Glossary /Foundations
Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)
The practice of making a site easier for search engines to find, understand and rank for the questions its buyers actually ask.
Search engine optimisation is the work of making a site legible to a search engine and useful to the person who arrives from one. It splits into three jobs that are easy to confuse: getting pages crawled and indexed at all, making each page unambiguous about what it covers, and earning enough external corroboration that the engine trusts the answer.
SEO is often sold as keyword placement. That was true in 2010. Modern engines resolve a query to intent and entities before they rank anything, so a page stuffed with the right phrase and thin on the actual answer loses to a page that reads like it was written for a person.
The discipline has widened again with assistants entering the mix. The same underlying assets — clean crawlability, honest structure, verifiable claims — now feed both a results page and a generated answer, which is why the technical foundation matters more than it did when the only consumer was a blue link.