Guide Technical SEO Beginner

SEO Guide

SEO for anyone starting from scratch: how Google Search works, content, technical SEO, AI in Search, ranking factors and measurement.

Taha Yelkenci | January 1, 2021 · updated: October 6, 2026 | 15 min read

SEO (search engine optimization) is the content, technical and backlink work that makes a site more visible in the organic results of search engines. This guide answers the question of what SEO is. It takes you to the point where you can run keyword research, produce content, handle technical optimization and build a backlink strategy yourself. I first published this guide in January 2021 and updated it in October 2026.

If you are thinking about hiring someone for SEO, read Google's own resource first. Before starting the guide you may also want to read how to become an SEO specialist.

What will you find in this guide?

The SEO guide covers four areas of work: keyword research, content production, backlink strategy and technical SEO. The October 2026 update adds the sections on Google Search, AI, spam and measurement.

But to do any of that you first have to enjoy SEO and be excited by it. Never begrudge the effort of testing what you learn, never get bored of research, and always read a great deal. Let's begin.

The fundamentals: every factor in one table

The fundamental SEO factors fall into two groups: on-page SEO and off-page SEO. The table below shows the six headings in the two groups and the factors under each heading.

On-page SEO

Content

IntentQualityFast experienceMediaReadabilityAnswerResearchKeywords

Technical

CrawlMobileUser experienceNon-duplicatePage speedURLSSL

HTML

TitleDescriptionStructured dataH tags

Off-page SEO

Trust

BrandingLoyaltyHistory

Backlinks

QualityAnchorRelevanceTrustworthinessVolume

Social

ReputationSharing

Content factors

Content factors are eight checks on how well the content of a page fits the user.

Intent; Does the content meet the user's intent? Does it match their purpose?
Quality; Is the content good? Does it repeat information needlessly?
Fast experience; Can users reach what they came for as quickly as possible?
Media; Does the content include alternative media such as images and video?
Readability; Is the content easy to read? Do users get bored reading it?
Answer; Does the content answer the whole query?
Research; Which searches do users make to reach this content?
Keywords; Are the targeted keywords actually used on the page?

Technical factors

Technical factors are seven checks on how the site is crawled and used.

Crawl; Can search engine bots crawl the site easily? Can they read all of the page content?
Mobile; Do the pages work properly on every mobile device?
User experience; Can the user find the answer to their query easily?
Non-duplicate; Does the site suffer from duplicate pages?
Page speed; Is the load time as low as it can be?
URL; Are the URLs simple and memorable?
SSL; Does the site use an SSL certificate?

HTML factors

HTML factors are four checks on the tags in the source code of a page.

Title; Does the page title catch the searcher's interest? Does it contain the relevant keyword?
Description; Does the description persuade the user in the search results?
Structured data; Is schema used to earn richer listings and help Googlebot?
H tags; Do the H tags carry questions? Do they state the purpose of the intent? Are they used to target long-tail terms?

Trust factors

Trust factors are three checks on the reputation of the brand and the domain.

Branding; Is the site (brand) name searched for? Is there work under way to raise that volume?
Loyalty; Does the user think the page is worth their time? Do they trust your content enough to read it?
History; Is the history of the site and the domain clean?

Backlink factors

Backlink factors are six checks on the links that point to the site from other sites.

Quality; Are the backlinks good ones? Do they carry authority in the eyes of search engines?
Brand backlinks; Does the site receive links using the brand term or site name?
Anchor; Do the links pointing at the page carry the relevant term?
Relevance; Do the links come from sites relevant to you?
Trustworthiness; Are the links pointing at the page safe?
Volume; Is the number of links to the site high?

Social factors

Social factors are two checks on how the content spreads on social media.

Reputation; Do well-known people on social media share the pages?
Sharing; Is there extra work going into producing shareable content?

Negative factors

Negative factors are six conditions that can harm the rankings of a site.

Thin content; Are there thin pages on the site? Are pages you do not target traffic with being indexed?
Cloaking; Does the page serve the same content to users and to search engine bots?
Desktop-mobile parity; Does the page serve the same content on desktop and mobile?
Site history; Has the site been reported for hosting banned content in the past?
Aggressive advertising; Are there too many ads? Do they disturb users?
Spam links; Were links taken from forums and blogs just to raise the backlink count?

The SEO hierarchy

The SEO hierarchy is a priority model that orders SEO work in seven steps, from the foundation upwards.

The SEO hierarchy, from the foundation upwards

Snippet / schema markupRich results
Title, URL & descriptionClick-through
Share-worthy contentEarns links
Great user experienceSpeed, usability
Keyword optimizedReachable
Compelling contentAnswers the intent
Crawl accessibilityThe foundation

I would describe the pyramid above as the most general view of how SEO works. If we read it as an order of importance, it shows what the foundations of SEO work are.

01 Crawl accessibility
Accessibility, so search engine bots can crawl and index the content easily.
02 Compelling content
Content that answers the query according to the user's intent and fits their purpose.
03 Keyword optimized
Keyword optimization in the content so the page can reach users at all.
04 Great user experience
Ease of use, excellent page speed and access to all content on every device.
05 Share-worthy content
Content worth quoting and worth sharing, so it earns links.
06 Title, URL & description
An eye-catching title, URL and description for a high click-through rate.
07 Snippet / schema markup
Structured data for richer appearances and for standing out in the snippet.

How does Google Search work today?

Google Search works in three stages: crawling, indexing and serving. Google's guide to how Search works notes that no page is guaranteed to pass them.

01 Crawling
Googlebot discovers URLs through links and sitemaps, downloads and renders the page.
02 Indexing
Google analyses the content, clusters similar pages and picks the canonical one.
03 Serving
Google returns matching pages, weighing hundreds of factors such as location, language and device.

Google's guide to ranking systems names the main systems. BERT, RankBrain and neural matching interpret language, and link analysis systems such as PageRank read links. Freshness systems favour newer content where it is expected, and SpamBrain detects spam. The helpful content system joined the core ranking systems in March 2024, and the Search Status Dashboard lists two core updates for 2026 so far.

Helpful content and E-E-A-T

Google's ranking systems prioritise helpful, reliable content made for people over content made to manipulate rankings. Google's page on helpful content offers self-assessment questions, and the three below come from it.

Does the content provide original information, research or analysis?
Does it add value instead of copying other sources?
Does it clearly show first-hand expertise?

E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness, and trust matters most. E-E-A-T itself is not a ranking factor, but Google gives it more weight on topics that affect health, finances or safety.

Page experience and Core Web Vitals

Google's core ranking systems look to reward a good page experience, and Google's page experience document says no single signal measures it. Core Web Vitals are the three real-user metrics in the table.

Metric	Measures	Good threshold
Largest Contentful Paint (LCP)	Loading	Within 2.5 seconds
Interaction to Next Paint (INP)	Responsiveness	Under 200 milliseconds
Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS)	Visual stability	Under 0.1

INP replaced First Input Delay (FID) in March 2024. Mobile-first indexing, complete since October 2023, means Google indexes and ranks the mobile version of a site, so that version must carry the full content. My article on mobile conversion rate and SEO covers the conversion side.

Which rich results does structured data unlock?

Google uses structured data to understand a page and to show it as a rich result. Google's search gallery lists the supported types, and Google recommends the JSON-LD format. Some types have lost support: the How-to rich result ended in September 2023 and the FAQ (frequently asked questions) rich result on 7 May 2026.

AI in Search and GEO

AI Overviews and AI Mode are Google Search features that answer a query with generative AI and link to supporting pages. Google's AI features and your website document says they need no additional requirements or optimization: an indexed page that is eligible for a snippet can appear. A Search Console setting, the Search generative AI control, has let every site opt out since 31 August 2026.

What is GEO?

GEO (generative engine optimization) is the SEO industry's term for work aimed at visibility in AI search. Google does not treat GEO as a separate discipline: its guide to optimizing for generative AI features, published in May 2026, calls that work SEO. The guide puts unique, first-hand content first and names tactics to ignore, such as llms.txt files, content "chunking" and inauthentic mentions. My post on measuring visibility in AI search shows how to track that visibility.

The most important ranking factors in SEO

To learn the most important ranking factors across content, analysis, technical work and backlinks, I offer three separate sources. They are long, but they are not boring. All three are correlation studies from 2015 to 2017, so read them as history.

Before the sources, let me summarise the questions they answer.

Content questions

The sources answer seven questions on content.

How much does content relevance matter?
How much does word count matter?
What should the keyword ratio be? Does it matter?
Does keyword density in the body matter?
How much does having the keyword in the title matter?
How much does having it in the description matter?
How much does having it in the H1 matter?

User behaviour questions

The sources answer four questions on user behaviour.

Is CTR a ranking factor?
Is bounce rate a ranking factor?
Is time on site a ranking factor?
Is direct traffic a ranking factor?

Technical questions

The sources answer six questions on the technical side.

How much does H1 matter?
How much does H2 matter?
How much does SSL matter?
How much does page size matter?
How much does page speed matter?
Is URL length a ranking factor?

Social media questions

The sources answer three questions on social media.

Are Facebook shares a ranking factor?
Are Twitter shares a ranking factor?
Are Pinterest shares a ranking factor?

Backlink questions

The sources answer three questions on backlinks.

Is the number of backlinks a ranking factor?
How do dofollow links affect a site?
How much does the number of linking domains matter?

Ranking factor sources

The ranking factor sources are three studies: Searchmetrics, SEMrush and Moz.

The ranking factors in the three sources are tables and charts built from averages across millions of sites and search results. Agreeing with them is usually right, but agreeing without ever questioning them is a mistake. Correlation is not causation.

Where the generalisations fail

Is bounce rate a ranking factor?

We cannot call bounce rate a direct ranking factor. Someone searching "iftar time in Istanbul" takes what they came for and leaves immediately, and the bounce rate there is 100%. However much work goes into lowering it, the user's intent will not change, so lowering it is close to impossible. It is still a useful metric for measuring experience. Google Analytics 4 (GA4) calculates bounce rate as the percentage of sessions that last under 10 seconds, contain no key event and show a single page.

Is page speed a ranking factor?

Page speed is a ranking factor in mobile searches. Although its importance is not obvious in the source documents, in 2018 Google stated plainly that "we use page speed as a ranking factor". Today Google recommends good Core Web Vitals, covered in the page experience section above.

Is word count a ranking factor?

Word count alone is not a ranking factor. The charts may show longer content in the top positions, but trusting them unconditionally is a mistake. Rather than focusing on word count, produce the content that gives the user what they want fastest. Google's SEO Starter Guide says the same, as the table below shows.

What does Google say about these questions today?

Google's documentation answers several questions the correlation studies asked. The table gives the answers I found in October 2026 in the SEO Starter Guide, the ranking systems guide, the page experience document and Google's How Search Works site.

Question	What Google says
Is word count a ranking factor?	No. There is no minimum or maximum word count target.
Is there an ideal keyword density?	No ratio is given. Excessive repetition is keyword stuffing, a spam policy violation.
Is CTR a ranking factor?	Google uses aggregated, anonymised interaction data to assess relevance but does not name click-through rate.
Are bounce rate and social shares ranking factors?	Neither appears in the ranking systems guide.
How much do SSL and page speed matter?	Ranking systems use Core Web Vitals. Other page experience aspects, HTTPS included, do not directly raise rankings.
Is the number of backlinks a ranking factor?	PageRank remains a core ranking system, but it is one of many signals.

Spam policies and manual actions

Google's spam policies define techniques used to deceive users or manipulate Search, and since May 2026 they explicitly cover generative AI responses. The four below apply to content and link work.

Scaled content abuse; Generating many pages to manipulate rankings, by any method, generative AI included.
Site reputation policy; Publishing third-party content on a host site mainly to exploit its ranking signals.
Expired domain abuse; Repurposing an expired domain with low-value content to manipulate rankings.
Link spam; Buying, selling or excessively exchanging links to manipulate rankings.

Google issues a manual action when a human reviewer finds that a site breaks these policies. The Manual actions report in Search Console lists each action and takes the reconsideration request after a fix.

SEO strategies

SEO strategies fall under two headings: technical work and content work.

Work to do on the technical side

I cover the work to do on the technical side in three articles: crawl budget, canonical tags and discontinued products. A fourth post, log file analysis for SEO, shows how to read crawling from server logs.

I also cover mapping site architecture and XPath in crawls.

Work to do on the content side

I cover the work to do on the content side in two articles: user intent and new content ideas.

How do you measure SEO work?

You measure SEO work with five Google Search Console reports for visibility in search, and with GA4 for behaviour on the site.

Performance; Clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, AI features included.
Generative AI performance; Impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode.
Page indexing; The pages Google can index and the problems it found.
Core Web Vitals; LCP, INP and CLS status of URL groups.
Crawl Stats; Googlebot's requests and server responses.

GA4 replaced Universal Analytics, which stopped processing data on 1 July 2023. My article on data analysis in SEO turns the numbers into decisions. To query performance data without row limits, read my post on the Search Console BigQuery export.

Tips and common mistakes

I have two articles on SEO tips and common mistakes: 12 advanced SEO tips and the most common SEO mistakes.

Resources worth following

The resources worth following are five official Google sources, three lists and six blogs I picked for anyone who wants to research and learn SEO in depth.

The three lists below remain from the earlier edition, and I reopened each in October 2026.

My favourite blogs: GSQI, Sparktoro, Moz, Backlinko, SEMrush, Authority Builders.

If you have read this far, you know the fundamentals of SEO, which factors genuinely matter and where to go next. All that is left is doing it: test what you have learned on your own site, measure the results, and never stop reading.

Sources I drew on and quoted while preparing this guide: Search Engine Land, Moz-1, Moz-2.

Taha Yelkenci

SEO since 2010. Founder of rankZup. Got a question? Write to me →