Content is King, but Technical SEO is the Castle. If Google's spiders can't crawl your site efficiently, your brilliant content doesn't exist.
1. XML Sitemaps
A roadmap for the spider. It lists every page you want indexed.
- Dynamic: Your CMS (Next.js/WordPress) should generate this automatically at
/sitemap.xml. - Action: Submit this URL manually to Google Search Console to speed up the discovery of new pages.
2. Robots.txt
The strict gatekeeper. It tells spiders where not to go.
- Use it to block internal search pages, admin panels, or staging environments.
- Warning: Do not block CSS/JS files. Google needs to render the page fully to understand if it is mobile-friendly. If you block the assets, Google sees a broken page and ranks you lower.
3. Canonical Tags
Duplicate content kills rankings.
If you have example.com/product and example.com/Product?ref=twitter, Google sees two different pages with identical content and splits the "link juice" between them.
Solution: Add <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/product" /> to the head of every page. This tells Google: "This is the master copy. Ignore the parameters on the others."
4. Structured Data (Schema.org / JSON-LD)
Help Google understand your content context. Adding hidden JSON-LD code tells Google: "This text is a Product, it costs $50, has 4 stars, and is in stock." This is how you get those rich snippets (Star ratings, Prices, FAQs) in search results, which drastically increases Click-Through Rate (CTR).