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| 1 | +--- |
| 2 | +title: Challenge 9 - Optimize Your Website for Search Engines (SEO) |
| 3 | +date: 2020-02-26 |
| 4 | +author: "Hashim Warren" |
| 5 | +excerpt: "Learn how to make your website rank no. 1 in search engines" |
| 6 | +tags: ["learning-to-code", "contest", "100-Days-of-Gatsby", "accessibility"] |
| 7 | +--- |
| 8 | + |
| 9 | +_Gatsby was named the [#1 new technology to learn in 2020](https://www.cnbc.com/2019/12/02/10-hottest-tech-skills-that-could-pay-off-most-in-2020-says-new-report.html)!_ |
| 10 | + |
| 11 | +_To help you learn about Gatsby and our ecosystem, we invite you to take the #100DaysOfGatsby challenge! If you are new to Gatsby, you can follow along with our beginner-friendly weekly prompts. Or if you are familiar with Gatsby and want to go deeper, we invite you to [build your first Gatsby Theme](/docs/themes/building-themes/)._ |
| 12 | + |
| 13 | +_Learn more about [#100DaysOfGatsby here](/blog/100days)!_ |
| 14 | + |
| 15 | +## Challenge 9: Help Your Site Rank No. 1 in Search Engines |
| 16 | + |
| 17 | +In a previous challenge we asked you to make your site's [forms and images more accessible](/blog/100days/accessibility/) so all people can view and interact with your content. This week we invite you to do the same for robots - namely the search engine "spiders" that crawl the web, indexing and ranking webpages. |
| 18 | + |
| 19 | +Good news - Gatsby gives you a head start to strong [search engine optimization (SEO)](/docs/seo/), similar to the way our framework helps you with accessibility. Gatsby sites are blazing fast, which is a [positive ranking factor for Google](https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/pagespeed). Also, Gatsby sites avoid some common SEO pitfalls of React projects by creating navigation between routes that search engine spiders understand how to crawl. |
| 20 | + |
| 21 | +An underappreciated feature of Gatsby is the [prefetching of pages](/docs/routing/#performance-and-prefetching) which makes a site feel snappy and dramatically more engaging. This may reduce user bounce rates and ["pogo sticking"](https://backlinko.com/hub/seo/pogosticking) which is a major _negative_ ranking factor for Google. |
| 22 | + |
| 23 | +Today we're going beyond the default SEO features of Gatsby, and moving on to advanced enhancements. Use the SEO resources below to make your Gatsby site competitive in search rankings! |
| 24 | + |
| 25 | +### SEO Challenge Resources |
| 26 | + |
| 27 | +#### Customize Your Site's Description in Search Engine Results |
| 28 | + |
| 29 | +[Add metadata to pages](/docs/seo/#page-metadata) so search engines and social media sites can display a custom preview of your site's content. |
| 30 | + |
| 31 | +#### Guide search spider to important or recently updated pages |
| 32 | + |
| 33 | +[Learn about sitemaps](/blog/2019-05-07-advanced-sitemap-plugin-for-seo/) and add one to your site using [a Gatsby plugin](/packages/gatsby-plugin-advanced-sitemap/). |
| 34 | + |
| 35 | +#### Create alternate page titles for individual blog posts |
| 36 | + |
| 37 | +Add a [new field in your blog's Markdown frontmatter](/docs/adding-markdown-pages/#frontmatter-for-metadata-in-markdown-files) for page titles that will appear in search engines, that may be different than the title of your blog post that appears on the page. |
| 38 | + |
| 39 | +#### What to Do If You Need Help |
| 40 | + |
| 41 | +If you get stuck during the challenge, you can ask for help from the [Gatsby community](/contributing/community/) and the [AskGatsbyJS](https://twitter.com/AskGatsbyJS) Twitter account. You can find fellow Gatsby Developers on [Discord](https://discordapp.com/invite/gatsby), [Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/gatsbyjs/), [Spectrum](https://spectrum.chat/gatsby-js), and [Dev](https://dev.to/t/gatsby). |
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