The term technical SEO is defined as all implementations on the server and website. For example all page elements, metadata, robots-txt, HTTP header responses, schema markup, sitemaps, redirects, … The goal of technical SEO is to directly influence how search engines crawl, index and ultimately rank your page.
Keyword research, SEO copywriting, local SEO or linkbuilding is not technical SEO. Mainly for larger websites, it is a challenge to make it clear to search engines which are your most important pages. But many small websites also benefit from technical SEO. Just think about speed optimization and mobile friendliness.
Google continuously searches the worldwide web for interesting information by using automatic software that we call a web crawler, spider or bot. Google’s web crawler is called “Googlebot. Every search engine has a bot, if you look at your server logs you will notice that Bingbot, Yandex Bot and Baidy Spider are also active as bots of the major search engines.
There are a lot of spiders active on the internet. Some try to blatantly copy your content others are less malicious. SEO software like Screaming Frog, for example, imitates the settings of Googlebot. Did you know that a web crawler is basically an Internet browser with no user interface?
Google gives you insight into how your website is indexed, this through Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools). If you want to know if your technical SEO is in order you will first look here. See if the ratio of pages on your website and the amount of pages Google has indexed match. If there is a large discrepancy then you probably have a problem.
Google provides many notifications through Search Console about problems with your website. From speed issues to problems with schema markup. In addition to the performance report, there is the coverage report that provides a lot of interesting information about the health of your website.
Checking a page can be done via the ‘inspection-tool’ this is the search-bar at the top. Did you just write a new page? Paste the web address into the inspection tool and request indexing at once, then you don’t have to wait for Googlebot to visit