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May 26, 2019 - 12:16 PM
I would say that technical SEO has always been at the core of what an SEO does. It's never gone out of fashion. Here's a slide I often share with clients to remind them of the 3 major aspects to successful SEO for an site:
If there is any debate, it will come from people who only specialize in backlinks (known as "link builders") or content (SEO copyrighters).
SEOs should be skilled in all 3 areas. I don't know of any case where someone performs "SEO" without looking at the technical aspects. This has been true long before Google existed.
There are far too many technical SEO factors to list here, but to give you a general sense of what constitutes Technical SEO, here are some points of emphasis:
- Site architecture, URL & Navigation Schemes, Folder Structure, internal linking strategy, subdomain or subfolder use, canonicals.
- Crawlability of site, with an emphasis on increasing indexing and prioritizing the right pages/sections. Avoiding traps causing duplication, from pagination to multi-language versions of sites. XML sitemap & robots.txt decisions.
- On-page optimization - proper headers, title tags, meta descriptions, formatting, image use & alt text.
- Site speed, plus mobile friendliness & determining what parts of a page/site a rendered in a way that search engine can crawl & trust the content.
- And Many Other Issues/Errors/Opportunities - what to do with missing content (404s), duplicate content, improper redirects, site merges, domain changes, https conversion, diagnosing ranking fluctuations, determining fundamental changes to core algorithm changes, understanding competitors tactics, and working through a plethora of changes in technology & the way developers are building sites.
Much of the value you get out of search engines came from the work of many SEOs ensuring the sites could be found, indexed, and understood by search crawlers and algorithms. It's a never-ending battle and I'm constantly surprised by many of the basics being overlooked by even the biggest companies.
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