Best Practices for Technical SEO

Introduction

If you want your site to rank, technical SEO is the most important thing to do. Your best content won’t get much attention if your foundation is weak. These best practices will help your site load quickly, stay stable, and be easy to understand for both people and search engines.

1. Make the site faster and get the Core Web Vitals right

Waiting is not fun for anyone. Your site needs to feel fast in order to rank well.

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint): Make sure that the biggest image or banner loads quickly. Use a CDN, compress images, or speed up server response times.
  
  
• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift): Don’t let elements move around while the page loads; leave room for ads, images, and embeds.
  
  
• Interaction time, or INP: Don’t block the main thread; split up heavy JavaScript and put off scripts that aren’t needed.
  
  

Quick tip: Check out pages on a mobile 3G network and see how long it takes to load. That gives you a reference from a real user, not just lab results.

2. Make mobile usability a top priority

More than half of people who use the web do so from their phones. Google notices if your site is hard to use on mobile.

• Use responsive design so that layouts change instead of breaking.
  
  
• Not just emulators, but real devices as well.
  
  
• Check that the buttons can be tapped, the fonts are easy to read, and the menus are simple to use.
  
  

3. Fix problems with crawling, indexing, and duplicates

Search engines need clear directions to get to your pages.

• Send in a clean XML sitemap and use Google Search Console to look for mistakes.
  
  
• Be careful with robots.txt; you don’t want to block pages you want to be indexed.
  
  
• Fix crawl errors and redirect broken links the right way (301s will help).
  
  
• Use canonical tags to keep the same content from showing up more than once, like when you list products or filter them.
  
  

4. Create a clean, logical structure

The structure is important. It has an effect on both users and bots.

• Use HTTPS all the time.
  
  
• Make sure your URLs are short and clear, like /blog/how-to-seo instead of /post?id=1234.
  
  
• Organize your pages into categories and subcategories, and use internal linking to help spread authority.
  
  
• Breadcrumbs are useful for both people and bots.
  
  

5. Use Schema and Structured Data Wisely

Schema helps search engines “see” your data and sometimes unlock extra features, like rich snippets.

• Use the right schema types for articles, products, reviews, FAQs, and local businesses.
  
  
• Google suggests using JSON-LD format, so you should use it.
  
  
• Always use Rich Results Test or schema validators to check that your schema works.