Technical SEO: Site Architecture, Crawlability, and Core Web Vitals

Technical SEO involves optimizing a website’s technical elements to improve search engine visibility, user experience, and site performance. Key components include site architecture, crawlability, and Core Web Vitals.

Site Architecture

Site architecture is the way a website’s pages are structured and linked. An SEO-friendly site architecture:

• Follows a clear hierarchy: Homepage → Category Pages → Subcategories → Individual Pages.
• Uses logical internal linking to help search engines discover and index pages efficiently.
• Maintains consistent, simple URL structures (e.g., example.com/category/product), using lowercase letters, hyphens, and descriptive keywords.
• Minimizes crawl depth so important pages are accessible within 3 clicks from the homepage.
• Groups topically related content together to build topical authority.
• Avoids orphan pages by ensuring all pages are linked internally.

Good site architecture improves crawl efficiency, distributes ranking signals, and enhances user navigation.

Crawlability

Crawlability is the ability of search engine bots to access and navigate a website’s pages. It ensures relevant pages are discovered and indexed. Factors affecting crawlability include:

• Avoiding broken links and duplicate content.
• Ensuring pages are accessible (not blocked by robots.txt or noindex tags).
• Using a logical site structure and internal linking.
• Fixing technical issues that hinder bots from crawling important content.

Improving crawlability helps search engines understand and rank your site better.

Core Web Vitals

Core Web Vitals are a set of user experience metrics defined by Google that measure loading performance, interactivity, and visual stability:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): Measures loading speed of the main content.
• First Input Delay (FID): Measures interactivity responsiveness.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): Measures visual stability during page load.

Optimizing Core Web Vitals involves improving site speed through image compression, caching, reducing server response time, and minimizing layout shifts. These metrics directly impact user experience and search rankings.

In summary, technical SEO requires a well-planned site architecture for easy navigation and indexing, ensuring crawlability for search engines, and optimizing Core Web Vitals to enhance user experience and ranking potential.