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It’s a no-brainer that everyone wants their site to show up on the very first page of a search result. With the Sitecore Experience Accelerator (SXA), this is easily possible if you follow the best practices for search engine optimization, so that your site rank improves.

The beauty of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is its platform independency. It does not depend on the platform a website is using, since the basic rules of SEO continue to apply. The pages need to have Title Tags, Meta Descriptions, Images and Alt Text as well as good, meaningful content.

While each instance can be set up differently, Sitecore SEO requires some basic components and the SXA makes it simpler to edit pages to adhere to Sitecore best practices. What’s more, SXA also allows teams to work in tandem with other departments and eliminates the need to wait for a deployment before adding any content. This in turn makes the process more efficient and cost-effective.

SEO and Page Design

If your aim is to make your website rank well, then having a responsive page design is of utmost importance. It is even more significant is providing a great user experience across multiple devices, in case you want to successfully display your content. Most people do not know that web design can affect different aspects of a page’s performance.

Page Speed

Google also determines a website’s ranking based on the page speed. This is an important criterion to keep in mind - also remember Plugins and load sequence also affect page speed.

Image Size

If your website has large images and takes extremely long to load, then you might rank low in Google SERP. The best approach is to compress images or reduce the file size, so that your page loads faster and the speed improves. Otherwise, the user experience won’t be as great!

Code Size

If you have a lot of CSS and javascript files, then code compression and magnification is the best way to improve the performance of your site. Code magnification is the process of removing any extra character, comments, spaces, or even reducing code hex length and removing semicolons. Code compression is about making files smaller in size that resembles zip files.

Navigation

Navigation is not just about how visitors navigate sites, but also how search engine bots crawl content. A good navigation process allows visitors to search content in a seamless manner. That’s not all - breadcrumbs are also important - depending on the depth of the site in question, breadcrumbs help users easily navigate to a previous category within the site. They can also be used as a point of reference in the Google Tag Manager when implementing Schema breadcrumbs.

On-Page SEO

Content is one of the most important aspects of SEO, and Sitecore SEO is no different. If content does not answer a specific question, visitors will likely look for another solution. Content and CTA that appear above the fold (content that visitors can see without having to scroll) will have more impact in terms of performance, since it is easier to see and crawl.

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Instructing Search Engines about the timing of crawl pages

XML Sitemap is one of the most important elements of SEO. An XML Sitemap is a protocol that gives search engines information about each page of a site - this includes the URLs that are to be crawled, the location of a page, how frequently they are updated, the last time they were updated and the priority of each page.

With SXA, we can easily set the change frequency and the priority. The changed frequency lets search engines know how often a page is updated to know how often to get back and recrawl that page. The priority option lets us set the importance of each page. On a scale from 0.1 to 1.0, 1.0 being the highest or most important, pages with a higher priority will likely be crawled more frequently.

So, how does this all tie back to SEO? With all the aforementioned aspects of SXA, we are able to quickly mark up each page with important elements of SEO. By adding title tags, meta descriptions, twitter cards and open graph elements on each page, we can control how our pages appear in the SERPs and on other platforms as well.