SEO Basics – the essentials in one crash course.

On-page SEO – what counts directly on the page

On-page covers every signal that sits directly on a URL. The most important ones:

• Title tag – max. 60 characters, primary keyword up front, brand at the end.
• Meta description – max. 155 characters, benefit plus call to action. It doesn't influence rankings directly, but it does affect click-through rate.
• H1 – exactly one per page, with the keyword.
• H2/H3 hierarchy – logical, with no skipped levels.
• Clean URLs – short, with the keyword, no parameters.
• Internal linking – hub-and-spoke logic, descriptive anchor text.
• Image alt text – descriptive, with the keyword where it makes sense.

Technical SEO – the invisible foundation

If Google can't crawl or index your pages, even the best content is useless. The must-cover topics:

• Crawlability – robots.txt, XML sitemap, crawl-budget management.
• Indexing – canonical tags, noindex control, pagination.
• Core Web Vitals – LCP < 2.5 s, INP < 200 ms, CLS < 0.1.
• Structured data – schema markup for Article, Service, FAQPage, Person.
• Mobile-first – Google indexes the mobile version first.
• HTTPS – mandatory, no exceptions.

Off-page SEO – authority from the outside

Backlinks and brand mentions from credible sources remain one of the three most important ranking factors. What works:

• Topically relevant mentions in trade media, industry portals and journalistic sources.
• Digital PR – original studies, data stories and industry insights as a lever for organic mentions.
• Citations – consistent NAP data across relevant directories.

What doesn't work: link networks, PBNs, buying links in obscure directories. Google is increasingly good at spotting this, and it penalizes it.

Content SEO – what your content has to deliver

Three principles:

• Match search intent precisely – informational, transactional, navigational.
• Fact density – citable statements instead of generic filler.
• E-E-A-T signals – visible authorship, last-updated date, source links.

How AI is changing the SEO game

AI models like ChatGPT, Perplexity and the Google AI Overviews use many of the same signals as classic search engines, but they weight fact density, schema markup and authorship more heavily. Build SEO with GEO in mind and you win twice: in the results list and in the AI answer.

Which KPIs show SEO success

Track four dimensions every month:

• Ranking progress for your agreed keywords
• Organic traffic from Google Search Console
• Conversion rate from organic sessions
• AI visibility across the four leading models