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Best practices

Search engine optimization best practices and techniques

Good SEO combines useful content with a clear technical structure, helping both traditional and AI-powered search systems discover, understand and surface your pages.

Content

Create content that is useful, relevant and written for the people you want to reach.

Use clear and descriptive language in the page title, main heading and content so that both users and search systems can understand what the page is about.

Prefer original content based on real knowledge, experience, data or expertise. Avoid creating generic content that simply repeats information already available elsewhere.

Organize longer content using descriptive headings and logical sections. This makes the content easier for people to read and helps search and AI systems identify relevant information.

Useful and authoritative content is also more likely to earn links, references and citations from other websites.

AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) focuses on making content useful for direct answers in search, while GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) focuses on visibility and citations in generative AI search experiences.

Both build on the same foundations as SEO: useful content, clear structure, crawlability and trustworthy information.

Use clear headings, concise sections and, where appropriate, FAQ-style content, tables, examples, data and reliable sources.

Use structured data such as JSON-LD where it accurately describes the content and helps search systems understand entities, relationships and page context.

An llms.txt file can provide AI tools and agents with a structured index of important website content.

Technical

Technical SEO ensures that search engines and AI-powered search systems can access, understand and index the website correctly.

Page title

Every page should have a unique and descriptive <title> that clearly describes the page content.

<title>Web accessibility services | Itiden</title>

Meta description

Add a relevant meta description for important pages. Search engines may use it as the description shown in search results.

<meta 
  name="description" 
  content="We design and develop accessible websites that meet modern accessibility requirements." >

Crawling and indexing

Make sure public pages can be crawled and indexed.

Use robots.txt to control crawling and a robots meta tag when a page should not be indexed.

<meta name="robots" content="noindex">

Development and staging environments are often blocked from indexing. Always verify these settings before launch.

If visibility in AI search is important, make sure relevant AI search crawlers are not unintentionally blocked by robots.txt, CDN or firewall rules.

Canonical URLs

Use canonical URLs when the same or very similar content can be reached through multiple URLs.

<link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/page/">

Sitemap

Provide an XML sitemap containing the canonical URLs that should be indexed.

The sitemap should be available at a predictable URL, typically /sitemap.xml, and referenced from robots.txt.

Generate it automatically where possible and keep it updated when pages are added, removed or moved. Large sitemaps should be split into multiple files and referenced from a sitemap index.

Status codes and redirects

Pages should return appropriate HTTP status codes.

Missing pages should return 404. Permanent redirects should normally use 301 or 308. Avoid unnecessary redirect chains.

When URLs change, redirect old URLs to the most relevant new location instead of simply redirecting everything to the homepage.

Structured data

Use structured data such as JSON-LD where it accurately describes the content, for example organizations, articles, products, events or breadcrumbs.

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Organization",
  "name": "Example"
}
</script>

Structured data should represent information that is actually present on the page.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a great tool to follow up on search terms being used to find your site. Make sure your register your site and that people that should follow up search results has access.

To do

  • Pages have unique and descriptive titles.

  • Important pages have relevant meta descriptions.

  • Public pages can be crawled and indexed.

  • Canonical URLs are configured where needed.

  • An XML sitemap is available and kept up to date.

  • Redirects and HTTP status codes are correct.

  • Structured data is added where appropriate.

  • Google Search Console is configured.

  • Relevant AI search crawlers are not unintentionally blocked.

  • Important content is clear, useful and kept up to date.