What is technical SEO and why is it important?

Technical SEO involves optimizing the technical aspects of your website so search engines can crawl, index, and rank your pages effectively. It includes site speed, mobile-friendliness, crawlability, indexability, structured data, and site architecture. It's important because even great content won't rank if search engines can't access or understand your site. Technical SEO forms the foundation—without it, other SEO efforts are less effective. It also directly impacts user experience, which search engines prioritize. Example: A site with excellent content but slow load times and crawl errors ranked poorly until technical SEO issues were fixed, then rankings improved significantly.