A Basic Introduction to Website SEO

SEO has a reputation for being either black magic or a con, and both reputations are earned by the people selling it. The fundamentals are not complicated. They are mostly a set of things you do once, properly, when you build a site, and then keep doing as you add pages.

Photo by Goumbik on Pexels

This covers those fundamentals. The examples lean towards shops and WordPress sites because that is what most of our customers run, but the principles apply to any website.

Start at the design stage, but start anyway

The cheapest time to get this right is before the site is built, because URL structure and page hierarchy are painful to change afterwards. If your site is already live, everything below still applies. You will just have redirects to manage.

Know what you are trying to rank for

Before anything technical, work out what people actually type when they want what you sell. Not what you call it internally. What they call it.

Free sources that beat guessing: the Performance report in Google Search Console shows queries you already appear for, including ones you never targeted. Google’s autocomplete and the People Also Ask boxes show real phrasing. Your own site search logs show what visitors could not find.

Aim for one clear subject per page. A page trying to rank for six unrelated things ranks for none of them.

URLs and site structure

Most platforms generate search engine friendly URLs, and it is worth understanding exactly how yours does it before you have a thousand pages committed to a format you dislike.

Keep URLs short, readable and descriptive. Use hyphens between words. Avoid dates in URLs for anything evergreen, and avoid stuffing every category into a product’s path.

Structure matters as much as the URLs themselves. Every page should be reachable from your homepage in a small number of clicks, and important pages should be closer than unimportant ones.

Title tags

The title tag is still the single most influential on-page element, and it is what appears as the clickable headline in search results.

Every page needs its own, it needs to contain the terms that page is about, and it needs to read like something a human would click. Put the distinctive part first: “Waterproof Walking Boots” before your brand name, not after it.

Duplicate titles across pages are common on shops with filtered category pages, and they actively hurt. Search Console will tell you if you have them.

Meta descriptions

These are not a ranking factor. They are advertising copy for your search result, and they are worth writing for exactly that reason.

Around 150 to 160 characters, unique per page, describing what the page offers and giving a reason to click. If you leave it blank, search engines will invent one from your page content, and it will usually be worse than what you would have written.

Headings

One h1 per page, describing what the page is about, then h2 and h3 for the structure beneath it.

The purpose is not keyword placement, it is that a properly structured page is easier for a search engine to understand and easier for a person to skim. Do not use headings for styling; use them for hierarchy and let CSS handle appearance.

Blocking search engines while you build

Older advice, including our own previous version of this article, said to put this in robots.txt while a site is in development:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /

Note the correct spelling is User-agent, not UserAgent, which is a genuinely common typo that renders the file useless.

More importantly, this is no longer the right approach. Blocking a page in robots.txt stops it being crawled but does not stop it being indexed; a URL that is linked from elsewhere can appear in results with no description. Worse, because the page cannot be crawled, a noindex tag on it will never be seen.

For a staging site, use HTTP password protection instead. That keeps it out of search entirely and stops people finding it. If you must use a tag, use noindex and leave the page crawlable.

And whatever you do, remember to remove it at launch. A live site quietly carrying Disallow: / from its build phase is one of the more common and more expensive mistakes we see.

One more thing on robots.txt: do not block your images, CSS or JavaScript. Search engines need to render your pages as a browser would, and blocking assets stops them doing that.

Tell search engines what exists

Register with Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Both are free, and between them they tell you what you rank for, what is indexed, what is broken and what search engines think of your site. Nothing you can buy is more useful.

Then submit an XML sitemap in each. This matters most on shops with deep catalogues where crawlers may not otherwise reach everything.

The things that did not exist when this article was first written

Mobile comes first. Google indexes the mobile version of your site. If your mobile pages have less content than your desktop ones, the reduced version is what gets indexed.

Speed is a ranking signal. The Core Web Vitals measure loading, responsiveness and visual stability. They will not lift a bad page above a good one, but between comparable pages they matter.

HTTPS is expected. Certificates are free and browsers warn without one.

Structured data drives rich results. Marking up products with prices, availability and ratings does not improve rankings, but it changes how your listing looks, and a listing with stars and a price gets clicked more than one without.

What still matters most

Everything above is the technical floor. It stops you being held back. What actually moves you up is having pages worth linking to, and being linked to.

There is no technical substitute for that, which is why anyone offering to sell you rankings as a one-off fee is almost certainly running a scam.

A starting order

1. Set up Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, and submit a sitemap.
2. Check your robots.txt is not blocking anything it should not be.
3. Fix duplicate and missing title tags, starting with your most important pages.
4. Write meta descriptions for those same pages.
5. Check the site works properly on a phone.
6. Look at what Search Console says you already rank for, and improve those pages first, because they are the ones closest to paying off.

If you host with us and want a hand with any of it, or you want us to look at why a page is not being indexed, just ask.