Technical SEO for fast sites
Crawling, indexing, redirects, canonicals, language versions, links, security headers and structured data: the technical side of search that sits next to speed.
Technical SEO is what lets search engines find, read and index your pages. A fast site that Google cannot crawl or index gets no benefit from being fast, so the two go together. These guides cover the parts of technical SEO that overlap with speed and site structure, in plain language.
Crawling and indexing: robots.txt and noindex, canonical tags, redirects and status codes, internal linking and mobile-first indexing.
What the page says: titles, descriptions and headings, structured data and hreflang for English and Spanish.
How the page is built: JavaScript and SEO, HTTPS and security headers and AI crawlers and llms.txt.
Before a move, use the website migration checklist.
Guides in this topic 13 guides
- robots.txt, noindex and the tags that control search
robots.txt controls crawling and noindex controls indexing. How each works, how they interact, what real sites do, and the mistakes that hide a whole site.
- Canonical tags: pointing duplicates to one address
A canonical link tells search engines which address is the main version of a page. When to use one, how to set it, how it goes wrong, and how to check it.
- Redirects and status codes: 301, 302, 404 and 503
What 301, 302, 307, 308, 404, 410 and 503 mean, when to use each, why redirects cost speed, how to avoid chains and loops, and how to check your site.
- hreflang for English and Spanish versions of a site
How to tell search engines about your English and Spanish pages: hreflang links, language and country codes, x-default, pairs that link back, and mistakes.
- Structured data basics: JSON-LD for small sites
What structured data is, why JSON-LD is the usual format, two small examples, where the code goes, and how to avoid duplicates and extra page weight.
- JavaScript and SEO: what crawlers can see
How pages built with JavaScript can hide tags, text and links from search engines, how to compare raw and rendered HTML, and how to fix the common gaps.
- Internal links: help visitors and crawlers find pages
How internal links work for visitors and search engines: link text, link counts, orphan pages, and a script that shows click depth and broken links.
- Page titles, descriptions and headings that work
How to write a page's title, meta description and headings for people and search engines: what real sites do, what Lighthouse checks and where speed comes in.
- Mobile-first indexing: what it means for your site
What mobile-first indexing means, why the phone version of a page matters most, and how to check the viewport tag, tap targets, matching content and speed.
- HTTPS and security headers without the slowdown
Which security headers to set, what each does, how they touch speed and caching, and how to roll them out in a safe order: HTTPS, HSTS, nosniff and CSP.
- Website migration checklist for speed and search
A step-by-step checklist for moving a site to a new host, domain, platform or design without losing addresses, search visibility or speed.
- AI crawlers, robots.txt and llms.txt
What AI crawlers are doing in robots.txt files, how to allow or block them, what llms.txt is and how little it is used, and why raw HTML and crawl load matter.
- Do you still need AMP in 2026?
What AMP is, what changed for it in Google Search up to the July 2026 switch to publisher-hosted pages, and how to decide whether to keep or remove it.
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