Basic SEO Tips

4 min read 8 October 2009

SEO is not a collection of tricks for forcing a page into a particular position. It is the work of making useful information accessible, understandable, and easy to navigate.

There is no reliable shortcut from a checklist to a ranking. Search systems change, competitors change, and a search result depends on the query, the page, the searcher, and the wider web. Start with the things you can inspect.

Make important pages accessible

Check that the pages you want found can be fetched, are not accidentally blocked, and return the right status. Follow important links from the site rather than relying on a page existing at an unlinked URL. Check the rendered page as well as its source when JavaScript is involved.

A page that cannot be reached or understood by a crawler cannot do its job in organic search. A page that is technically accessible but unusable for people has a different problem, not a successful SEO outcome.

The Google Search crawling and indexing overview is a useful reference for separating crawling, indexing, and serving results. Those are different stages, and fixing one does not guarantee the next.

A sensible audit order is: fetch a representative URL set, inspect status and access controls, check rendered content, review page purpose and internal links, then define a baseline for the outcome that matters. Keep the URLs, date, market, and tool output with the audit.

Give each page a clear job

Write the page for a real question, decision, or task. A useful page usually has a clear subject, enough detail to answer its intended question, and a next step that makes sense for the reader.

Do not create near-duplicate pages just to cover small variations of a phrase. If two pages have the same job, decide whether they should be combined, differentiated, or kept as separate views for genuinely different audiences.

Use descriptive titles and headings

Describe the page in its title, main heading, URL, and visible copy. Use the words a reader would use when they need the page, but do not repeat a phrase until the prose becomes awkward.

A descriptive title helps a person decide whether a result is relevant. It is not a promise of a particular ranking, and it does not replace a page worth reading.

Internal links should help someone move from one question to the next. Use link text that describes the destination, and link from established pages to important new pages when the relationship is real.

External links are not a quota either. Earned references from other sites may help people discover a page, but buying, exchanging, or manufacturing links can create quality and policy problems. Publish something worth citing instead.

Remove avoidable friction

Make pages readable on the devices your audience uses. Keep the interaction usable with a keyboard, give images meaningful alternative text when it conveys information, label form controls, and ensure text has sufficient contrast.

Measure performance with the experience your page creates, not with a score treated as a target. The Web Vitals documentation explains one current set of performance signals. A faster page is useful, but speed alone cannot answer a user’s question.

The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines provide a separate accessibility standard. Accessibility is for people first. It also often exposes the same structural problems that make a site hard to understand.

Measure progress without promising an outcome

Choose measures that match the page’s job. Depending on the site, that might include indexed important pages, search impressions for a defined group of queries, qualified visits, completed enquiries, purchases, or whether users reach the next useful step.

Record the date, the query set, the page, the market, and the measurement method. Search visibility is not the same as business value. Traffic is not the same as a qualified visit, and a ranking is not the same as a sale.

Review the evidence at a regular cadence and change one important thing at a time where practical. If the constraint is a broken checkout, unclear offer, weak product, or missing capacity to implement recommendations, more SEO work may not be the next useful investment.

These foundations do not guarantee rankings. They give you a site and a measurement process that can be inspected, improved, and judged against the work the site is meant to do.