What Is SEO?

Search engines do three things with your site, and each depends on the one before it. Almost every SEO problem is a failure at one of these three, and knowing which saves you from working on the wrong one.

1. 01Crawl — can it reach your pages?A bot follows links and fetches pages. A page with no links to it, or blocked in robots.txt, is invisible regardless of how good it is.
2. 02Understand — can it tell what the page is about?Content in HTML, a clear title, real headings, descriptive links. A page whose content only appears after JavaScript runs is harder to read, and sometimes not read at all.
3. 03Trust — is this a reasonable result to show?Links from other sites, a coherent site around the page, and content that actually answers the query. This is the slow part, and the part that can't be faked cheaply anymore.

This is a short list, it's mostly a one-time job, and skipping it undermines everything else.

• A unique <title> per page, roughly 50–60 characters, describing that page specifically
• A unique meta description — it doesn't affect ranking directly, but it's the text people decide on
• One <h1> per page, and heading levels that don't skip
• A canonical URL, so the same content at two addresses doesn't compete with itself
• A sitemap.xml listing your real pages, and a robots.txt that doesn't block them
• Fast loading and a usable mobile layout — both are measured, both are ranking inputs
• Content present in the HTML, not assembled by JavaScript afterwards

<title>What Is an API? — Navital Learning</title><meta name="description"      content="An API is a defined way for one program to ask another               for something. Methods, status codes, and keys explained." /><link rel="canonical" href="https://navitallabs.com/learning/lessons/what-is-an-api" />

Once a page can be crawled and understood, ranking comes down to whether it's a good answer. That's less mysterious than it sounds, and it has a testable definition: a person who searched that phrase should be able to stop searching after reading your page.

• One page per question. A page covering six topics ranks for none of them
• Answer in the first paragraph, then explain. Nobody scrolls to find out whether you'll answer
• Use the words your readers use, which are often not your internal terms
• Include what a reader needs next — the follow-up question, the example, the thing that goes wrong
• Say when it was updated, and mean it

1. 01Search for your own site by nameIf your pages aren't there, you have a crawl problem and nothing else matters yet.
2. 02Check titles and descriptions are uniqueDuplicate titles across pages is the most common finding on a small site.
3. 03Submit a sitemap in a search consoleFree, and it tells you which pages were seen and which had errors.
4. 04Pick your three most important pages and rewrite each to answer one questionNot six. One.
5. 05Wait weeks, not daysIndexing and re-ranking are slow. Changing things every three days makes the results unreadable.