Many decisions that determine whether a page is found are made by front-end developers: which HTML is served, how links are marked up, whether content needs JavaScript, how fast the page loads and what metadata travels with it.
Search engine optimization (SEO) is full of folklore, so this chapter says whether each factor is confirmed by the search engines, denied or simply unknown.
The chapter starts with the machinery of crawling, ranking and AI answers, then works through the classic factor families (domain, page, backlinks, navigation and brand), SEO tools and microformats. It closes with technical SEO for JavaScript sites and generative engine optimization. Meta tags, JSON-LD, sitemaps and robots.txt (Metadata and SEO) and Core Web Vitals (Core Web Vitals) are not repeated.
What you will learn:
How crawling, rendering, indexing and ranking work at Google and Bing 31
Which ranking factors are confirmed, which are myths, and which are unknown
How links, duplicates, translations and redirects affect a site
Which SEO tools, microformats and structured data formats to use
How to make JavaScript sites visible to search engines and AI assistants