The Technical SEO Cheat Sheet: Never Forget Again

The struggle to remember is real.

Sometimes it’s hard enough just to remember what you ate the day before, let alone all the finer details of technical SEO.

There are countless factors involved and skills required—and of course, plenty to memorize.

From meta tags, link attributes and canonicals to HTTP status codes and more.

Sure, you could memorize everything you need to know…

But what if you had a cheat sheet you could bookmark or print out and put on the wall of your office so that you’d never forget that string of code again?

Enter:

The Technical SEO Cheat Sheet: Never Forget Again

The Basics

We’ll begin with the basics. Because even the basics can be hard to memorize, right?

HTTP Status Codes

Status codes indicate whether an HTTP request has been completed successfully.

There are five classes of HTTP status codes.

1xx: Informational

These codes indicate the request has been received.

100: Continue
101: Switching Protocols
102: Processing

2xx: Success

These codes indicate the requested action has been accepted.

200: OK / Success
201: Created
202: Accepted
203: Non-Authoritative Information
204: No Content

3xx: Redirection

These codes indicate further action is required.

300: Multiple Choices
301: Moved Permanently
302: Found
307: Temporary Redirect

4xx: Error

These codes indicate a client error.

401: Unauthorized
403: Forbidden
404: Not Found
410: Gone (permanently removed)
429: Too Many Requests

5xx: Server Error

These codes indicate a failure to fulfill what should be a valid request.

500: Internal Server Error
502: Bad Gateway
503: Unavailable (retry later)
504: Gateway Timeout

Find a list of all HTTP status codes here.

Common HTML Tags

There are plenty of tags you need to know to perform technical SEO. Here are some of the basics:

Title Tag

<head>
<title>Page Title</title>
</head>

Description Tag

<head>
<meta name="description" content="Meta Description">
</head>

Image

<img src="img/seo.png" alt="seo" width="100" height="100">

Links

<a href="https://example.com" rel="nofollow noopener" window="_blank">Link Text</a>

Crawling

Robots.txt

Robots.txt give direction to website crawlers on how to crawl the pages of a site.

There are two critical components: the user agents targeted and the URL string.

Location: yoursiteurl.com/robots.txt

User-agent: [user agent name]
Disallow: [URL string not to be crawled]

Learn more about robots.txt.

X-Robots

The X-Robots tag allows you to set various robot.txt-related directives in the headers of a HTTP response.

The same parameters that apply to robots.txt apply to X-Robots directives.

Location: Within HTTP Header

X-robots-tag: noindex nofollow

Meta Robots

Robots meta directives give crawlers direction on how to crawl and index an individual page’s content.

The same parameters (noindex, nofollow) apply.

Location: In HTML <head>

meta name="robot" content="nofollow noindex">
meta name="robot" content="follow index">

Canonicalization

Canonical tags help direct crawlers to the preferred version of a page.

Canonicals are a solve for duplicate content issues—or multiple URLs containing similar or identical content. For instance, instead of a single homepage URL, your site may contain:

http://yoursite.com
http://www.yoursite.com
https://yoursite.com/index.html

To tell crawlers which version you prefer, you would implement a canonical tag:

Location: In HTML <head>

<link rel="canonical" href="https://yoursite.com">

Learn more about canonicalization.

Pagination

Pagination can also prevent tricky duplicate content issues.

Crawlers need to know that page one or two of an archive is a paginated archive. The introduction of the rel=”prev” and rel=”next” tags solved this dilemma a few years ago.

Location: In HTML <head>

<link rel="prev">

<link rel="next">

Learn more about pagination.

Most Common User Agents

There are plenty of user agents crawling the web, and plenty of reasons why you might want to direct certain user agents to crawl your site in different ways.

Googlebot
Googlebot-News
Googlebot-Mobile
Googlebot-Image
Adsbot-Google
Bingbot
Slurp
DuckDuckBot
Baiduspider
YandexBot
FacebookExternalHit
ia_archiver

View a full list of user agents and bots.

Content Display

There are some tags that pertain specifically to how a page appears when shared on a third-party platform like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn.

The Open Graph protocol has opened the door for webmasters to have full control over the way their content is displayed across the web.

Here are some common tags to help you take control of your content display:

Open Graph Tags

<meta property="og:title"> content="Title Goes Here">
<meta property="og:type"> content="article">
<meta property="og:url"> content="URL of page">
<meta property="og:description"> content="Description (keep under 300 characters)">
<meta property="og:image"> content="Image URL (recommended 1200×630 pixels)">

Twitter Card Markup

<meta name="twitter:card" content="Summary">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="Title or alternate title of page viewed as the headline">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@username for the website used in the card footer.">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@username for the content creator / author">
<meta name="twitter:description" content="Page description (less than 300 characters)">

View the full list of cards.

Structured Data

Structured data simply refers to organized content that helps search engines understand a webpage’s content.

There are many use cases, and a couple of common vocabularies. For example, marking up a product with schema.org would look something like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/ItemList">
  <link itemprop="url" href="http://multivarki.ru?filters%5Bprice%5D%5BLTE%5D=39600" />
  <span itemprop="numberOfItems">315</span>
  <div itemprop="itemListElement" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
       <img alt="Photo of product" itemprop="image"
src="http://img01.multivarki.ru.ru/c9/f1/a5fe6642-18d0-47ad-b038-6fca20f1c923.jpeg" />
       <a itemprop="url" href="http://multivarki.ru/brand_502/">
          <span itemprop="name">BRAND 502</span>
       </a>
  <div itemprop="offers" itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Offer">
     <span itemprop="price">4399 р.</span>
  </div>

Learn more about structured data.

Most Common Uses

Products
Business Information
Phone Number
Email
Events
Recipes
Media Content
People

Most Common Schema Vocabularies

Rich Snippets

Structured data can also be used to aid search engines in displaying rich snippets in search results.

A snippet is a bit of additional information added to a search result. For instance, Google might display a review rating for a local business.

The structured data intended to display a review rating might look like this:

<div itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/Product">
  <span itemprop="name">Kenmore White 17" Microwave</span>
  <img itemprop="image" src="kenmore-microwave-17in.jpg" alt='Kenmore 17" Microwave' />
  <div itemprop="aggregateRating"
  itemscope itemtype="http://schema.org/AggregateRating">
  Rated <span itemprop="ratingValue">3.5</span>/5
  based on <span itemprop="reviewCount">11</span> customer reviews
</div>

Learn more about rich snippets.

Advanced

There are a couple of tools in the technical SEO tool bag we’re going to file under “Advanced.”

If you’re a pro in these areas, more power to you!

Log Files

Log files contain a collection of log entries made whenever a server, operating system, network device or computer application performs an action on your site.

When considering how log files can be used for technical SEO analysis, the action we’re most often referring to is a user or bot requesting a page.

A log entry might look like this:

118.0.0.1 brooks [4/Oct/2018:9:51:58 -0800] "GET /page-url.html HTTP/2.0" 404 5672

118.0.0.1 – remote hostname IP
brooks – user ID
[4/Oct/2018:9:51:58 -0800] – date, time and timezone
GET – refers to the action taken; will either be GET or POST
/page-url.html – URL being accessed
HTTP/2.0 – version of HTTP
404 – the status code returned
5672 – the size of the file returned (in bytes)

Log file analysis can give you technical SEO insight into:

Bot crawling
Redirects
Response code errors
Crawl budget
Crawl budget waste
Duplicate crawling
Last crawl date

Learn more about log file analysis for technical SEO.

Hreflang Implemenation

The hreflang attribute tells Google what language you’re using on a page. This allows Google to serve the right page to the right audience.

You can target both languages and variants of languages with the hreflang attribute. For instance, you can target Portuguese in Portugal or in Brazil.

<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="pr-pr" />
<link rel="alternate" href="http://example.com" hreflang="pr-br" />

The hreflang attribute should both reference itself and any page that should serve as an alternate.

Common Language Codes

Chinese: zh
Spanish: es
English: en
Arabic: ar
Hindi: hi
Portuguese: pr

Popular Regions

China: CN
United States: US
Brazil: BR
India: IN
Japan: JP
Portugal: PR

Learn more about optimizing your site for different languages.

And there you have it: A cheat sheet to help you conquer all things technical SEO.

Our hope is that this serves as a trusty resource for years to come.

So bookmark it, print it out, frame it, and go help search engines better understand your site!

The Technical SEO Cheat Sheet: Never Forget Again

The Technical SEO Cheat Sheet: Never Forget Again

The Basics

HTTP Status Codes

Common HTML Tags

Crawling

Robots.txt

X-Robots

Meta Robots

Canonicalization

Pagination

Most Common User Agents

Content Display

Open Graph Tags

Twitter Card Markup

Structured Data

Rich Snippets

Advanced

Log Files

Hreflang Implemenation

Written By

Brooks Manley

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