SEO often gets portrayed as an art form, but it’s actually more of a science. In fact, there are many technical steps that you can take to ensure your site isn’t at risk of being penalized by search engines, and thus not performing as well as it could be organically. Here are four of the most important technical SEO tasks that you should be prioritizing to make sure your site has the best possible organic performance.

Improve Page Experience

Page load time is an important ranking factor and has a significant impact on user engagement. If a page takes too long to load, you can expect users to leave your site, killing any potential conversions and traffic. Luckily, there are ways to optimize page performance so that your pages aren’t only fast—they’re also functional. Here are four strategies for improving your site speed A website with slow load times can significantly reduce customer satisfaction, click-through rates, and conversions. For ecommerce sites in particular, which rely heavily on product impressions and online shopping carts, having an optimized website is crucial to driving sales through your store.

Ensure Pages are Crawlable

Before you publish a page, make sure it’s crawlable by Google. The first thing to look at is your robots.txt file, which should be set up with a few commands. First, you want to ensure that pages are not blocked from being crawled: User-agent: * Disallow: /example-page/ Crawl delay: 30 (This ensures Googlebot won’t crawl any of your pages for 30 seconds after crawling another page.) Then, make sure all of your important URLs are available and accessible through a sitemap file. You can also use canonical tags to point certain URLs back to their main landing pages.

Optimize Site Architecture

Good architecture doesn’t only make your website easier to use, it also improves a site’s user experience, search engine rankings and crawl budget. If you want to know how to optimize your site architecture, keep reading for a closer look at four common problems. You can apply these solutions whether you’re optimizing an existing site or starting from scratch.

Check which Pages Allow Indexing

Reviewing which pages on your site are showing up in search results can help you determine whether your content is falling short of meeting Google’s Quality Guidelines. There are two places to review whether pages allow indexing: 1) view each page’s source code to see if there’s a rel=canonical tag pointing to its preferred URL, and 2) check Search Console under Crawl > Index Status for info on blocked URLs.