What is SEO?

SEO stands for search engine optimization. It’s the work of helping search engines such as Google understand what your pages are about, and helping people who search pick your page from the results.

Say you run an online Excel course for beginners. You’d want someone who searches for “online Excel course for beginners” to reach your course page. Deciding what to put on that page, and how to set it up, is SEO. Knowing how it works keeps you from chasing unproven “tricks,” so you can spend your time on things you can actually do. This article is based on Google Search Central, Google’s official documentation for site owners.

How do search engines collect pages?

According to Google, Search works in three broad stages.

Stage	What happens
Crawling	A program called Googlebot (a crawler) finds new pages by following links from pages it already knows, or by reading a list of pages a site submits (a sitemap)
Indexing	Google analyzes the text, images, and video on the page, works out what it’s about, and stores it in a large database (the index)
Serving results	When someone searches, Google picks pages from the index that are relevant to the query and puts them in order

Not every page makes it through all three stages. A page that nothing links to is hard to discover, and a page that has been crawled may still not be indexed. Google says plainly that it doesn’t guarantee crawling, indexing, or showing any page. For the full picture, see Google’s in-depth guide to how Google Search works.

One more thing worth knowing: you can’t pay to rank higher in the regular results. Google says it doesn’t accept payment to crawl a site more often or to rank it higher. Search ads, which you do pay for, appear in a separate space that’s marked as ads.

How is the order of results decided?

Which pages fit a search depends on many factors beyond the meaning of the words, including the searcher’s location, language, and device (computer or phone). Two people who type the same words in London and in Sydney may see different results.

On top of that, Google says its systems aim to show helpful, reliable content made for people. Its advice is to write for people, not for search engines. A good test is whether someone who reaches the end of your page feels they learned what they came for.

Google also suggests taking a second look if your content seems “search engine-first,” for example if you are:

• Producing lots of pages on many topics mainly in the hope of getting search visits
• Padding content to hit a particular word count
• Mostly summarizing what others say without adding new information or a new perspective
• Changing the date on pages to make them seem fresh without really changing the content

What is E-E-A-T?

E-E-A-T stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. Google says E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor. Instead, its systems use a mix of signals that line up with these qualities, and trust is the most important of them.

For a small business, the simplest approach is to say honestly who wrote the page and what real experience they have. A class website, for example, can show the instructor’s background, how many years they’ve been teaching, and what a real lesson looks like. That helps readers make up their minds, too.

What should you do for SEO?

There’s a lot you can start on without special technical skills.

Write content that answers readers’ questions

Start with what people searching want to know. For a small company’s service page, that’s what you offer, your prices, the areas you cover, what happens after someone gets in touch, and common questions. For a class, it’s the days and times, the location, the level, what to bring, and how to book a trial. Use the words searchers are likely to use, in natural sentences. Repeating the same words over and over (“keyword stuffing”) is tiring for readers and goes against Google’s spam policies.

Give each page its own title and description

Give each page a <title> (the title shown in the browser tab, which Google also uses, among other sources, to build the title in search results) that is unique, short, and accurate. The description under the title in search results, called the snippet, mostly comes from the page’s own content, and sometimes from a description you write for the page (the meta description). Both should tell people briefly what they’ll find on the page.

Make the site easy to follow

• Break the content up with headings so it’s easy to read
• Use link text that says where the link goes (for example, “Prices and courses”), not “click here”
• Give images alt text that describes what’s in them
• Use URLs with words that hint at the content, such as /courses/beginner

Let people know about your site

Search engines learn about new pages by following links from other pages. Simple steps help, too: share new pages on social media or in your newsletter, and print your site’s address on business cards and flyers.

What are common SEO myths?

A lot of SEO advice out there is outdated or has nothing behind it. Here are some beliefs that Google’s SEO Starter Guide explicitly rejects.

What you may hear	What Google says
Listing keywords in the keywords meta tag helps	Google Search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag
You need a minimum word count to rank	There’s no magical word count, minimum or maximum
Putting search terms in your domain name helps you rank	Keywords in the domain name or URL alone have hardly any effect
Headings must follow a strict order	A proper order helps screen readers, but for Google Search it doesn’t matter if they’re out of order
Your E-E-A-T score decides your ranking	E-E-A-T is not a ranking factor in itself

Be careful with sales pitches that promise you the top spot, too. Google states that no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. If you hire outside help, ask what they’ll do, whether they follow Google’s guidelines, and how they’ll measure the results.

Does SEO matter for the AI summaries shown in search results?

Google’s results now include AI Overviews, which show an AI-written summary in answer to a question, and AI Mode, where people can explore a topic by going back and forth with AI. Google says there are no extra requirements and no special optimization needed for a page to appear in these features. A page is eligible if it’s indexed and can be shown in Google Search with a snippet. Even then, appearing isn’t guaranteed.

In other words, the SEO basics in this article still apply as they are. You don’t need special files or special markup for AI. Visits that come from these AI features are included in the Performance report in Google Search Console, Google’s free tool for seeing how your site does in Search.

How can you tell whether it’s working?

Changes take time to show up in search results. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours, while others can take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether a change helped.

To check, combine two kinds of tools to see the whole picture.

Tool	What it tells you
Google Search Console	Which searches your pages appeared for (impressions), how often people clicked (clicks), the click-through rate, and the average position
Web analytics	Which pages visitors viewed after they arrived, and whether they went on to make an inquiry or sign up

In Search Console, average position is the position of your site’s top link in the results, averaged across the times it was actually shown. Searches where your site wasn’t shown aren’t counted, so it doesn’t mean “we’re always in this position for this word.” To learn how web analytics works, see “What is web analytics?”

Rather than watching rankings alone, look at whether people who came from search found what they needed and took the next step. That’s what shows you how to improve a page.