...when I was but a young man, this whole web thing seemed to appear from nowhere. It was a magical time in the early '90s seeing, what would become, a career forming out of nothing.
The earliest web server I ever remember working on was created by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, University of Illinois. I knew it as the NCSA web daemon. Looking back it was clunky and terrible but from it came a great thing.,
Huge parts of it were buggy and people all over the world, people more talented than me, started sending each other emails with fixes to the problems.
These fixes, known as patches, all got added to the NCSA codebase for the web server and eventually the lines of code in these patches started to outnumber the original code in the NCSA daemon. It became A Patchy Server.... or as we all it now... Apache.
Apache became the most dominant web server in under a year of it's launch and has retained that position ever since. Quite simply, the web is dominated by Apache and with good reason. It is an amazing piece of software and well understood by many.
You don't need to know the intimate details of Apache or how to configure every feature and option to be an effective and Technical SEO, but you do need to understand some basics. It is those basic features we're going to be discussing here.
SEO is often a collection of bodges... Things we do to help work around issues and problems, looking at the wider and bigger picture of commercial gain, than aiming for perfection.
As such, and without direct access to the core codebase of an underlying website a bodge that works is better than excellent that doesn't get delivered.
So.... go and read up and learn these resources intimately!
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/remapping.html
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/rewrite/remapping.html
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/trunk/mod/mod_substitute.html
https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/howto/reverse_proxy.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_data.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_deflate.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_expires.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_headers.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_include.html
http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.4/mod/mod_speling.html