What is website SEO optimization?

Underneath the tactics it reduces to three questions. Can a crawler reach the page and render it. Is the page allowed to be indexed and does it declare itself as the canonical version. Does it answer the question someone actually typed better than the pages currently ranking. Internal links matter because they are how a crawler discovers pages and how it infers which of yours are important.

The failure I see most is scale without substance: hundreds of templated pages differing by a place name or a keyword, where the unique portion of each is two sentences. Search engines treat that as one page repeated, and the thin pages drag on the whole domain. Fewer pages with something genuinely specific on each — and an honest noindex on the ones that do not deserve to be indexed — works better than volume.