Technical SEO archives

Recent Technical SEO articles

Meta keywords: why we don’t use them – and neither should you

17 May 2017 Joost de Valk

You would think this post would be redundant by now: people know that the meta keyword tag is useless nowadays, right? Yet we still see site owners using meta keywords on their websites and, according to Google Trends, people are still searching for meta keywords, although there seem to be fewer queries than some years …

Read: "Meta keywords: why we don’t use them – and neither should you"
Meta keywords: why we don’t use them – and neither should you

Page speed as a ranking factor: what you need to know

It’s official: Google announced that page speed will be a ranking factor in its mobile-first index. But what does that mean? There’s no beating around the bush anymore: you should work on making your site as fast and accessible as possible. Don’t wait, do it now. I mean it. Work on your mobile SEO. For …

Read: "Page speed as a ranking factor: what you need to know"
Page speed as a ranking factor: what you need to know

Metadata and SEO part 3: social, internationalization and more

15 March 2017 Michiel Heijmans

Literally, metadata is data that says something about other data. You can use particular metadata to send information about a webpage to a search engine or a social media channel, and thereby improve your SEO. In the first two posts of this metadata series, we discussed meta tags in <head>of your site and link rel metadata. …

Read: "Metadata and SEO part 3: social, internationalization and more"
Metadata and SEO part 3: social, internationalization and more

Metadata and SEO part 2: link rel metadata

9 March 2017 | 4 Comments Michiel Heijmans

In the first post of our metadata series, I discussed the meta tags in the <head> of your site. But there’s more metadata in the <head> that can influence the SEO of your site. In this second post, we’ll dive into link rel metadata. You can use link rel metadata to instruct browsers and Google, for example to point them to the AMP version …

Read: "Metadata and SEO part 2: link rel metadata"
Metadata and SEO part 2: link rel metadata

WordPress archive pages: the tutorial

3 March 2017 | 9 Comments Jimmy Comack

Once your website starts growing and you continue writing blog posts, you’ll eventually end up with archive pages. These archive pages can be based on taxonomies, categories, custom post types and even dates. WordPress has built-in support for these archive pages, however there are some small drawbacks. In this post, I’ll explain to you how …

Read: "WordPress archive pages: the tutorial"
WordPress archive pages: the tutorial




What’s the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? And how to use it?

3 January 2017 Joost de Valk

Traditionally, you will use a robots.txt file on your server to manage what pages, folders, subdomains, or other content search engines will be allowed to crawl. But did you know there’s also such a thing as the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? Here, we’ll discuss the possibilities and how this might be a better option for your …

Read: "What’s the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? And how to use it?"
What’s the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header? And how to use it?

Performance optimization in an HTTP/2 world

22 December 2016 | 28 Comments Joost de Valk

A revolution is currently going on in the underpinnings of the web. HTTP, the protocol your browser uses to connect to your site, has a new version: HTTP/2. This is not something that should concern the average user, but for web developers, it changes how we do performance optimization entirely. In this short article, I want to …

Read: "Performance optimization in an HTTP/2 world"
Performance optimization in an HTTP/2 world