Search Engines

What Is Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)?

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.

How Can I Improve My Google Ranking?

Improve Google visibility

Make each important page the clearest, most useful answer for the customers you want to reach

There is no switch that guarantees a first-place Google ranking. Improve crawlability, publish accurate people-first content, earn genuine recognition, provide a strong page experience and use Search Console to learn which pages and queries need work.

Use the SEO PlanMeasure progress
FOUNDATIONCrawl and indexLet Google access the page
VALUEHelpful contentSatisfy a real customer need
FEEDBACKSearch ConsoleTrack queries, clicks and pages

A practical SEO improvement plan

  1. 1
    Choose a real customer task

    Give one page a clear purpose based on the audience, service and question it should answer.

  2. 2
    Study current performance

    Use Search Console queries, impressions, clicks, position and device data as evidence.

  3. 3
    Improve the page

    Answer early, add original expertise, organise headings and remove obsolete or misleading material.

  4. 4
    Strengthen discovery

    Link to it from relevant pages, include it in the sitemap and avoid conflicting duplicate pages.

  5. 5
    Improve the result snippet

    Use a descriptive title and accurate meta description that match the page.

  6. 6
    Measure after recrawl

    Allow time, compare equivalent periods and improve again from the new evidence.

What makes content useful?

Direct answer

Tell the reader what to do or know before a long introduction.

First-hand expertise

Add tested steps, product knowledge, examples and limitations that generic summaries lack.

Trustworthy claims

Support important facts, show who is responsible and avoid guarantees or invented evidence.

Clear next action

Help the visitor complete the task, compare a service or reach a person.

What technical basics matter?

Indexable canonical URL

Return a successful status, avoid noindex and declare the preferred URL when duplicates exist.

Mobile page experience

Keep text readable, controls usable and layouts free from horizontal overflow.

Internal links

Use descriptive links from relevant pages so people and search engines can discover the content.

Structured data where valid

Use only supported types that accurately match visible content. Mark-up is not a ranking guarantee.

How should you measure progress?

Watch page-level queries, impressions, clicks, click-through rate and average position in Search Console. Pair that with privacy-safe business outcomes such as useful enquiries or completed purchases. A ranking change can take days or weeks after recrawl, and seasonality or search-result features can alter clicks even when position is stable.

What should you avoid?

Should I repeat the keyword many times?

No. Write naturally using the language customers use. Repetition that makes a page awkward does not improve usefulness.

Should I buy links?

No. Link schemes can violate Google spam policies. Earn references through useful resources, genuine relationships and good work.

Should I create hundreds of similar AI pages?

Not to manipulate rankings. Google advises against scaled search-engine-first content. Every page should have a useful reason to exist.

Can anyone guarantee first place?

No credible provider can guarantee a specific organic position. Google controls its ranking systems and changes them over time.

Start with evidence

Improve one important page around one customer need

Measure it in Search Console, learn from the result and repeat the process.

Review the SEO Plan

Questions about my Google listing

The following questions concerning your Google listing plus Do you have a question about your Google listing, sate ranking, page rank or index entry?

Questions such as:

• How do I get my site listed on Google?
• My web pages are not currently listed in Google. Why?
• My site’s listing in Google is incorrect.
• Google PageRank Information
• Reasons your site may not be included in Google.
• Google does not index all of my pages. Why?
• My information is outdated in the Google index.
• Google continues listing an ‘old’ version of my site.
• I am changing my URL in Google.
• There’s no description of my site in Google.
• The description of my site is wrong in Google.
• I’m in the Google index, but not listed for keyword “X”.

All of these Google questions are answered here:

Google Webmaster Information

Google may answer specific questions directly if you send yuor enquiry to them.

How long will it take before my website is indexed by the search engines?

With our “Standard Submission” package after we have submitted your website to the search engines and directories it will take up to ten weeks for your website to be added to their indexes, depending on the search engine. Some smaller search engines will take only a few days to index your page. However, most of the other larger search engines will take several weeks. Such a delay between the date of submission and the date of indexing is due to the extremely high number of submissions (sometimes tens of thousands) that the most popular engines receive each day.

With the “Standard Submission” we only submit your website to the search engines and cannot guarantee that they will include your website in their indexes. If you want to ensure guaranteed fast inclusion of your website into search engine indexes, we recommend our De Luxe XL submission package.

I could not add my Meta Tag Keywords when I made my order?

You may have expected to add your Meta Tags (keywords, Description, Title, etc) when you placed your order? This is in fact not required.

When the search engine bots visit your website that we submit for you, then they will index the Meta Tags that are included on your website at this time.

If you update your Tags at any point then the search engines should update your Tags when they next re-index your website.