Technical SEO (Sitemaps, Robots.txt, Core Web Vitals)

 Technical SEO (Sitemaps, Robots.txt, Core Web Vitals)

Technical SEO focuses on optimizing the backend and infrastructure of your website to help search engines crawl, index, and rank your pages more effectively.

✅ 1. XML Sitemap

An XML sitemap lists all important pages of your site for search engines.

Why It Matters:

• Helps bots find and index content faster

• Especially useful for large or new websites

How to Use:

• Generate using tools like Yoast SEO, Rank Math, or XML-sitemaps.com

• Submit to Google Search Console under “Sitemaps”

📌 Example:
sitemap.xml file:
https://yourwebsite.com/sitemap.xml

✅ 2. robots.txt File

This tells search engines which parts of your site they can or cannot crawl.

Common Uses:

• Block admin pages or duplicate content

• Prevent indexing of staging versions

Example robots.txt:

pgsql

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

📌 URL:
https://yourwebsite.com/robots.txt

✅ 3. Core Web Vitals (Google Page Experience Signals)

These metrics measure user experience and affect ranking:

Key Metrics:

• LCP (Largest Contentful Paint) – Measures load speed (ideal: ≤ 2.5 sec)

• FID (First Input Delay) – Measures interactivity (ideal: ≤ 100 ms)

• CLS (Cumulative Layout Shift) – Measures visual stability (ideal: ≤ 0.1)

Tools to Check:

• PageSpeed Insights

• Lighthouse

• Google Search Console > Core Web Vitals Report

📌 Example Fixes:

• Compress images

• Use a CDN

• Eliminate unused CSS/JS

• Implement lazy loading

🛠️ Additional Technical SEO Tips

• HTTPS: Ensure your site uses SSL (https://)

• Mobile-Friendly: Use responsive design

• Canonical Tags: Prevent duplicate content issues

• Structured Data (Schema Markup): Add rich snippets (reviews, recipes, FAQs)