A Practical Guide to SEO: Practical Steps to Get Ranked

Understanding SEO gets a lot easier once you stop thinking of it as a bag of tricks and start thinking of it as three separate mechanical steps: crawling, indexing and ranking. Google has to find your page, understand it and then decide where it belongs among every other page competing for the same query. This guide walks through each step and what you can do about it.

Step one: getting crawled

Google finds new pages by following links from pages it already knows about, plus, since Google, Yahoo and Microsoft jointly adopted the Sitemaps protocol in late 2006, by reading an XML sitemap you submit directly. A sitemap is just a file listing your URLs so Googlebot doesn’t have to stumble onto them by luck. If a page has no links pointing to it and isn’t in your sitemap, it may never get crawled at all, no matter how good the content is.

Practical step: submit a sitemap through Google Webmaster Tools (renamed Search Console years later, but the same idea applies now) and check that your important pages are reachable through normal navigation, not buried behind a search box or a form Google can’t fill out.

Step two: getting indexed

Once crawled, a page still has to be indexed, stored in Google’s database as a candidate for search results. Pages built entirely in Flash or with content loaded through JavaScript often get crawled but not properly indexed, because Googlebot in 2007 still reads HTML far better than it reads scripted content. The fix is having real, readable text in the HTML itself, not just images of text or animated menus.

Practical step: view your page with images and scripts turned off. Whatever text disappears is text Google may never fully credit you for.

Step three: getting ranked

This is where most of the SEO conversation happens, and it splits into on-page and off-page factors.

On-page factors are things you control directly:

• Title tags: the single highest-leverage on-page element. A specific, descriptive title beats a vague one every time.
• Headings: use them to structure the page the way a reader would expect, not to stuff keywords.
• Body text: write for the person reading it. Google’s algorithm looks at word patterns and relevance, and content written naturally for a human tends to satisfy both.

Off-page factors are things other sites do:

• Inbound links: still the backbone of Google’s ranking system through PageRank. A link from a relevant, respected site in your industry carries far more weight than ten links from unrelated directories.
• Anchor text: the clickable words in a link matter. A link that says “commercial roofing contractor” tells Google more than one that just says “click here.”

What changed the game this year

Google’s rollout of Universal Search in May 2007 blended images, video, news and local results directly into the main results page instead of keeping them in separate tabs. Practically, that means a well-tagged image or a listing in Google’s local business index can now show up on page one even when your regular organic ranking wouldn’t get you there. Businesses that ignored image alt text or never claimed a local listing are leaving visibility on the table.

Putting it together

None of these steps work in isolation. A perfectly crawlable site with weak content won’t rank, and brilliant content that Google can’t crawl won’t either. Work through the mechanics in order, crawlable, indexable, then optimized for ranking, and treat each new page you publish the same way. That sequence, done consistently, is what moves a site up the results over time.