Technical SEO Fundamentals
Technical SEO addresses infrastructure issues affecting how search engines crawl and index a website. Fixing technical issues is often the highest-leverage SEO action for sites with existing content.
Crawlability
- robots.txt: instructs crawlers which URLs to access. Misconfiguration can block critical pages.
- XML sitemaps: list of URLs submitted to search engines
- Internal linking: distributes PageRank and signals page importance
Indexability
- noindex meta tag: prevents indexing
- Canonical tags: specify preferred version of duplicate content
- Redirect chains: flatten long chains to single redirects