Technical SEO
Optimisations to a website's infrastructure that help search engines crawl, index, and understand it.
Full definition
Technical SEO encompasses all website optimisations that are not related to content or link building — instead focusing on the underlying infrastructure that allows search engines to properly access and understand the site. Key technical SEO areas include: site architecture and internal linking, crawlability and indexability, page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendliness, HTTPS security, structured data markup, XML sitemaps, robots.txt configuration, hreflang tags (for international sites), log file analysis, and handling of duplicate content. Technical SEO issues can prevent even high-quality content from ranking — they are the foundation that content and links build upon.
Real-world example
A site audit reveals that 40% of pages are blocked by robots.txt due to a development configuration left on the live site — a critical technical SEO issue that prevented indexing.
Related terms
The ability of search engine bots to access and crawl a website's pages.
Read definitionStructured data code added to a webpage to help search engines understand content context and display rich snippets.
Read definitionGoogle's set of speed and UX metrics — LCP, INP, and CLS — used as ranking signals.
Read definitionAn HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a duplicate or similar page is the preferred one to index.
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