SEO: Crawlability, Intent and Ranking Signals
SEO tests whether you understand how search engines discover, interpret and rank content, and how marketers earn visibility without gaming the system. CDMP questions favour the interplay of technical health, search intent and content quality over memorised trick lists.
Crawl, index and rank are three separate problems
Googlebot discovers URLs through links and XML sitemaps. A robots.txt disallow blocks crawling - it does not remove a page from the index, and combining it with a noindex tag prevents the noindex from ever being read. Canonical tags consolidate duplicate or near-duplicate URLs. Ranking signals include relevance to the query, usefulness, link signals, freshness and page experience; Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS) are measured on a mobile-first index.
Keyword research is intent research
Classify queries as informational (what is, how to), navigational (brand), commercial investigation (best, versus, reviews) or transactional (buy, price, near me). Long-tail queries are usually easier to rank and convert better. Judge opportunity by relevance and difficulty, not volume alone, and map clusters of related queries to single URLs rather than splitting them across thin pages.
On-page and off-page
Align title tag and H1 with intent; use headings for structure, not keyword repetition; write descriptive internal link anchors; add alt text and relevant structured data. Off-page factors are the quality and relevance of linking domains, digital PR and E-E-A-T signals - experience, expertise, authoritativeness, trust - which weigh heaviest in YMYL topics such as health and finance.
Worked example
A page about standing desks ranks position 14 for “best standing desk” but position 2 for “standing desk assembly instructions”. Diagnosis: the asset is a how-to guide competing for a commercial-investigation query. Fix: keep the how-to page on its instructional intent, then build a separate buying guide with comparison tables, tested picks, pricing and an author bio. Cross-link the how-to page to the guide and both to the product category page. Measure ranking and CTR in Search Console over eight to twelve weeks - SEO results are not judged on a two-week window.
Traps
- Believing robots.txt removes a page from search results.
- Optimising meta descriptions for ranking rather than click-through.
- Chasing high-volume head terms the page cannot satisfy on intent.
- Buying links or keyword-stuffing - both breach spam policies.
- Reporting keyword rankings without impressions, clicks and conversions.