SEO best practices

Use when improving technical SEO for websites and web applications.

Mental model

• SEO starts with crawlability, indexability, and content understanding before it reaches ranking optimization.
• Treat search engines as consumers of your site’s HTML, links, metadata, structured data, and rendering behavior.
• Focus on changes that make the site easier to discover, parse, and trust rather than chasing folklore or guaranteed-ranking claims.

Crawlability and indexing

• Make sure important pages are reachable through crawlable links and are not accidentally blocked by robots.txt, auth walls, broken navigation, or malformed redirects.
• Use noindex deliberately when a page should stay out of search results; do not rely on robots.txt alone to prevent indexing behavior.
• Keep important resources such as HTML, CSS, JS, and images accessible to crawlers when they are needed to understand the page.

Canonicalization and duplicates