Technical SEO: a practical guide
The technical fundamentals every site needs in 2026 — explained in plain English, with the tools to verify each one.
Crawlability
If Google can't crawl it, nothing else matters. Make sure your robots.txt isn't blocking core sections, your sitemap is current, and orphan pages are linked from at least one indexed page. Run our SEO Audit to surface crawl issues automatically.
Indexability
Canonical tags, hreflang for multi-language sites, and clean status codes. Watch out for accidental noindex tags shipped during a redesign — they're the #1 silent killer of organic traffic.
Core Web Vitals
LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1. Image lazy-loading, font preloading, and reducing main-thread work usually move all three at once.
Schema & structured data
Article, Product, FAQ, HowTo, Breadcrumb. Structured data won't move rankings on its own, but it's table stakes for rich results and AI Overview eligibility.