Updated August 2026: this article replaces an obsolete Flash tutorial with current, accessible guidance.
Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of making a website easier for search engines to understand and easier for people to use. Good SEO helps the right audience discover useful pages through unpaid search results. It is not a shortcut or a guarantee of a particular ranking.
What SEO involves
- Publishing accurate, original content that answers a real question.
- Giving each page a clear title, heading structure and descriptive links.
- Making the site fast, secure, mobile-friendly and straightforward to navigate.
- Ensuring important pages can be crawled and are not accidentally blocked.
- Using descriptive URLs, image alternative text and structured data where appropriate.
Start with visitors rather than algorithms. A page should make its purpose clear, provide a complete answer and help the reader take the next sensible step. Technical improvements matter, but they cannot turn thin, inaccurate or copied material into a genuinely useful result.
How to measure progress
Use Google Search Console to see which pages are indexed, the searches that generate impressions and clicks, and whether Google reports crawl or page-experience problems. Review trends over weeks and months: search demand, competition and rankings naturally change.
Further reading: Google’s SEO Starter Guide and guidance on helpful, people-first content.