SEO Starter Guide: The Basics

When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content. SEO—short for search engine optimization—is about helping search engines understand your content, and helping users find your site and make a decision about whether they should visit your site through a search engine.

The Search Essentials outline the most important elements of what makes your website eligible to appear on Google Search. While there's no guarantee that any particular site will be added to Google's index, sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google's search results.

SEO Fundamentals

1. How does Google Search work?
   • Google is a fully automated search engine that uses programs called crawlers to explore the web constantly, looking for pages to add to our index. You usually don't need to do anything except publish your site on the web.
2. Crawling and Indexing
   • Crawlers search for web pages on the internet and index the content to provide search results.
3. Sitemaps
   • A sitemap is a list of URLs on your website, which can help crawlers understand your site's structure.
4. robots.txt
   • The robots.txt file is a text file that allows you to communicate with search engines about how to crawl your website.

SEO Tips

1. Maintaining your site's SEO
   • Regularly update your website with fresh and relevant content.
2. Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content
   • Focus on providing valuable and informative content that users will enjoy and share.
3. Mobile site and mobile-first indexing
   • Ensure your website provides a good mobile user experience, as search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites.
4. JavaScript SEO
   • Optimize your JavaScript code to ensure search engines can crawl and index your content.

Structured Data

1. What is URL canonicalization?
   • URL canonicalization is a technique to specify the preferred URL for a piece of content, helping search engines avoid duplicate content issues.
2. Structured data general guidelines
   • Use structured data to provide search engines with extra context about your content, enabling them to display more informative search results.

Measuring SEO Success

1. Get started with Search Console
   • Monitor your website's search traffic and identify potential issues.
2. Debug traffic drops
   • Use Search Console to find and fix issues affecting your website's search traffic.

Conclusion

SEO is about understanding how search engines work and helping them understand your content. By following the best practices outlined in this guide, you can improve your website's presence in search results and attract more users. Remember, SEO is an ongoing process that requires regular maintenance and updates to your website.