Technical SEO
In one line
Technical SEO is the infrastructure-level work — crawling, indexing, rendering, speed, structured data — that makes a site readable and rankable for search engines in the first place.
Going deeper
Technical SEO is about whether search engines can read and index your site at all. Scope covers robots.txt, sitemaps, canonicals, rendering, page speed, structured data, HTTPS and mobile parity — the infrastructure beneath everything else.
Doing it well is mostly about not giving back yards. Indexing gaps, duplicate canonicals or a slow LCP will drag down a domain regardless of how good the writing is. Content can earn ground, but technical issues quietly take it back.
GEO has stretched the surface area. Bot policy — how you handle GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, whether you publish an llms.txt — is technical SEO too, just aimed at a different fleet of crawlers.
Related terms
On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is the work you do inside a page itself — title, headings, body copy, internal links — to align it with search intent and make ranking signals legible to engines.
SEOOff-Page SEO
Off-page SEO is the umbrella for everything that builds your domain's authority and trust outside your own site — backlinks, press coverage, brand mentions, citations.
SEOGooglebot
Googlebot is Google's official web crawler used to build the search index — controllable through robots.txt rules and identifiable by its User-Agent string.
SEOHTTPS
HTTPS (HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure) is HTTP traffic encrypted with TLS — and a baseline ranking signal Google has confirmed publicly.
SEOSchema.org
Schema.org is the shared vocabulary co-sponsored by Google, Microsoft, Yahoo and Yandex that lets you label what each page means so search engines and AI can understand it.
SEOProgrammatic SEO
Programmatic SEO is the practice of combining a database with templates to generate hundreds or thousands of pages automatically — capturing patterned demand like '[city] + [service]' at scale.
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