7 Technical SEO Facts For Beginners You Should Know

If you are wanting to wrap your head around SEO, the complex terminology and terms can seem intimidating and off putting. With search a large subject that is incredibly complex and nuanced, it can be difficult to know where to start. If you are just starting out on your SEO journey, here are 7 technical SEO facts for beginners you should know that can help you along the way.

Google Usually Crawls Your Home Page First

When you are setting up your website, it can easy to become over excited and spread your effort all over the site instead of concentrating it on your home page. You want to concentrate your efforts here, because chances are this is the one Googles will usually crawl first. If you want to check your crawl budget, you can do so in your Google console. See more at

You Don’t Have To Rank All Of Your Pages

It is easy to think that you need to be able to rank all of your pages in order to get a good result on Google, this actually isn’t the case. Read some search ranking  case studies at https://t-ranks.com/ for inspiration and better understanding. If you have pages that have generic information on them such as privacy policies or terms and conditions, you can imagine how many other websites have the same, so don’t allow these to rank, simply block them. That way you can concentrate your efforts where it really matters.

Page Speed Matters

Page speed is vital for mobile ranking, you don’t want your page to take any longer than 2 to 3 seconds to load. The reason for this is due to user experience, whilst some home pages can take upwards of 22 seconds to load, a customer will decide within the first 3 seconds if they want to stay on the page.

No Translate

We’ve all seen Googles attempt to translate websites and often these translations are sub-par at best. You can opt of out translation by enabling the no to translate meta tag, this is important if you are selling a product that you don’t want to ship abroad or you are providing a service that can only be utilised in your native country. This will also stop Google translating your website if you are concerned about how the translation may look.

Understand Keywords

When it comes to getting your website ranked, the on-page efforts are just an important as off page efforts. In order to get your site well ranked, you need to understand what key words people are using to find websites that are similar to yours. There is an array of key word tools you can use that will help you find the most popular key words relating to your content. You can use different sentences in a variety of ways to build up a comprehensive picture of how people search for similar sites and then embed it into your content accordingly. 

Check How Mobile Friendly Your Pages Are

Google are known for throwing out updates that can change the SEO framework overnight and usually they keep these releases quiet until they happen and take everyone by surprise. However, the change to mobile based index policy and ranking is one update they have let everyone know about. Later on, it would be worth gearing your website to mobile first, to make sure you don’t lose out, but for now, you can just check if your pages are mobile friendly.

Google Doesn’t Care How You Structure Your Sitemap

Some people were pretty hot on their sitemap when SEO first became mainstream, suggesting that it impacted on how Google would rank their website. This isn’t actually the case, Google doesn’t care how you structure your sitemap! As long as your sitemap is XML or mark-up language, you will have no problem with at all with Google ranking your page. 

Final Thoughts

When you first start reading about SEO, it really can be daunting prospect. There are so many new terms and so many different subjects that all combine to make search engine optimisation. Before you start trying to build a website, it is worth using a few resources that can help get you up to speed about SEO so that you aren’t going in blind. Once you have done this, you can start working on your on page and off page SEO. Make sure you take note of our 7 technical points, so that you don’t fall at the first hurdle. However, one of the most important facts about SEO is that you will never get it right first time, so don’t worry if your website doesn’t rank immediately. SEO is a cumulative process where you are constantly learning and applying this to your site, once you start you won’t be able to stop.