Technical SEO
Technical SEO foundations every website needs
10 August 2026 · 10 min read · Coselli, Bournemouth
Content and links cannot rescue a site search engines cannot crawl, render or trust. The technical baseline, explained without jargon.
Technical SEO is not a growth tactic. It is the condition under which every other tactic works. A brilliant page that cannot be crawled, rendered or attributed to the right URL earns nothing.
Crawling: can search engines reach the page?
- robots.txt should allow everything public and block only genuinely private areas. A stray Disallow: / has killed more launches than any algorithm update.
- Every important page must be reachable by a plain HTML link from somewhere else on the site. Pages only reachable through search boxes or JavaScript menus often are not found.
- Keep the click depth shallow — three clicks from the homepage to anything that matters.
Indexing: is the page allowed in the index?
Crawlable and indexable are different things. A noindex meta tag, a canonical pointing elsewhere, or a redirect will all keep a perfectly crawlable page out of results. Check the rendered HTML, not your intentions.
| Signal | Says to Google | Common mistake |
|---|---|---|
| noindex | Do not include this page | Left on after launch from a staging build |
| canonical | This URL is the real one | Every page canonicalising to the homepage |
| 301 redirect | This has permanently moved | Chains three redirects deep |
| hreflang | This is the version for this language | Missing return references |
Rendering: does the content exist without JavaScript?
Google can execute JavaScript, but it queues it, and many other crawlers — including several AI systems — do not execute it at all. Server-side rendering or static generation means your content is in the initial HTML response. On modern frameworks this is a build-time decision, not an afterthought.
The quick test: view source, disable JavaScript, and reload. If your headline and body copy are missing, so are your rankings and your AI citations.
URLs, architecture and internal links
- Short, readable, lowercase, hyphenated URLs that describe the page. Never change them without a 301.
- Group related pages into folders that mirror how customers think, not how your business is organised internally.
- Link between related pages with descriptive anchor text. Internal linking is the most underused ranking lever available to small sites.
Sitemaps and robots
An XML sitemap should list every indexable, canonical, live URL — and nothing else. No redirects, no noindexed pages, no 404s. Include lastmod only when you have a genuine page-specific modification date; a build timestamp on every URL is noise and teaches crawlers to ignore the field.
HTTPS, duplicates and pagination
- One canonical hostname. Redirect http to https, and www to non-www or vice versa — pick one and be consistent.
- Watch for parameter and trailing-slash duplicates; canonicalise them.
- For paginated listings, let each page be indexable with a self-referencing canonical, and make sure item links are crawlable.
Monitoring
- 01Verify the site in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
- 02Watch the Page Indexing report monthly for pages dropping out.
- 03Set a reminder to re-crawl the site with a desktop crawler quarterly and fix broken links and redirect chains.
- 04Alert on 5xx errors — outages during crawl windows cost rankings.
None of this is glamorous. All of it is cheaper than the traffic you lose without it.
Frequently asked
- How often should I audit technical SEO?
- A full crawl quarterly, plus a check after any significant site change — redesign, migration, CMS change or new template. Watch Search Console monthly in between.
- Does my small site really need an XML sitemap?
- For under fifty well-linked pages it is not critical, but it is trivial to generate and it speeds up discovery of new pages, so there is no reason to skip it.