Out of the box you can use TYPO3 to easily create the most beautiful websites. But when we don’t attract visitors, a beautiful website is useless. That is why search engine optimization is a real important part of the website.
With the current state of TYPO3 you do have some meta tag fields that you can fill, but out-of-the-box, those fields do nothing at all. So you have to do it yourself by extensions or other solutions.
You do have some extensions like EXT:cs_seo and EXT:yoast which helps developers and editors to create a website that is optimized for search engines. But why should we use plugins for the basic things? As a CMS with more and more functionality in core, the most important SEO features should be integrated in core too. That’s why this initiative is started.