Search Engine Optimization requires careful attention to maintaining good URLs, links, relevant content and A/B testing. Fastly is a great place to exert fine control over all these aspects of your site experience without compromising on performance.
Many companies spend a significant part of their marketing budget on Search Engine Marketing (SEM) and advertising, so anything you can do that increases organic traffic is worth its weight in gold. In the case of Google, tools like [Pagespeed Insights](https://pagespeed.web.dev/) and [Search Console](https://search.google.com/search-console) help to quickly identify which improvements are expected on your site. Here we'll help you understand how Fastly can help boost your organic search performance. ## Fastly features Improving search ranking is rarely a matter of tuning a single property of your website, since many different signals contribute to good ranking. A number of Fastly features can come in useful: * **Header manipulation:** HTTP headers can affect the way a search crawler interprets your page, and are also important in creating redirect responses. [Learn more about headers and Fastly](/reference/http/http-headers/). * **Cache policy:** When cache directives are used correctly, it can dramatically improve your site's performance. Fastly respects cache policies set on responses by your servers, including `Surrogate-Control` as well as all `Cache-Control` directives. Fastly's cache also provides mechanisms to modify cache directives before a response is cached. [Learn more about HTTP caching semantics](/guides/concepts/cache/cache-freshness). * **Stale serving:** [Serving stale](/guides/concepts/cache/stale) allows content to be served even though it is past its normal cache lifetime. Normally this is done while the content is refreshed in the background, or when the origin server is down. * **Image optimization:** Turn on our [image optimizer](/reference/io) to adapt images to the correct size and format for each client device. * **Compression**: Compressing may dramatically reduce your response sizes, which will often be valued by crawlers, and may allow a crawler to visit each page more often. Fastly supports [compressing content at the edge](/guides/concepts/compression). * **HTML manipulation:** Using the [Compute](/guides/compute) platform, streaming transforms can be written in any supported Compute language, to modify the content of the response as it passes through your app. * **Generated responses:** In [Compute](/guides/compute) services it's easy to construct responses from scratch, which is often valuable to create redirects. In [VCL services](/guides/full-site-delivery/fastly-vcl) the `synthetic` statement provides the same capability. * **Data at the edge:** It can be handy to be able to configure datasets that are accessible to edge applications, to power redirects or content insertion, for example. Compute services have access to [Config stores](/guides/compute/edge-data-storage/working-with-config-stores), while VCL services use [dictionaries](/guides/full-site-delivery/dictionaries/about-dictionaries). ## Ideas and typical uses Some of the specific things that Fastly customers do at the edge to improve SEO include: * **Redirects:** Search engine algorithms are still strongly based on links between pages. These links help determine the visibility that each web page has within the search engine results pages (SERPs). Ensuring URLs never die is one of the most important aspects of a good SEO strategy, and the edge is the best place for redirects, so that they can be served as fast as possible. * **Increasing cache TTLs:** Longer cache times mean that it's more likely a search crawler will get a HIT from the cache, instead of having to load a page from your origin servers. Remember that search crawlers don't act like normal users; they will visit far more long-tail content, which is much less likely to be in cache. * **Enabling stale serving:** In some cases, it can make sense to serve a crawler with potentially out of date content very fast, rather than fetching up to date content and giving the crawler a slower experience. * **Modifying content:** Mis-ordered headings, over-long text or lack of descriptive content can all cause poor ranking for pages. Consider generating additional content for product or listing pages at the edge using AI language models such as ChatGPT. * **Optimizing images:** Serving images that are the correct size and format for the client makes pages smaller, faster and easier for crawlers to parse. * **Authenticating crawlers**: Some behaviors may be triggered by knowing that the visitor is a crawler, such as allowing the crawler to see premium content instead of a paywall. This often makes use of the `User-Agent` header, but that's easily faked. A DNS lookup at the edge can help ensure that you are dealing with the real Googlebot. * **Canonical link headers:** The `Link` header can be used to denote the URL that should be considered canonical for a piece of content. Where the same content is available from multiple URLs, using a `Link: rel=canonical; url=<...>` header will avoid search crawlers seeing your content as a duplicate. * **Data collection:** It's important to know how crawlers are behaving on your site. Modifying response content at the edge can enable the insertion of `