Google's SEO guidelines: what you actually need to stick to

Google publishes its requirements itself, in the Search Essentials. In short: your pages must be findable, load properly, contain no deception, and be made for people. Everything else circulated as a 'rule' is usually just someone's assumption.

Google needs to be able to reach your page (no block in robots.txt), index it (no accidental noindex), and see one clear version of each page (canonical properly set). If this goes wrong, no amount of copy will help.

Bought links, doorway pages, automatically generated text without real value, and hidden keywords. This creates a short-lived bump in analytics tools followed by an expensive problem to fix. I don't do it, even if a client asks.

There is no mandatory word count, no ideal keyword density, and no fixed position for your keyword in the text. What does measurably work: a title that directly matches the search query, an opening paragraph with the direct answer, and headings that follow the reader's question.

First technical foundations and indexing, then the pages with the highest commercial value, then the rest. I explain what I've done at each step and what you can pick up yourself — often small copy adjustments that you can do faster than I can.

Start with accessibility: make sure there are no blocks in robots.txt and no accidental noindex tags on pages you do want to show. Then, check in Google Search Console whether your most important pages have been indexed.

Next, check for a single version per page (canonical), working internal links, and page titles and descriptions that address the search query. Only after that does it make sense to work on copy.

A new website going live with the staging environment's noindex still active. Multiple pages tackling the same topic, diluting each other's impact. Copy packed with keywords that fails to answer the reader's question.

And the most dangerous one: buying backlink packages because it seems fast. That only delivers temporary metrics in tools, followed by an expensive recovery.