Welcome back. Although Rebecca already covered technical SEO, I wanted to give my own take on it. In this lesson you'll gain an understanding of the parts of the website that impact technical SEO, the skill sets that are needed and what Google has to say about how to improve our overall website performance. When we think about technical SEO, we need to come back to the algorithm. I think a bit around content and localization is related to relevance. Linking and social factors dealing with importance. Technical and site architecture factors related to trust and crawlability. Let's focus on how you can improve the domain value for trust with search bots. Now there's too much to consider when it comes to technical SEO related to global, accessibility, content, mobile, and all the other elements you see here. Given that all the websites signals are a lot to bear in mind, I have it this way on purpose. There's really no simple way to summarize it into just one or two easy factors on this page. Instead, let's consider what technical SEO's solves for rather than all the elements required. It solves for the infrastructure that search engines prefer, well organized sites, those where content is easier to access. Examples of this might be redirects, robots, coding, or session IDs. Then coding itself, that's the site crawlability or limiting of common crawler blocks, whether it be flash or frames, table structures, or how dynamic content is loaded. Last is the user experience and how the site design for search bots improves the overall user experience whether bot or human. This could be heavily nested tables, mislabeled or buried images or videos. So let's start with Google's Webmaster Guidelines. You can better understand what Google is asking for by looking here. They want to understand your sites content better and how it can be crawled effectively. We talked about using the robot txt file on your web server. A content management system should be able to create pages and links that search engines can crawl. And that you should test in different browsers to make sure your site is set up correctly. They give some suggestion on tools to use. These Webmaster Guidelines are basic, but they do indicate what matters from the search bot standpoint. I'll go into more detail on this in the future lessons. What skills are needed for technical SEO? Well, it's important to realize that this is not for everyone. Technical SEO is core to a good intermediate to advanced search engine optimization professional. Many people with careers in this field only touch upon it briefly. Key skills are related to having a scientific mind set or a logical approach. This is the left brain focus of SEO where you need to be able to see things in a linear pattern. You also need to be curious, you want to be a problem solver. You have to be able to get underneath to discover what is causing certain things to work or perform better than others. You should be detail oriented, willing to be thorough about assessing problems. This will result in coming up with the right data to make a case for a change or identifying any problems, in influencing stakeholders to take action. Finally, there is something to be said for an attitude that accepts long term results and not always directly impactful initiatives. This is not to say technical SEO doesn't have a significant impact. However, something you do today may take a week or two or a month, to actually get recognized by search bots. Therefore, look to interpret cause and effect rather than to expect an immediate correlation. You can't directly say, I did A, B, and C and I got D out of it because there are so many factors at play. These important skills can be developed along the way if someone has a natural affinity for SEO in a technical manner. These skills provide a foundation for those who are more inclined and seeking to advance more quickly with technical SEO.
