--- title: "Technical SEO — glossary category" description: "Under-the-hood optimizations that help search engines crawl and index your site" url: "https://skribra.com/glossary/category/technical-seo" type: "index" --- # Technical SEO Under-the-hood optimizations that help search engines crawl and index your site - [Crawlability](https://skribra.com/glossary/crawlability): The ability of search engine bots to access, navigate, and read the pages on your website without encountering technical barriers. - [Indexing](https://skribra.com/glossary/indexing): The process by which a search engine stores and organizes crawled web pages in its database so they can be retrieved and displayed in search results. - [Canonical URL](https://skribra.com/glossary/canonical-url): An HTML tag that tells search engines which version of a page is the preferred, authoritative URL when multiple URLs serve the same or very similar content. - [Schema Markup](https://skribra.com/glossary/schema-markup): Structured data code added to a web page's HTML that helps search engines understand content context and enables rich results like star ratings, breadcrumbs, product prices, and event details in the SERP. - [Core Web Vitals](https://skribra.com/glossary/core-web-vitals): Google's set of real-world user experience metrics — Largest Contentful Paint (LCP), Interaction to Next Paint (INP), and Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — used as ranking signals in the Page Experience update. - [Robots.txt](https://skribra.com/glossary/robots-txt): A plain text file at the root of a website (e.g., example.com/robots.txt) that instructs search engine crawlers which pages or sections they are and are not allowed to crawl. - [XML Sitemap](https://skribra.com/glossary/sitemap): A file (typically in XML format) that lists all the important URLs on a website, helping search engines discover and crawl content more efficiently. - [Page Speed](https://skribra.com/glossary/page-speed): The amount of time it takes for a web page to load and become usable for a visitor — a direct Google ranking factor measured by Core Web Vitals metrics including Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift. - [Mobile-First Indexing](https://skribra.com/glossary/mobile-first-indexing): Google's practice of using the mobile version of a website's content as the primary version for indexing and ranking — meaning Google crawls and evaluates your mobile site, not your desktop site, when determining how to rank your pages. - [Hreflang](https://skribra.com/glossary/hreflang): An HTML attribute that specifies the language and optional regional targeting of a web page, helping search engines serve the correct language or regional version of a page to users in different countries or language groups. - [Open Graph](https://skribra.com/glossary/open-graph): A protocol developed by Facebook that uses `` tags in a page's `` to control how content appears when shared on social media platforms — defining the title, description, image, and URL shown in link previews. - [Internal Linking](https://skribra.com/glossary/internal-linking): Links from one page on your website to another page on the same website — used to help users navigate, distribute link equity (PageRank) between pages, and signal to search engines the relative importance and topical relationships of your content. - [Breadcrumbs](https://skribra.com/glossary/breadcrumbs): A navigation element showing the user's location within a website's hierarchy (e.g., Home > Blog > SEO > Keyword Research), which also appears in Google search results when properly marked up with structured data. - [HTTPS](https://skribra.com/glossary/https): HyperText Transfer Protocol Secure — the encrypted version of HTTP that secures data transmission between a user's browser and a web server using TLS/SSL certificates, protecting against data interception and man-in-the-middle attacks. - [JavaScript SEO](https://skribra.com/glossary/javascript-seo): The practice of ensuring that JavaScript-rendered content on websites is properly crawled, rendered, and indexed by search engines — addressing the challenges that arise when content is generated dynamically in the browser rather than served in static HTML. - [URL Structure](https://skribra.com/glossary/url-structure): The format and organization of a website's URLs — including their length, use of keywords, directory hierarchy, and readability — which affects both search engine understanding of page content and user experience. ## Machine-readable index - HTML version of this page: https://skribra.com/glossary/category/technical-seo - Site index for agents: https://skribra.com/llms.txt - Sitemap: https://skribra.com/sitemap.xml - Public REST API: https://skribra.com/api/v1 - OpenAPI specification: https://skribra.com/openapi.json