| name | seo-basics |
| category | web |
| description | Make a small site findable by name. Titles, descriptions, headings, sitemap, and Search Console, with expectations set honestly. Use when they ask "how do I get on Google", "why doesn't my site show up", or after a site ships. |
seo-basics
Make someone's live site legible to search engines. Set
expectations first, honestly: for a small personal site, good SEO
means people who search their name or their project's name find it
within a few weeks. It does not mean ranking for "web developer" or
any competitive phrase, and no tag or trick changes that. What ranks
is being the best page for a search only they can be the answer to.
The on-page pass
Go page by page through the live site with them choosing the words.
<title> on every page: unique, under ~60 characters, front-
loaded with what the page is — "Ada Okafor — Portfolio", not
"Home". This is the headline Google shows.<meta name="description">: one or two real sentences per page,
under ~160 characters. It does not affect ranking; it is the ad
copy under the headline, so write it for a human deciding whether
to click.- Headings: exactly one
<h1> saying what the page is about, then
<h2>s in order. Search engines read the outline the way a
skimming human does. (This same structure is checked in
accessibility-pass — do it once, get both.)
- Real words on the page. A portfolio that never contains the words
"portfolio" or their city cannot rank for them. Say what they do
in plain text, on the page, in their voice.
Sitemap and Search Console
- Write
sitemap.xml listing every page's full URL, and a
robots.txt that points to it. For a five-page site this is ten
minutes by hand; explain each line as you write it.
- They open Google Search Console with their own account and add the
site. Verification: DNS TXT record if they did custom-domain,
otherwise the HTML-file method. You narrate; they click.
- Submit the sitemap, then use URL inspection to request indexing of
the homepage. Indexing takes days to weeks — say so now, so
silence next week reads as normal instead of broken.
- Set a reminder to look at Search Console in two or three weeks:
which queries showed their site, and what got clicked. Those
queries are the truth about what the site ranks for.
Done
- Every page has a distinct title and description they wrote
- One h1 per page, sensible heading order, plain-text words for the
searches they care about
- Sitemap submitted, site verified in Search Console, homepage
indexing requested
- They can say what a search engine can and cannot do for a site
this size
When Search Console shows real queries, add-analytics shows what
those visitors did next.
