Focus: Concentrates on optimizing the infrastructure and backend of your website to ensure search engines can crawl, index, and render your content effectively. This includes page speed optimization, mobile-friendliness, structured data, secure browsing (SSL), and XML sitemaps.
• Site Speed/Performance: Ensuring fast loading times (e.g., through compression, caching, image optimization).
• Robots.txt: Controlling which pages are accessible to search engine bots.
• XML Sitemaps: Helping search engines find and index your pages efficiently.
• Canonical Tags: Preventing duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a webpage.
• Schema Markup (Structured Data): Adding semantic tags to help search engines understand your content.
• HTTP/HTTPS (Security): Ensuring your site is secure (SSL certificates).
• Crawl Errors: Monitoring and fixing issues that prevent search engines from accessing your pages.
• Mobile-Friendliness: Ensuring your website adapts properly to and is optimized for mobile devices. This includes mobile-first indexing, responsive design, and ensuring a fast, seamless experience for mobile users.
• Breadcrumbs: Improving navigation and providing search engines with better page structure.
Indexing is a part of Technical SEO as well. Indexing refers to the process by which search engines, like Google, crawl your website, analyze the content, and store it in their database (or index) so it can appear in search results when relevant queries are made.
Here’s how indexing relates to Technical SEO:
1. Crawlability and Indexing: Ensuring search engines can access and index your content.
• robots.txt: Used to instruct search engine bots on which pages to crawl and which to ignore.
• XML Sitemap: A file that helps search engines find and crawl important pages on your site.
• Canonical Tags: Prevents duplicate content issues by specifying the “preferred” version of a page.
• Noindex Tags: Tells search engines not to index specific pages (e.g., thank you pages, login pages).
• Index Coverage Reports: In tools like Google Search Console, these reports help identify any issues that prevent pages from being indexed.
• Redirects (301/302): Ensures the right version of a page is indexed when URLs change.
2. Site Structure & Internal Linking: A well-structured website with proper internal linking helps search engines discover and index new or deep pages efficiently.
3. Mobile-First Indexing: Search engines prioritize mobile versions of websites for indexing, making mobile optimization crucial.
In short, indexing falls squarely under Technical SEO, as it involves backend website settings and protocols that help search engines understand, crawl, and store the site’s pages in their index.