Technical SEO Setup

Technical SEO is the infrastructure layer that determines whether search engines can find, crawl, and index your pages correctly. Without it, search engines cannot reliably discover or index your pages, regardless of content quality.

Every website we build includes a complete technical SEO setup covering canonical URLs, XML sitemaps, robots.txt, heading hierarchy validation, Core Web Vitals optimisation, and search engine submission. These are not optional extras — they are the baseline requirements for any site that intends to rank.

What Technical SEO Covers

1. Step 1: Canonical URL configuration. We set a self-referencing canonical tag on every page and ensure that trailing slashes, www/non-www, and HTTP/HTTPS variants all resolve to a single canonical version. This prevents duplicate content issues that dilute ranking signals.
2. Step 2: XML sitemap generation. We generate an XML sitemap that includes all indexable pages with correct lastmod dates. The sitemap excludes noindex pages, redirects, and utility pages that should not appear in search results.
3. Step 3: Robots.txt configuration. We write a robots.txt that allows search engine crawlers access to all indexable content while blocking admin pages, staging URLs, and any directories that should not be crawled.
4. Step 4: Heading hierarchy validation. Every page is checked for a single H1 that matches the target keyword, logical H2/H3 nesting without skipped levels, and no duplicate H1 tags. Heading hierarchy directly affects how search engines understand the topic structure of each page.
5. Step 5: Core Web Vitals optimisation. We optimise images (WebP format, correct dimensions, lazy loading below the fold), minimise CSS and JavaScript, eliminate render-blocking resources, and test every page through PageSpeed Insights and WebPageTest.

Core Web Vitals Targets

Our Astro builds achieve these results because they ship static HTML with zero client-side JavaScript by default. There is no framework hydration delay, no layout shift from dynamically loaded components, and no render-blocking scripts. The browser receives pre-rendered HTML and displays it immediately.

Search Engine Submission

Sites submitted directly to Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools enter the index faster than sites waiting for organic discovery. We submit your XML sitemap on the day of deployment.

IndexNow notifies Bing and Yandex of new and updated URLs in real time. IndexNow pings the search engine the moment a page is published or modified, eliminating the wait for the next scheduled crawl. New sites benefit most — early crawl cadence determines how fast your pages enter the index.

Frequently Asked Questions