Technical SEO: making sure Google can actually read your site

Crawling, indexing, ranking

Three separate stages, and they happen in order.

Crawling is a search engine following links and discovering pages. Indexing is it storing and understanding those pages. Ranking is deciding where they appear for a given search.

People obsess over ranking while having problems at the crawling stage. If a page is not crawled it is never indexed, and a page that is not indexed cannot rank at all — it is simply absent.

Titles and descriptions

Every page needs its own title tag and meta description. The title is the blue link in search results; the description is the grey text beneath it.

Two mistakes dominate. The first is leaving them identical across the whole site, so every page says the business name and nothing else. The second is leaving them empty, so Google invents something from your page content, usually badly.

Write the title with the most important words first, keep it around sixty characters so it does not get cut off, and make the description read like an advert — because that is exactly what it is.

Structure search engines can follow

A few structural pieces do a lot of work.

• One h1 per pageThe main heading, describing what the page is about. Then h2s for sections, h3s within those. A logical outline, not a font-size picker.
• An XML sitemapA machine-readable list of your pages, submitted to Google Search Console. It does not guarantee indexing but it makes discovery far more reliable.
• A robots.txt fileTells crawlers which areas to ignore, such as admin pages. Worth checking you have not accidentally blocked something important — it happens more often than you would think.
• Internal linksLinks between your own pages help search engines discover and understand them. A page with no internal links pointing at it is nearly invisible.
• Canonical tagsWhen the same content is reachable at several addresses, a canonical tag says which one is the real version, so you are not competing against yourself.

Redirects, and how migrations destroy rankings

When a page moves or is deleted, anyone following an old link gets a 404. If that page had built up authority over years, it is thrown away.

A 301 redirect points the old address at the new one and passes most of that accumulated value across. This is why a rebuild done without a redirect map can tank a site that was previously ranking well — the content survives but every URL changed, and search engines see a wholly new site with no history.

If you are planning a redesign, mapping old URLs to new ones is not optional housekeeping. It is the difference between keeping and losing your position.

Where to start

Set up Google Search Console. It is free, takes a few minutes, and it tells you which pages Google has indexed, which it could not, what searches you appear for, and what problems it has found. You are otherwise guessing — analytics and measurement covers what to do with it.

Then work outward: fix indexing errors, write proper titles, submit a sitemap, and make sure your site is quick — speed is part of how Google ranks pages. If you serve a local area, local SEO will usually be worth more to you than anything else here.

Sources and further reading

• SEO Starter Guide (opens in a new tab)Google Search CentralGoogle's own beginner guide. Start here rather than a blog.
• Google Search Console (opens in a new tab)GoogleFree, and the only way to see what Google thinks of your site.
• Spam policies for Google Search (opens in a new tab)Google Search CentralWorth reading before anyone sells you "SEO tricks".

Common questions

How long does SEO take to work?

Technical fixes such as unblocking indexing can show results within days or weeks. Genuine ranking improvement for competitive terms takes months. Anyone promising first place in a fortnight is either lucky or lying — usually the latter.

Do I need to pay for SEO tools?

Not to begin with. Google Search Console and PageSpeed Insights are free and cover the fundamentals. Paid tools become useful once you are doing serious competitor and keyword research, which is well past the point most small business sites are at.

What is the difference between technical SEO and content SEO?

Technical SEO makes sure search engines can find, read and understand your pages. Content SEO is about whether those pages actually answer what people searched for. Technical is the plumbing; content is the water. You need both, but plumbing problems are usually faster and cheaper to fix.