Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a crucial process for optimizing your website to achieve higher rankings in search engine results organically. This is aimed at enhancing visibility and driving traffic to your site.

To effectively optimize for search engines, it's essential to understand how they operate. While search engine ranking algorithms remain undisclosed, adhering to a set of rules and best practices can significantly improve your website's performance.

People use search engines to find answers to their questions, and your goal is to provide the best answer. While this sounds simple, the practical implementation is a little more complex. Ideally, search engines like Google would recognize the page with the most relevant answer, but this isn't always straightforward due to the artificial nature of their "intelligence."

Ensuring your content is compelling, engaging, accurate, and regularly updated is crucial. While you focus on content, tools like Sparkle can handle the technical aspects, optimizing performance and generating appropriate code.

Certain structural aspects of your site will require attention in order to increase your chances of search engine exposure. Sparkle's SEO Assistant highlights these areas to ensure they are correctly configured.

When targeting SEO, the first step involves determining which pages of your site you want to position prominently in search results. While any page can appear in search results, your primarily objective should be to optimize pages that are likely to be useful to your audience rather than ancillary pages like privacy policies or password-protected pages.

In the page settings, you can enable "Optimize for Search Engines" for selected pages and specify the keywords or key phrases those pages are targeting.

Choosing the right keywords is crucial. Online tools can help estimate search volumes for different keyword combinations and assess the competition. Alternatively, you can rely on intuition and experimentation.

Once you've selected keywords, the SEO Assistant utilizes this information to suggest improvements for the page, aiding search engines in understanding its content better.

To run the SEO Assistant, click on the SEO toolbar button. 

This initiates a scan of the site and presents a list of detected issues, allowing you to view and address them contextually. The SEO Assistant categorizes issues by severity, and you can dismiss irrelevant ones by clicking the bell icon.