From the course: Danny Sullivan on SEO
Technical SEO
- It's important to have great content for success with SEO but if you don't have your technical house in order people might not ever even see that content. Think about it as if you produced the greatest television advertisement that's ever been seen. This is a commercial that blows away any of the other Superbowl commercials that have ever happened and it's all been filmed, and it's got no audio, and just all visuals, and it's amazing. Then you take that same television commercial and you try to play it on radio and it is just silence. It didn't matter that it was the greatest television commercial in the world, radio didn't understand the visuals. And when it comes to search engines, they have technical limitations of their own so you may have wonderful, great, stellar content but because of technical limitations the search engines may not understand it in full or in part. That's what Technical SEO is all about understanding what the technical limitations search engines may have and making sure that you've adjusted things so that if you use a lot of JavaScript the search engines can interpret what you're doing with the JavaScript. That if you're using a lot of images that you're also having good, ordinary text that they can also understand what a page is about. It can be things like making sure all the pages in your website have unique titles because if they don't have unique titles it's as if perhaps you published 500 books with all the same title and nobody can understand that they're unique inside. Sadly, sometimes people don't even open their websites up to the search engines. They mistakenly block all the content from being seen and then they don't understand why they're not doing well because they put up a, basically, no trespassing sign. So you want to have your Technical SEO house in order. And a common problem is that people assume that that's something that their web developer did. They did all the other technical stuff with the site so surely they looked into all the Technical SEO issues that might need to be taken into account. Some do but some don't, it's a real complicated field and you can't make that assumption so you need to ensure that someone has taken responsibility for it. Who that may be will vary depending on your own organization but someone needs to be in charge of it and making sure that you have everything put together the way it should be. And one tip that will help you with that is both Google and Bing provide tools, free tools that will tell you whether or not you have Technical SEO problems. Google's is called Google Search Console, Bing's is called Bing Webmaster Tools. In both cases you verify your website and then they analyze your website and report back to you any Technical SEO issues. They're free, they're easy to use, and they're something you should, definitely, take advantage of.
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