The Complete Guide to Technical SEO
Crawling, indexing, rendering, site architecture, performance and structured data explained from first principles.
How search engines process a site
Discovery, crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking are distinct stages. A problem at any stage prevents progress to the next.
Technical SEO is the discipline of removing friction at each stage so your content can be judged on relevance and authority.
Crawlability
Crawlers discover URLs through links and sitemaps. Robots.txt controls access; internal links determine priority. Crawl budget is finite for large sites.
Indexability
Noindex, canonical tags, duplicate content and quality thresholds decide what enters the index. Every important page should have a self-referencing canonical and unique value.
Rendering
JavaScript-heavy sites risk content invisible to crawlers at first pass. Server-side rendering or static generation for critical content is the safest approach.
Performance
Core Web Vitals — LCP, INP and CLS — measure real user experience and are a ranking signal. Optimise by template.
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