seo-basics

# 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. 1. `<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. 2. `<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. 3. 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.) 4. 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 1. 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. 2. 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. 3. 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. 4. 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.