Technical SEO
The foundation everything else on this site builds on: can a search engine reach your pages, read them, and trust them?
Overview
Technical SEO is infrastructure work. It doesn't make a page more persuasive — it makes sure the page is even eligible to be found and shown in the first place. The sections below map to the folders this project is organized around; each will grow into its own set of articles as later parts of this project are built.
Crawling & indexing
Crawling is a bot requesting a page. Indexing is the decision to store and rank it. Controls that affect each stage are different and easy to confuse:
- robots.txt controls whether a crawler is allowed to request a URL at all.
- Robots meta tag (
<meta name="robots">) and the X-Robots-Tag HTTP header control whether a page that was crawled gets indexed.
WordPress exposes a site-wide "Discourage search engines" checkbox under Settings → Reading, plus per-page indexing controls inside an SEO plugin like Rank Math.
URL structure & architecture
Every URL on this site is lowercase, hyphenated, and free of query-string parameters — for example /blog/technical-seo-basics/ rather than /blog?id=786. Clean URLs are easier for both users and crawlers to understand, and they don't create accidental duplicate-content variants the way parameter-based URLs can.
This maps to Settings → Permalinks in WordPress, typically set to the "Post name" structure.
Metadata & canonicals
Every page here ships a unique title, meta description, and a self-referencing canonical tag. See the Technical SEO Basics article for a worked example of exactly what that markup looks like.
Performance & Core Web Vitals
Core Web Vitals measure real user experience: Largest Contentful Paint (LCP, loading speed), Interaction to Next Paint (INP, responsiveness), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS, visual stability). This project's coded build avoids heavy JavaScript frameworks and web fonts specifically to keep this baseline honest and fast from the start.
In the WordPress build, this is where LiteSpeed Cache, image optimization, and careful theme/plugin selection do the heavy lifting.
Security
HTTPS is table stakes. Beyond that, HTTP response headers like Strict-Transport-Security, Content-Security-Policy, X-Content-Type-Options, and Referrer-Policy affect both user safety and, indirectly, search engine trust signals. These are server/CDN-level settings, not something an HTML <meta> tag can fully replace.
Configured in .htaccess, your hosting control panel, or a CDN like Cloudflare — not inside WordPress itself.
Testing & tools
Chrome DevTools, Lighthouse, PageSpeed Insights, Google Search Console, and SecurityHeaders.com cover most of what's needed to verify all of the above. See the full breakdown on the SEO Tools page.