SEO Fundamentals
How search engines find, understand, and rank your pages — and what you can actually control.
Search engine optimization is the practice of making a website easy for search engines to find, easy to understand, and worth ranking. That breaks down into three jobs: making sure your pages can be crawled and indexed, making it obvious what each page is about, and earning enough credibility that search engines prefer you to the alternatives.
Most of what gets called "SEO" is one of those three jobs wearing a different name. Technical SEO is the first. Keyword research and on-page optimization are the second. Content quality, links, and reputation are the third. If a tactic does not serve one of them, it probably does not matter much.
The guides below follow that order, because the order matters. Optimizing a page that search engines cannot crawl is wasted effort, and choosing keywords before understanding how ranking works usually means targeting terms you have no chance of winning. Start with what SEO is and how it works, then move into research, then optimization.
New to this? Read What is SEO? and How SEO Works first — everything else assumes them.
7 guides in this section
What is SEO?
What search engine optimization actually is, and why it matters for a business.
Beginner 02How SEO Works
Crawling, indexing, and ranking — the pipeline every page goes through.
Beginner 03Keyword Research
Finding the terms people actually search, and which ones you can realistically win.
Beginner 04Competitor Analysis
Reading what already ranks to work out what it will take to outrank it.
Intermediate 05On-Page SEO Guide
Titles, headings, structure, and internal links — making a page unmistakably about its topic.
Intermediate 06Technical SEO Guide
Crawlability, speed, and structure — the groundwork everything else depends on.
Advanced 07SEO vs AEO vs GEO
How optimizing for search engines differs from optimizing for AI answer engines.
Intermediate