SEO Basics: Questions Answered
What search engine optimisation is, how to start on your own site, and the basics of technical and on-page SEO, keywords, titles, descriptions and social sharing tags.
Each answer below gives the short version first. Open the full article for the steps, the reasons and the official sources.
24 questions on SEO Basics
| Question | Short answer |
|---|---|
| Fix Orphan Pages and Internal Links Without a Subscription | An orphan page has no internal links pointing to it, so Googlebot rarely finds or indexes it and it gains no PageRank. To fix orphan pages, add two to five contextual links from relevant existing pages on your site. |
| Generate Open Graph Tags Without a Monthly SEO Plan | Open Graph tags control how your page looks when shared on Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter. The core tags are og:title, og:description, og:image at 1200 by 630 pixels and og:url. A generator can audit your existing tags and generate Open Graph tags to replace missing or incorrect ones. |
| Improve Your E-E-A-T Signals Without an SEO Agency | Improve your E-E-A-T signals by showing first-hand experience, naming authors with verifiable credentials, earning press coverage and respected backlinks, and building trust through accuracy, transparency about who runs the site, HTTPS and verified reviews. An E-E-A-T checker shows exactly which signals are missing. |
| Can you do SEO yourself? | Yes. Most of SEO is content and structure that any site owner can learn: clear page titles and descriptions, headings that match what people search for, basic keyword research and internal links. Technical areas such as site speed, structured data and indexing take longer to learn, so many owners handle the basics themselves and get help with those. |
| How do you start SEO? | Start with keyword research to find the terms people really search for in your area. Then fix the technical basics so search engines can crawl your pages quickly on mobile, write useful content that answers those searches, and earn links from other reputable sites once you have something worth linking to. |
| How to do SEO for free? | Submit a sitemap, set up the free webmaster tools from Google and Bing to find indexing and mobile problems, write clear titles and descriptions, improve your existing pages and make them load quickly. All of this costs time rather than money. Free link building comes from content worth referencing and from contacting sites that would find it useful. |
| How to start SEO as a beginner? | First make sure search engines can crawl and render your pages, because a page blocked by robots.txt or hidden behind JavaScript can be invisible however good it is. Then use clear URLs, group related pages logically, match your content to what your audience searches for, and avoid duplicate pages and intrusive adverts. |
| What does a SEO marketer do? | An SEO marketer works to bring more visitors to a website from unpaid search results. The job covers keyword research, improving existing pages and their titles and links, fixing technical problems such as slow pages and crawl errors, and tracking rankings and traffic to decide what to work on next. |
| What is SEO and examples? | SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, is improving a website so it appears higher in unpaid search results. It has four main parts: on-page SEO (titles, headings and content), technical SEO (speed, mobile use and structured data), off-page SEO (links from other sites) and content SEO (useful pages that answer what people search for). |
| What is SEO in marketing and how does it work? | SEO in marketing is improving a website so it appears higher in unpaid search results. Search engines rank pages by how relevant they are to the search and how far they can be trusted, which comes from technical health and links from reputable sites. Unlike paid adverts, a well-ranked page can keep bringing visitors after you stop spending. |
| What is SEO marketing in simple terms? | SEO marketing is making your website easier for the right people to find in search without paying for adverts. It has two halves: a fast, well-built site that search engines can read and trust, and content that genuinely answers what people are searching for. |
| What is the golden rule of SEO? | The golden rule of SEO is to write for people, not for search engines. Answer the reader's question clearly and use keywords only where they fit naturally. Search engines aim to reward pages that serve their users well, so content that genuinely helps readers tends to do better over time than content written to game rankings. |
| What is SEO in simple words? | SEO, or Search Engine Optimisation, means improving your website so it appears higher in search results when people look for what you offer. It comes down to three things: making each page clearly relevant to the search, earning trust through links and clear authorship, and giving visitors a fast, easy experience. |
| Is technical SEO part of on-page SEO? | No, they are separate but related. On-page SEO covers what is on each page: content, headings, titles, descriptions and internal links. Technical SEO covers the site underneath: crawling, indexing, speed, mobile use and structured data. Some items, such as canonical tags, sit in both. |
| Does Squarespace do SEO? | Yes, for small and medium websites. Squarespace creates a sitemap, uses HTTPS and mobile-friendly designs, produces clean URLs, and lets you edit page titles, descriptions and image alt text without code. It gives you less control than platforms such as WordPress over advanced technical SEO. |
| Which type of SEO is best? | No one type is best. Use the one that fixes your biggest problem. If search engines cannot crawl your pages or the site is slow, start with technical SEO. If the site is new or the pages are thin, build better content. If the content is good but rankings lag, work on earning links. Local businesses also need local SEO. |
| What is SEO in social media? | SEO in social media means using the words people search for in your profile bios, captions, titles and post text, so your profiles and posts are easier to find. Platforms such as TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn have their own search, and well-optimised profiles can also appear in Google results. |
| Keyword Density Has No Magic Number: What Google Says | There is no ideal keyword density. Google has never published a target percentage and says it does not measure pages against one. Keyword stuffing is defined by unnatural behaviour, not a percentage, so focus on placing your target phrase in the title, H1, meta description and opening paragraph instead. |
| Why Single-Word Keyword Tools Miss What People Search For | Single-word keyword tools count individual words, so they show a page's vocabulary but not whether words appear together. People search in phrases such as schema generator, so a page can use each word often yet never use the phrase. Phrase-aware checks of 2- and 3-word phrases reveal what the page will actually rank for. |
| Title and Description Length Is Measured in Pixels | Title and description length is measured in pixels: Google truncates titles and meta descriptions by pixel width, not character count. Titles are safe up to about 561 pixels and descriptions up to about 985 pixels. Because letters vary in width, character limits such as 60 characters are only an estimate. |
| og:site_name and the Open Graph Tags That Actually Matter | Every page needs four Open Graph tags: og:title, og:type, og:image as a full https URL, and og:url matching the canonical, plus og:description. og:site_name is optional but worth adding, because Facebook, LinkedIn and messaging apps show it so readers see which site a shared link comes from. |
| Blog Descriptions Cut Mid-Word, and How to End Them Cleanly | Descriptions cut mid-word appear when a blog builds them from the first 155 or 160 characters of a post, or from excerpts stored already cut. Fix it by measuring pixel width, using the whole excerpt if it fits, otherwise cutting at the last whole word with an ellipsis. |
| What is technical SEO? | Technical SEO is the work that lets Google find, crawl, render and index your pages. It covers robots.txt, status codes, canonical URLs, sitemaps, mobile versions and page speed. Google's minimum requirements are simple: Googlebot is not blocked, the page returns an HTTP 200 status code, and the page has indexable content. |
| What is the 80/20 rule in SEO? | The 80/20 rule in SEO is the Pareto principle used as a way to prioritise: the idea that most of your results come from a small share of your pages, queries or fixes. It is not a Google rule or a ranking factor. Use Search Console to find the pages that bring most of your clicks and work on those first. |