What’s SEO?
A short glossary-style explanation.
SEO is the practice of making pages easier for search engines to find, understand, and show for relevant searches.
SEO means search engine optimization. It is the practice of making a page easier for search engines to find, understand, and show for relevant searches. It is part content work, part technical housekeeping.
How search engines read a page
Search engines use crawlers to discover pages, follow links, and collect page information. That information can then be stored in an index. When someone searches, the search engine looks through its index and serves pages that match the query.
What SEO usually touches
- Helpful content that answers a real search need.
- Clear titles, headings, URLs, and link text.
- Pages and links that crawlers can access.
- Descriptive image alt text when images carry meaning.
- Pages that load quickly and work well on mobile.
What SEO is not
- It is not buying placement in organic search results.
- It is not repeating keywords unnaturally.
- It is not a guarantee that every page will be crawled, indexed, or shown.
Common terms
- Crawling: discovering and fetching pages.
- Indexing: analyzing and storing page information.
- Serving: returning results for a search query.
- robots.txt: a file that gives crawler access instructions.