For new website owner's it can be confusing. What are all these different types of SEO? While content and backlinks are important, in this article we want to get you familiar with the aspects that make up Technical SEO. The Crawl Tool covers many types of SEO, but a large part of it is technical SEO. So this will help with your understanding and use of the tool if SEO is new to you.

Technical SEO is about ensuring your website functions well for both search engines and users. It's a win-win in the sense that technical SEO helps with ranking in the search engines but also improves your user's experience of your site. Rather then focusing on content and backlinks, technical SEO focuses on infrastructure, navigation, and speed.

It's common to hear one part of SEO is more important than another (particularly from people who make tools that cover that one part), whereas the reality is that good SEO is a blend of all these techniques. What technical SEO brings to the mix is:

• It improves how crawlable your pages are, resulting in more opportunities to rank in the search engines and bring in visitors.

• It enhances user experience. Who doesn't like a fast site? Slow sites are proven to put user's off.

• It boosts rankings.

To understand why the things matter better, it's important to understand what a crawler is. A crawler is also known as a spider, or simply a bot. It follows links from pages, gathering data. Search engines, therefore, use crawlers to build their search databases to present results from. The Crawl Tool uses crawlers to gather useful information to help you make your site better.

A robots.txt file lets you give crawlers some directions when crawling sites. You can specify what pages can be crawled and what pages it should not crawl. This is a useful for technical SEO as you can ask them not to crawl things you don't want them to but also things there is little benefit to you having them crawl (thereby making them focus on crawling your important pages and adding them to the search engine database).

An XML Sitemap can be viewed as the opposite of a robots.txt. Where a robots.txt generally asks the robots.txt file not to crawl something, an XML Sitemap lists all possible urls that you do want a search engine crawler to find.

This is advantageous for search engines because they can fetch this list and know what there is to crawl, without necessarily having to follow each link. For you the advantage is that a search engine is likely to list new content quicker.

One important aspect of Technical SEO is website speed. You might ask yourself - how can I improve my website's speed? The are a few easy wins here:

• Choose a fast hosting provider! It sounds obvious, but it is one of the biggest causes of slow or better speed for a website.

• Use gzip compression - hopefully your hosting provider has this set for you.

Some aspects of the design/coding of the website can help:

• Use browser caching whenever possible.

• Minify CSS and Javascript files.

• Compress images to reduce their size.

As time has gone on, having a mobile friendly website has become an important aspect of technical SEO. The majority of search engine crawl requests now come from their "mobile" crawler. It's not an actual mobile phone, but it's looking at pages from that perspective.

Things that are critical for mobile - like small file sizes, and a UI that is easily tappable on mobile screens, are therefore also very important for SEO.

HTTPS is the secure version of HTTP, the method where browsers fetch and receiving web pages. As time has progressed, nearly all sites have switched to HTTPS. This is because it encrypts data from the client to the server. Even in cases where this encryption doesn't serve any real world purpose (no confidential data is being sent), people tend to use HTTPS as search engines and web browsers often ignore or block pages without.

There is, of course, much more to it. But as a new website owner, understanding these basic terms and principles will take you a long way.