Improving an application's SEO can be a challenging and opaque process, but with Next.js on Vercel as your foundation, you can build up best practices to see exponential gains. Rendering is a critical aspect of SEO, with prerendering being the best practice for SEO, as it makes the crawler willing to reindex your site more frequently. Next.js offers Incremental Static Regeneration (ISR), which pre-renders all your pages like SSG but also allows you to update specific pages as needed, without redeploying your app. Speed is also crucial in SEO, with faster websites keeping users engaged and ranking higher in search engine results. Image optimization, code splitting, font optimization, and consistent linking are also important aspects of SEO. Next.js provides tools such as the App Router, layouts, dynamic routing, and Link component to help structure your site and improve navigation. Fixing dead ends by implementing smarter navigation is also essential, and Next.js provides sensible defaults and best practices for errors. Internationalization (i18n) and localization can also help climb search engine rankings across the globe, with Vercel Analytics providing a Real Experience Score and Next.js Analytics enabling analysis and measurement of page performance.