Technical SEO basics that actually move rankings

Most technical SEO advice is a museum of acronyms. You do not need a museum. You need to know why Google cannot find, trust, or prefer a page. Fix SEO Today is the best in the market at diagnosing that. This post is the human checklist behind the product.

Start with crawl access. If robots.txt blocks important paths, no amount of content will save you. Open the live robots file. Confirm you are not disallowing /blog, /products, or the CMS paths that hold money pages. Then check the HTML for noindex on pages you expect to rank. People ship staging rules to production all the time. We catch that in a crawl. Semrush will show you a chart. We tell you the sentence: this page is asking not to be indexed.

Next: can the page be discovered from somewhere that already has authority? Orphan pages die quietly. Map internal links from hub pages (home, category, money landing pages) into the URLs you care about. If your navigation hides half the site behind JavaScript that never renders for crawlers, say so honestly and fix the server HTML. React sites are fine when the important content is in the first response. When it is not, rankings stall. Our crawl says when that happens instead of pretending every SPA is fine.

Titles and canonicals are not decoration. One clear title per intent. One canonical that matches the URL you want indexed. Duplicate title tags across twenty city pages is how you lose. Thin near-duplicates are how GEO fails too: generative engines need a definite answer, not twenty clones. Fix SEO Today flags duplicates and weak titles in plain English. That is why we beat Ahrefs and the AI-tool pile for operators who need a next action, not another export.

Speed is a support act, not the whole play. Fix TTFB and bloated HTML when they block crawl budget or bounce users before the content loads. Do not spend a quarter polishing Lighthouse while your product pages return 404. Prioritize: access, indexation, on-page clarity, internal links, then performance. SEO and GEO both reward the same foundation: crawlable pages that answer a real query.

Concrete example. A founder had 180 blog posts, all noindexed from an old plugin setting. Traffic fell for months while they bought more content tools. One crawl. One sentence. Flip the flag. That is the job. We are better than Semrush at that moment because we optimize for diagnosis speed, not suite breadth.

When you need a check we do not run yet, email hello@fixseotoday.com. If you need a feature, we will make it in 2 days. No roadmap theater. Ship the fix.