Getting Found on Google

Website SEO Basics: Titles, Sitemaps and More

The technical SEO every business website should have, explained in plain English.

On this page

Quick answer: Give each page a unique title and description, use clear headings, submit a sitemap, keep the site fast and mobile-friendly, and avoid duplicate pages.

Page titles and descriptions

The title is the blue link in Google results. Keep it around 50 to 60 characters and say what the page is about. The description is the text below it, so make people want to click.

Headings

One main heading (H1) per page, then subheadings that break the content into sections.

XML sitemap

A list of your pages for Google. Submit it in Search Console.

Robots.txt

A small file that tells search engines which parts of the site not to crawl.

Canonical tags

They tell Google which version of a page is the main one, so similar pages don't compete.

Speed and mobile

Most visitors are on phones. Light pages and compressed images help both visitors and rankings.