What is SEO? What you need to rank higher

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Definition: Search Engine Optimization (SEO) describes the tactical and strategic efforts to maximize a website’s placement in search engine results. SEO depends on (among other factors): on-page HTML structure, website architecture, page content and keyword usage, inbound links, and a domain’s collective content.

Search Engines and Ranking

To understand why best practices are the way they are, it’s important to understand the search engines they’re trying to please. Search engines deploy bots (commonly referred to as “spiders”) that crawl websites and index their content.

Website architecture is a critical component of SEO because it lays the path for search engines to crawl a site’s various pages. If important sections of your website aren’t easy to find, a spider won’t crawl it and assumes it isn’t important.

What to look out for

  • Blocking search engines: Noindex tags and robots.txt files tell search engines not to crawl a page. These tags are often implemented in a staging environment and, when not removed, will cause a page to go uncrawled by Google and other search engines.
  • Duplicate content: It’s tempting to use manufacturer product descriptions, but these can be crippling to a product page’s organic ranking potential. Google penalizes webpages that borrows some or all of its page content from another webpage – whether on the same or another domain.