What Is SEO and How Does It Work? A Beginner's Guide

SEO, or search engine optimization, is the practice of making your website easy for Google to understand and valuable for people to read, so it appears higher when customers search for what you sell.

How search engines rank pages

Google first crawls pages, then indexes them, and finally ranks them for each search. Ranking depends on relevance to the search, content quality, page experience and the authority your site has earned through links from other sites.

The three parts of SEO

• Technical SEO: speed, mobile friendliness, clean URLs and crawlable pages.
• On-page SEO: titles, headings, content and internal links that match what people search for.
• Off-page SEO: backlinks and mentions that show your site can be trusted.

Where to start

Pick a handful of keywords your customers actually search, make sure each has a helpful page, and fix any speed or mobile problems. Then publish useful content consistently. SEO rewards patience, so measure progress monthly rather than daily.