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23

CHAPTER 23

23. Technical SEO

Online marketing is just marketing, yet every online marketer should have a basic knowledge
of some of the technical aspects of websites and social media.
As an online marketer, you can think up fantastic strategies and tactics for your customers, but
this is only valuable if they can be implemented technically and financially. After all, there is no
point in making proposals that are not feasible. Online marketers are also expected to know
the potential of the website software. What can and cannot be done with the customer's soft-
ware is a frequently asked question.

Technical knowledge is also necessary because the state of technology is not yet such that eve-
rything that is desirable and necessary can be implemented in the dashboard of the website
software. Certain wishes can only be implemented by making changes in the program code of
the web site. Simple changes in the program code are often carried out by the marketeer. If it's
more complicated, these tasks are delegated to a programmer.

23.1 Common technical operations

In this section, we discuss a number of common situations where a technical solution is often
required. A technical solution means that what you want to realize is not (always) possible in
your CMS, but that you have to add code lines somewhere in the technical part of your site.
Usually, this is a job for the programmer.

1: You want certain pages of the website not to be indexed.
Sometimes site owners want certain pages to be excluded from the search engine's index, for
instance for competitive reasons. The checkout pages of a web shop are often excluded from
indexation as well.

The solution: Pages that must be excluded from indexing must be provided with an extra line
of code in the HTML code that tells the bot that the page may not be indexed. Code lines can
also be included in a special file on the web server, a so-called robots.txt file. With some web-
site software, it is possible to check in the dashboard for each page whether the page may be
indexed. The software will then automatically place the line of code in the right location. If the
software does not have this function, the programmer has to place the line manually.

This website is provided with a Robots.txt file.

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