SEO Técnico – Aprende a optimizar tu web como un profesional

Review

Although SEO is a digital marketing discipline that has achieved massive adoption by all companies today, the majority of professional profiles lack the necessary technical foundation to understand and master the most technical aspects related to website positioning. The increasing demands of search engines regarding content structure, the application of structured data, or achieving maximum download speed—to name just a few—require a deeper and more up-to-date understanding of how content management systems work, code optimization, and the possibilities offered by different web server configurations.

In Technical SEO: Learn to Optimize Your Website Like a Professional, the authors pour in over forty years of accumulated experience working as consultants at Human Level, solving some of the most complex and ambitious web positioning projects across a wide variety of technological scenarios and business models.

Given that the reader already has a good number of books in this same collection addressing the most basic aspects of SEO, our goal has been to delve precisely into those more technical aspects that are frequently perceived as a challenge by many professionals in the sector: complex indexability scenarios, JavaScript content managers, structured data markup, the use of regular expressions for data analysis, download speed optimization, deployment of international versions, strategy definition, and the application of artificial intelligence for content classification and generation.

All of this is presented not only by professionals with many years of dedication behind them but also with extensive teaching experience. This guarantees that, despite the technical rigor, the reader can be sure of the accessibility of the information and the possibility of consulting numerous examples, templates, and checklists that will facilitate the application of the learned concepts to their own projects.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Chapter 1. Keyword Research

1. Target customer profile
2. The purchasing decision process
3. The conversion funnel
4. The customer journey
5. SERP features and result formats
6. What is Keyword Research: areas of greatest influence
7. Keyword identification and selection
8. The importance of content marketing to cover all defined visibility goals
9. Visibility goals map

Chapter 2. Benchmarking and SEO Strategic Plan

1. Gap analysis, identification of problems, and improvement opportunities
2. SEO Levers: indexability, content, architecture, authority.
3. Positioning strategic plan

Chapter 3. Information Architecture

1. Navigation systems and internal linking
2. Taxonomies, folksonomies, and content hierarchy
3. Information architecture in large websites

Chapter 4. Indexing Control

1. Crawl control
2. Server log analysis
3. Indexing control
4. Types of redirects
5. Crawl budget optimization
6. Render budget and JavaScript indexing issues
7. Difference between link and button
8. Non-indexable technologies

Chapter 5. Structured Data

1. What are they for?
2. Characteristics of the data model
3. Applying the data model to a specific situation
4. HTML semantic tags with equivalent structured data
5. Common errors

Chapter 6. Technical Foundations for Web Performance Optimization

1. Importance of WPO
2. Communication between client and web server
3. Types of cache, CDNs, and proxies
4. Internal browser functioning
5. HTTP protocol versions
6. Core Web Vitals and other metrics
7. Measurement and monitoring tools
8. Analysis tools

Chapter 7. WPO in Depth

1. HTTP: header parameters
2. Critical and non-critical CSS
3. Font optimization
4. Image optimization
5. Optimal use of videos
6. Optimizing animations
7. Improving JavaScript download
8. Avoiding CLS due to JavaScript

Chapter 8. Advanced Optimization Techniques

1. Optimizing FID and INP metrics
2. Databases
3. Server-side code optimization
4. SPAs, PWAs, and the PRPL pattern
5. Caching with Service Workers
6. Optimizing AMP pages
7. Anti-patterns and obsolete techniques

Chapter 9. International SEO

1. Deployment options
2. Content personalization
3. hreflang markup and geographical targeting: scenarios

Chapter 10. Data Integration, Analysis, and Visualization

1. KPIs
2. Looker Studio
3. Interpretation and presentation

Alphabetical Index

Foreword

Dear readers, it is an honor for me to recommend this magnificent book on technical SEO brought to you by experienced and prominent professionals and friends.

The book arrives at an especially necessary moment. The digital world advances relentlessly, companies are struggling to adapt to times that hardly allow staying up to date, and definitely, digitalization and search engine optimization are becoming more necessary and—at the same time—more complex than ever. Amidst so many gurus and artificial intelligence that will change the world and make you rich, it is always wonderful to receive something as valuable and real as this, capable of providing light and knowledge in the market we are immersed in.

I met Fernando almost a decade ago on the internet, through social media. I read his books, and he was my main motivation for pursuing a Master’s degree that he led, which changed my life. Since then, in one way or another, I have been linked to Fernando and his company in my professional career. I was, as I say, first a follower and then a student, later becoming a colleague and having him as a boss at Human Level. Subsequently, we have continued working together, as Human Level is a technical SEO service provider for the media outlet where I work, Diario AS.

At every turn, he has been a wise and educational person, contributing knowledge and value to everyone who has performed professionally around him. I am grateful to have learned so much with him and that this has given me the opportunity to meet and work with his phenomenal team.

As a sports legend, Don Alfredo di Stefano, once said: “no player is as good as all of them together”. And that is exactly what happens at Human Level and, specifically, in the book you hold in your hands. José, Ramón, and Rocío, besides being incredible colleagues, are the perfect team that, together with Fernando, can offer the best global vision of the SEO world.

José’s strategic experience, his wisdom in indexability matters, and data management, along with his analytical and reflective capacity, are fundamental in many of the sections addressed here.

Ramón and his endless technical capacity—in programming, systems, applications, or WPO—succeed in solving the most complex and technical parts of this volume in an understandable way.

Lastly, Rocío’s drive, creative capacity, and technical skill applied to content add the icing to this cake of knowledge baked alongside Fernando’s talent and science.

There are hundreds of experiences from all of them throughout the different digital projects they have tackled for decades. And best of all, in many and very different sectors, from the largest ones like media, banking, or tourism, to various e-commerce sites, services, or small SMEs. Therefore, you will find in these texts a wide diversity of highly technical, curious, or bizarre situations in which they always end up providing a solution. Because what is truly valuable about this copy is exactly that: it offers solutions to everyday problems that you—as SEOs, freelancers, business owners, or simple apprentices—will encounter along the way with your digital products around the giant Californian search engine.

Why I recommend this book:

• Because it will be a step forward in your SEO knowledge from a practical point of view, as it is full of real examples, clarifying graphs, data, tools, and procedures that will make you grow as a professional in the sector.
• Because you have a company that wants and needs to take the leap to the next level and be visible in search engines.
• Because you also want to understand more than just concepts about the work your website needs or the reason behind the recommended actions that need to be implemented.
• Because you have your own business, few resources, and you have to take care of everything. It is necessary for you to understand this part of optimizing your website and your business. It will let you know what you need, how to prioritize, why it is necessary, and the time, steps, resources, or help that will be essential to be competitive on Google.
• Because you are increasing your digital training and you always lacked the technical part of SEO.
• Because you want those gurus and those AIs not to make you feel that there is no future; there is, and it is exciting as long as you train and move forward.

What you will learn in it:

• The entire technical SEO workflow in a digital business.
• To understand how to conduct good keyword research, a competitor study, and with it, draw up an SEO strategic plan.
• How to create an optimal information architecture for your website, properly organizing your content, products, taxonomies, and with relevant navigation and linking.
• To improve the user experience for people visiting your website.
• Optimize the most technical part of indexing, control it, understand how search engines interpret your website, and prepare them in terms of structured data, performance, WPO, JS, CSS, etc.
• You will get up to date on the latest algorithms, changes, and updates, databases, new relevant metrics, caches, PWAs, and monitoring, measurement, analysis, and data visualization tools.
• What is necessary for your international SEO when your business crosses borders.
• That SEO does not stop at a couple of books, but that this is the beginning of understanding a complex but very interesting universe, vital for any business that needs to be online. And that it is in your hands to keep learning from something so alive and mutable as long as you continue training or seeking advice from the best professionals.

In short, I am honored to contribute a grain of sand to this work that will be useful and that, besides providing added value, may help change your life.

Manuel Barrios Carrasco
Deputy Director of Strategy, Digital Distribution, and International Expansion at Diario AS

Introduction

No SEO is as good as all of them together

When writing the foreword for this new SEO book, our dear friend Manu Barrios could not have chosen a better quote than this one from the great Alfredo di Stefano: “no player is as good as all of them together.” If teamwork is important in football, in the increasingly complex world of SEO, it is not only important but has become essential. So many disciplines converge and overlap, so many aspects must be taken into account to achieve maximum visibility for a website in search engines, that it is impossible for a single person to cover them all. If we truly wish to go deep, we must specialize to delve into the knowledge of a more specific area and achieve excellence in it.

The authors of the work currently in your hands collectively possess over forty years of professional dedication to SEO and have participated in numerous positioning projects of all kinds over the last two decades. To this vast experience, they also add a profound teaching vocation through their work as professors or speakers in courses, Master’s degrees, and events of all kinds where they have had the opportunity to share their knowledge and discover the most effective way to transmit it.

With this goal, we invite the reader to delve into some areas of technical SEO that have gained increasing importance in recent years: aspects related to strategy, information architecture, complex crawling and indexing problems, improvement in download speed (WPO), international SEO, or results monitoring. Regardless of the level of prior SEO knowledge, we have made an effort to always be educational and present realistic examples of diverse scenarios, so it is easy to transfer that knowledge and apply it to other projects.

What you will find in this book

The book begins with three introductory chapters where we will delve into the keyword research process. We will use three different sources of information: the target definition and its decision-making process (customer journey); the analysis of the search results pages themselves as firsthand information on what type of content Google identifies as the best answer for a search and why; and finally, benchmarking as a way to discover content gaps to cover or opportunities to improve our information architecture.

We will also delve into the concept that an SEO project requires more than checklists and decision trees. It is a strategy that must align with the company’s objective and vision, which requires starting from an internal and external analysis that allows us to identify the most effective SEO levers and activate them in the proper order to achieve our visibility goals.

Although we had to squeeze it in, when talking about strategy, we did not want to overlook the likely upcoming launch of Google SGE in Europe, with all that it may imply for the evolution of the search engine as a source of traffic and the impact that generative artificial intelligence will eventually have on how we create content and manage information.

Finally, we will review the most technical aspects of designing and modifying the information architecture of a website, as it is one of the core aspects for the success of a project.

Chapters 4 to 8 delve into the most technical aspects of SEO to a level never before addressed in previous literature. Technical profiles will enjoy discovering new methodologies for the analysis and optimization of any website, both in aspects related to crawling and indexing, and in those that impact its download speed and performance.

Different ways to control crawling and indexing on websites have been taken into account, as well as new development technologies, the problems they can generate, and how to solve them. Concepts such as crawl budget and the somewhat lesser-known render budget are also addressed, and tips are provided to use the resources Google dedicates to crawling and indexing our site as efficiently as possible.

Chapter 5 is entirely dedicated to structured data. It explains what this data model consists of, how to configure it correctly, what the most common errors are, and how to avoid them when approaching its implementation.

Chapter 6 serves as a knowledge base to master the concepts that the reader will need to grasp to assimilate the optimization techniques explained in chapters 7 and 8, where all aspects capable of improving download speed are explored, as well as the multiple interactions that must be considered when optimizing each of the Core Web Vitals indicators, including the most recent ones (FID and INP).

Chapter 7 focuses on identifying critical and non-critical CSS to establish different download priorities and also addresses image, video, and animation optimization.

Chapter 8 closes this technical block of the book by focusing on optimization techniques for database queries, server code optimization, taking advantage of different caches, and AMP page optimization.

Chapter 9 presents the latest developments in international SEO, after Google removed the International Targeting functionality and increased its level of demand when adding new pages to its index. We will study in which scenarios it is beneficial or not to deploy specific language or language-and-country versions, and how to make better use of the crawl quota to avoid common errors while maintaining visibility for the most popular searches.

Chapter 10, finally, focuses on SEO reporting and explains how to select key performance indicators and present them in a user-friendly way with Google Looker Studio. We provide recommendations for analyzing, interpreting, and presenting information more effectively to make sound decisions, always justified by data.

The book concludes with a practical alphabetical index that will be very useful for locating where each of the most important concepts appears.

Who this book is for

This book is intended as an optimal choice for anyone wishing to deepen or update their knowledge of the more technical aspects of organic positioning.

Always aiming to do so in a simple and accessible way, we assume the reader is already familiar with the basic aspects of SEO and refer them to other titles in this same Social Media collection if they wish for an introductory text on the discipline, such as SEO – The Essential Keys, published by Aleyda Solís in 2016, or Advanced SEO, published by Fernando Maciá in 2020, which those starting their learning now will find extremely useful.

These are the profiles we kept in mind while writing the following pages:

• Technical SEO consultants.
• SEO agencies.
• Website analysts, managers, and designers.
• In-house SEO professionals.
• Digital marketing department heads.
• SEO trainers.
• Web programmers.
• Webmasters.

We trust that all of them will find new ideas and concepts, valuable contributions, useful tools, and applicable recommendations to improve their websites.

As with our previous books, our main goal is to contribute our grain of sand to this generous Spanish-speaking SEO community and share at least part of what we have had the opportunity to learn over these years. We hope and wish it will be useful and contribute to improving the visibility and performance of numerous online projects.

Dedication and Acknowledgments

José E. Vicente

Dedication

I dedicate this book to my life partner, Yolanda, a true example of strength and resilience. Without her support, encouragement, and patience, none of this would be possible.

Acknowledgments

My gratitude goes to my colleagues at Human Level, where every year we are more, but the essence of a group of people striving to do things better and keep learning remains. Especially the senior SEOs, Ramón, Rocío, and María, who have been there for over 8 years to offer help when you can’t manage everything and you can trust them with any task knowing the result will be perfect. To the rest of the department, Paolo, Juan Antonio, Sandra, Laura, and the new additions yet to come, I hope we continue doing SEO for many years and sharing great moments.

But these last 15 years of my professional career would not have been possible without Fernando; thank you for giving me the opportunity to start in SEO, to collaborate on this book, in training, for all that knowledge you pass on to us, and a very long list of etceteras.

Finally, a special thanks to my parents, who have always educated me in the values of effort, respect, and responsibility that have forged me as a person.

Ramón Saquete

Dedication

I dedicate my part of this book to my parents, Ramón Enrique Saquete and María Isabel Mellado, to my sister, Maribel, and to the rest of my family.

Acknowledgment

I especially thank Fernando Maciá for inviting me to collaborate on this project, to José Emeterio Vicente and Rocío Rodríguez, because without them this book would not have been feasible, and to the rest of the Human Level team for being there in the day-to-day.

Finally and above all, I thank my wife Ana García for her patience and understanding.

Rocío Rodríguez

Dedication

To Daniel, my life partner, the one who gives me everything without expecting anything in return. Thank you for understanding me, loving me, and accompanying me in every step I take, supporting and respecting each of my decisions. I am very lucky to have you.

Acknowledgment

My first thanks cannot be for anyone else. Fernando Maciá, thank you for opening the doors to your small but great world where I have had the opportunity to train professionally alongside a magnificent mentor but, above all, where I have traveled a long road hand in hand with a great person. I feel infinite gratitude not only for having given me the opportunity to contribute my grain of sand to this book but also for opening other doors that I had not explored until now, such as training.

Of course, I cannot finish these lines without mentioning how proud I am to be part of the Human Level marketing agency. I am lucky to have been part of it since 2016 along with other great professionals, many of whom started as colleagues and have ended up as friends. Here’s to many more years full of challenges, learning, and growth, doing together every day something that excites and enriches us.

Fernando Maciá

Dedication

Affectionately dedicated to Jose, María, Rocío, Ramón, and Sandra. You are the human factor that makes Human Level such a special company.

Acknowledgment

My first thanks go to my fellow page-mates Jose, Rocío, and Ramón, who with great generosity agreed to share their knowledge in this book. It is a matter of pride to see my name alongside yours.

Although only four of us signed it, this book is a reality thanks to the professional, dedicated, and demanding work of the great team of consultants at Human Level, as well as the countless clients who over the last two decades have entrusted us with their projects. Developing my professional career alongside all of them is an absolute privilege.

Starting an SEO book with a quote from Alfredo di Stefano is a fluke that could only happen thanks to the generous foreword dedicated to us by Manuel Barrios. A thousand thanks for your words.

Thanks also to Eugenio Tuya, always receptive to our editorial proposals, for his trust and encouragement. Also to Lidia Señarís, for polishing and refining our writing with her amazing command of language. As well as to the entire editorial team at Anaya Multimedia.

Finally, infinite gratitude to my family: you are my main source of pride and happiness. I am very lucky to enjoy life together with you.