s Guide to Technical SEO” by Ahrefs. Thank you for reading! If you need a Technical SEO expert to perform a full website health audit, don’t hesitate to contact TOS today!

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