SEO is the practice of helping search engines understand your pages so they show up for relevant searches. This guide covers the whole picture in plain terms.
How search works
1. Crawling — bots fetch pages they discover via links and sitemaps
2. Indexing — the content is stored and understood
3. Ranking — the engine orders results for a query
You optimise for all three: make pages findable, make them understandable, and make them the best answer.
The main levers
- Content — cover topics people search for, completely and clearly
- On-page — titles, headings, internal links, structured data
- Technical — crawlability, speed, canonical tags, mobile
- Off-page — other sites linking to and mentioning you
Your first 10 things to do
1. Set up Search Console and submit a sitemap
2. Check robots.txt is not blocking anything important
3. Write unique titles and meta descriptions (use the title generator)
4. One clear H1 per page
5. Add internal links between related pages
6. Mark up key pages with structured data
7. Make the site fast and mobile-friendly
8. Publish content for real searches
9. Get a few quality links
10. Measure in Search Console and iterate
The mindset
SEO compounds. Pick a narrow topic, publish genuinely useful pages, fix technical issues, and repeat. Avoid tricks that risk a penalty. Read the related guides on this blog for depth on each piece.