Technical SEO Guide: How Search Engines Read Your Site

Technical SEO is about access: whether search engines can crawl your pages, render them, index them and pick the right URL. On-page SEO is about meaning: whether each page matches what people search for, with a clear title, headings, body copy, images and links. A page needs both. Perfect copy on a page Google can't index won't show up, and a crawlable page that answers the wrong question won't either.

No. Google's own guidance on hiring an SEO says no one can guarantee a number one ranking. It also says Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher, and it doesn't guarantee that it will crawl, index or serve any page. Be wary of anyone who promises fixed positions, a special relationship with Google or priority submission.

No. Google says content length alone doesn't matter for ranking, and that it has no preferred word count. Write as much as the topic needs to fully answer the question, and stop there. A short page that answers a simple question can beat a long one that buries the answer. Google notes that natural, varied wording gives a page more chances to match searches, which has nothing to do with length.

Not directly. Google's SEO Starter Guide answers that question with a plain no. E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trust, and it comes from the guidelines Google's search quality raters use. Rater scores don't move individual pages. Google does say its systems try to reward content that shows those qualities, so clear authorship and real first-hand detail still help.

Yes. Google says that optimizing for its generative AI search features is still SEO, because those features are rooted in its core ranking and quality systems. A page has to be indexed and eligible for a snippet before it can appear as a supporting link in AI Overviews. So the same work applies: crawlable pages, clear answers and a site search engines can understand.

Start by checking that Google can see the site. Search for site: followed by your domain to confirm pages are indexed, then add the site to Search Console and look at the Page indexing and Performance reports. Fix anything blocking crawling or indexing first. After that, work on the pages that matter most to your business: their intent, titles and internal links.