In this lesson, you'll learn what technical SEO is and some of its foundational principles.

To understand why technical SEO is necessary, you first need to understand how search engines like Google find pages on the web and how they then, we hope, end up ranked in the search engine.

The first step is for Google to crawl the site to discover its pages and what's on them. More about that in a moment.

But Google also needs to be able to render the page, that is, be able to understand how the code of the page will translate into what a user will see and experience on the page.

Next, Google indexes the page. That is, it translates the elements on the page in ways its algorithms can use to decide if and how it should rank. Not everything that gets crawled gets indexed.

And finally, if Google decides the page is a good match for a certain query, it may appear in search results. But that final step won't happen if the first three aren't working.

And that's where technical SEO comes in.

Technical SEO is optimizing your site's technical elements to ensure search engines can find, crawl, understand, and index your site's pages. Only if all that is in good shape can you hope for your pages to rank in search.

But technical SEO also helps create a better user experience on your site, as it naturally links and redirects visitors to your most important content.

At seoClarity, we work from what we call the URA framework. This framework gives us the three essentials of SEO: usability, relevance, and authority. Technical SEO lives at the usability level and so is fundamental to everything else.

So digging into the usability level, we first need to understand crawlability and indexability and the difference between them.

Crawlability refers to the ability of a search engine to access and reach the pages of your site. It must be able to see all the elements on the pages it crawls.

Indexability is the extent to which a search engine can understand all the elements on a page and store it in its index for potential ranking,

it's important to understand that not all the pages on a site are crawled, and among those that are crawled, not all are indexed.

So one of the primary goals of technical SEO is to try to get all the pages that matter on your site crawled by Google, and then get as many of those as possible indexed.

As we said before, only pages that have been crawled and indexed can qualify to be ranked and potentially drive traffic. So it's critical to drive more success at the top of what we call the SEO fundamentals funnel.

Finally, let's get a high level view of the essential tasks that make up technical SEO.

The primary aim of tech SEO is to fix the technical problems on a site that can prevent pages from being crawled, indexed, and ultimately ranked to drive traffic.

The technical SEO also wants to be following best practices so their site won't be broken or affected by changes, whether in crawling technology or search algorithms.

But it's just as important to develop the skill and experience to know which of the many technical fixes or improvements you could do need to be done first.

Of course, automation in seoClarity like Actionable Insights does that heavy lifting for you.

Finally, it's the technical SEO's responsibility to make sure the architecture of the site not only facilitates search engine crawlbots, but also the site's users, making it simple and intuitive for them to get to what they need.