Technical SEO basics for small business websites

Crawling is a search engine fetching your page. Indexing is it deciding to store the page so it can appear in results. A page can be crawled and not indexed, for instance when it is a near-duplicate or thin. Two small files and one tag steer this.

The robots.txt file sits at the top of your site and tells crawlers which areas to avoid. It is easy to get wrong. A single line that blocks everything, left over from when the site was in development, can hide a whole site from search. Open yoursite.co.uk/robots.txt and read it. Unless you know why a line is there, be suspicious of anything that blocks your main pages.

The noindex tag is the other trap. WordPress has a setting called "Discourage search engines from visiting this site", usually ticked during development and forgotten at launch. If your site is missing from search, check that setting first, then check individual pages in your SEO plugin.

Your site should load over HTTPS, and every http:// address should redirect permanently to its https:// twin. It should also settle on one version of the address, either with or without www, and redirect the other. Otherwise the same page can exist at four addresses, which splits signals and confuses reports. If you still need to switch, follow our guide to moving from HTTP to HTTPS.

URLs should be short, readable and stable. A path such as /services/web-design/ explains itself to people and crawlers. Avoid changing URLs once they are live, because every change needs a redirect. Avoid long strings of parameters, capital letters and spaces. Choose a form for trailing slashes and stay with it.

Use a canonical tag where the same content must exist at two addresses, for example a product reachable through two categories. It tells search engines which one is the main version.

Google indexes the mobile version of your pages, so what a phone sees is what counts. Check your site on a real phone. Text should be readable without zooming, buttons should be easy to tap and nothing should scroll sideways. Most modern themes handle this, but pop-ups that cover the page on a phone are a frequent problem.

For speed, aim for pages that show their main content quickly, respond to taps without delay and do not shift as they load. Compress images before uploading, remove plugins you do not use, and make sure caching is on. A server using LiteSpeed with Redis object caching, as ours are, helps on the server side. See does web hosting affect SEO for how the two connect.

Technical SEO tools love to produce long lists of warnings, and many are trivial. A missing meta tag on a privacy page does not matter. Fix problems in order of impact: anything that stops pages being indexed comes first, then broken or duplicated key pages, then speed and mobile experience, then small tidying.

Keep a simple log of changes with dates. If traffic moves, you can see what you changed around then. Make one significant change at a time where you can, so cause and effect stay clear. And remember that technical health supports good content rather than replacing it. Once the basics are in place, the time is better spent writing pages that help your customers.