Quotes taken from Google’s developer webisite “Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Starter Guide”.
No opinions, just quoting Google word for word. Everything from here on out is selectively copied and pasted from that page on the 16th of Febraury 2026 - bold and italics are added by me.
I’d recommend you do what I’m doing with this. Treat it like a to-do list for my website.
When you built your website, you likely created it with your users in mind, trying to make it easy for them to find and explore your content. One of those users is a search engine, which helps people discover your content.
… sites that follow the Search Essentials are more likely to show up in Google’s search results …
Every change you make will take some time to be reflected on Google’s end. Some changes might take effect in a few hours, others could take several months…
Google primarily finds pages through links from other pages it already crawled …
When you’re setting up or redoing your site, it can be good to organize it in a logical way because it can help search engines and users understand how your pages relate to the rest of your site
- Use descriptive URLs
- Parts of the URL can be displayed in search results as breadcrumbs
- you can also influence them with structured data
- Try to include words in the URL that may be useful for users
- Group topically similar pages in directories
- Reduce duplicate content
- search engines might waste crawling resources on URLs that you don’t even care about
Make your site interesting and useful … Creating content that people find compelling and useful will likely influence your website’s presence in search results more than any of the other suggestions in this guide
The text is easy-to-read and well organized: Write content naturally and make sure the content is well written, easy to follow, and free of spelling and grammatical mistakes. Break up long content into paragraphs and sections, and provide headings to help users navigate your pages.
The content is unique: When you’re writing new content, don’t copy others’ content in part or in its entirety: create the content yourself based on what you know about the topic. Don’t just rehash what others already published.
The content is up-to-date
The content is helpful, reliable, and people-first
Expect your readers’ search terms
Google’s language matching systems are sophisticated and can understand how your page relates to many queries, even if you don’t explicitly use the exact terms in them
… links (are) a crucial resource you need to consider to help your pages be discovered by Google and potentially shown in search results
Write good link text … Link text (also known as anchor text) is the text part of a link that you can see
The title link is the headline part of the search result and it can help people decide which search result to click. There are a few sources that Google uses to generate this title link, including the words inside the
You can influence the title links in Search by writing good titles
The snippet (below the title in the search engine results) is sourced from the actual content of the page the search result is linking to, thus you have complete control over the words that can be used to generate the snippet. Occasionally the snippet may be sourced from the contents of the meta description tag…
Use images that are sharp and clear, and place them near text that’s relevant to the image. The text that’s near images can help Google better understand what the image is about and what it means in context to your page.
Alt text is a short, but descriptive piece of text that explains the relationship between the image and your content. It helps search engines understand what your image is about and the context of how your image relates to your page
Effectively promoting your new content will lead to faster discovery by those who are interested in the same subject, and also by search engines. You can do this in many ways: Social media promotion, Community engagement, Advertisement, both offline and online, Word of mouth, and many other methods. One of the most effective and lasting ways is word of mouth: that is, people familiar with your site tell their friends about it, who in turn visit your site.
Google Search doesn’t use the keywords meta tag.
the TLD (the domain name ending like “.com” or “.guru”) only matters if you’re targeting a specific country’s users, and even then it’s usually a low impact signal
While PageRank uses links and is one of the fundamental algorithms at Google, there’s much more to Google Search than just links. We have many ranking signals, and PageRank is just one of those.
Google’s automated systems are designed to use many different factors to rank great content. After identifying relevant content, our systems aim to prioritize those that seem most helpful. To do this, they identify a mix of factors that can help determine which content demonstrates aspects of experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, or what we call E-E-A-T.
Of these aspects, trust is most important
Consider evaluating your content in terms of “Who, How, and Why” as a way to stay on course with what our systems seek to reward.
Google’s core ranking systems look to reward content that provides a good page experience. Site owners seeking to be successful with our systems should not focus on only one or two aspects of page experience. Instead, check if you’re providing an overall great page experience across many aspects.
Make sure that your visual content is expressed in text form
Make sure that every page has a descriptive title and meta description
Use semantic HTML. While Google indexes HTML, PDF content, images, and videos, it doesn’t index content that requires plugins
Googlebot navigates from URL to URL by fetching and parsing links, sitemaps, and redirects
A sitemap is a file where you provide information about the pages, videos, and other files on your site, and the relationships between them. Search engines like Google read this file to crawl your site more efficiently.
Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. This is called mobile-first indexing
Redirecting URLs is the practice of resolving an existing URL to a different one, effectively telling your visitors and Google Search that a page has a new location. Redirects are particularly useful.
You can enhance the appearance and coverage of your official website and presence in Search results by first establishing it with Google … Claim your business … Manage how your business appears on Google Maps and Google Search by claiming your Business Profile.
Register your website with Search Console
Update your site’s Google knowledge panel … Google algorithms find information, like your site’s name, corporate contact information, and social profiles, that is publicly available on the web. You can update or provide more information for your site for broader reach and recognition in Search results.
Add structured data … Site logo and Organization structured data … breadcrumbs structured data.