Technical SEO: What Every Website Needs to Get Right

Technical SEO is everything that helps Google find, read and understand your website. Even great content will not perform if the page is not indexed.

Crawling, indexing and ranking are three different stages

In short: Google first discovers a page (crawling), then stores it in its index (indexing), and only then decides where to show it (ranking). If your site is missing from Google, the problem is usually in the first two stages.

Why your website is not showing on Google

• The site is new and has not been crawled yet;
• The page carries noindex;
• robots.txt blocks the site or part of it;
• The canonical points to another URL;
• The page returns a 404 or 5xx error;
• The content is thin or duplicated.

First step: add the site to Google Search Console (Domain or URL-prefix property, verified by DNS or meta tag) and check the Pages report.

Status codes and redirects

Use 301 redirects for permanent moves and avoid chains (A→B→C) and loops. Internal links should point straight to the final URL.

robots.txt

robots.txt controls what crawlers may fetch — it is not a reliable way to remove a page from the index; use noindex for that. Include your sitemap URL in robots.txt.

sitemap.xml

A sitemap should list only indexable, 200-status, canonical URLs — not redirects, filter pages or noindex pages.

Canonical URLs

A canonical tells Google which version of a page is the main one when similar content lives at several addresses. Normally a page points to itself. Never point a canonical to another domain unless you want that page to drop out of search.

Titles, H1 and structure

Each page needs a unique title, description and a single H1, with H2/H3 subheadings in a logical order.

Speed, mobile and Core Web Vitals

Google measures three metrics: LCP (loading of the main content), INP (responsiveness to interaction) and CLS (layout shift). Recommended thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds, INP under 200 milliseconds, CLS under 0.1. A slow site loses visitors, so speed matters for users and SEO alike.

Structured data (Schema.org)

Describe your organisation, services, products, articles and breadcrumbs in JSON-LD. The data must match what is visible on the page — fake reviews or ratings are not allowed. Validate with the Rich Results Test.

hreflang for multilingual sites

Each language version should reference itself and its alternates (for example ka ↔ en). If a translation does not exist, do not create an hreflang pair.

Keeping rankings during a redesign

List your old URLs, set up 301 redirects, keep titles and content, submit the new sitemap after launch and watch for 404 errors.

Checklist

• Search Console connected and sitemap submitted;
• Important pages indexed;
• robots.txt blocks nothing important;
• Canonicals correct;
• No broken internal links;
• Core Web Vitals green on mobile;
• Schema free of errors.

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