What you will learn
- Explain the roles of an XML sitemap and a robots.txt file
- Describe the three Core Web Vitals and what each measures
- Run a basic technical check on a website using free Google tools
Technical SEO makes sure search engines can reach, read, and store your pages. An XML sitemap lists the URLs you want indexed and is submitted in Google Search Console. A robots.txt file tells crawlers which areas they should not crawl, such as admin pages. A common and costly mistake is a leftover rule or noindex tag from development that blocks the whole live site.
Google uses mobile-first indexing, which means it mainly looks at the mobile version of a page. Page experience matters too. The Core Web Vitals are Largest Contentful Paint, how quickly the main content appears; Interaction to Next Paint, how quickly the page responds to taps and clicks, which replaced First Input Delay in 2024; and Cumulative Layout Shift, how much the layout jumps while loading.
You do not need to be a developer to spot problems. PageSpeed Insights shows Core Web Vitals and suggests fixes, such as compressing large images. Search Console's Pages report shows which URLs are indexed and why others are not. Also check that every page loads over HTTPS and that each piece of content has one main URL, using canonical tags where duplicates are unavoidable.