SEO playbook

An SEO playbook for any website on any stack. SEO, search engine optimisation, means making pages that search engines can find, understand and trust, so the people who need them see them first. Every rule here follows the search engines' own published guidance, and every rule has a check.

The chapters run in the order you work. First comes keyword research, which finds the words your customers use and gives each topic one page. Then come where those words go on the page, and how to write content that deserves to rank. Next are crawling and indexing, site structure, and how your pages look in the results. After that come links from other sites and the spam policies that get sites punished, with how to answer a penalty. The last chapters cover local search, images and video, measuring results, and answers written by AI.

Start with Start from the customer's own words. A page written in your own jargon ranks for words nobody types. Then read Search spam and penalties before you hire anyone to "do SEO" for you.

Some topics have their home elsewhere. The page title and meta description rules live in the website playbook's HTML basics. Redirects and canonical addresses live in Redirects and canonicals. Files for AI agents, such as llms.txt, live in Ready for AI agents. Language versions and hreflang live in the localization playbook.

Chapters

1. Keyword research

   Find the words your customers use and read the intent behind each search. Then give every topic one page in a keyword map, so no two pages compete.

   • Recommended 6
   • Avoid 1

2. Words on the page

   Put the main phrase in the title, the h1, the first paragraph, a subheading, the address and link text. Write for the reader, with no keyword density target.

   • Recommended 6
   • Avoid 1

3. Helpful content

   Write people-first pages that show who wrote them and why to trust them. Update pages instead of republishing, merge thin ones and cover every buying stage.

   • Recommended 7

4. Crawling and indexing

   Let search engines fetch, render and index every public page, with robots.txt, sitemaps, server-rendered HTML, one version for phones and noindex.

   • Recommended 5
   • Optional 2

5. Site structure

   Clean addresses, links that reach every page, topic hubs, breadcrumbs and crawlable lists show search engines how your pages relate and which ones matter most.

   • Recommended 8

6. Search result appearance

   How a page looks in the results decides whether it gets the click. Titles search engines keep, snippets, rich results, site names, favicons and dates.

   • Recommended 6
   • Optional 1

7. Links from other sites

   Links from other sites tell search engines your pages are worth citing. Earn them with useful work, label every paid one, never buy them, and rarely disavow.

   • Required 1
   • Recommended 2
   • Optional 1
   • Avoid 1

8. Search spam and penalties

   What search engines punish, from keyword stuffing and cloaking to mass AI pages and rented reputation. How to prove you avoid it and answer a manual action.

   • Recommended 1
   • Avoid 9

9. Local search

   For a business with a shop, an office or a service area. A complete business profile, one name, address and phone everywhere, honest reviews and local pages.

   • Required 1
   • Recommended 3

10. Images and video

    Help image and video search find your media, with descriptive file names, honest alt text, image sitemaps, watch pages, thumbnails and video structured data.

    • Recommended 3
    • Optional 1

11. Measuring results

    Read queries, impressions, click-through rate and position for each page in Search Console. Fix pages seen but rarely clicked, and judge each change over weeks.

    • Recommended 5

12. AI search answers

    Search engines now answer with AI above the results. The same SEO earns those citations. Keep pages quotable, measure AI impressions and never plant prompts.

    • Recommended 3
    • Avoid 1

All 75 rules on one page

This is a lot to check. An Expert can check it for you.

Related playbooks

• Redirects and canonicals

  In the Website playbook. Moving or merging pages loses their ranking unless each old address redirects in one hop to the right new page.

• Performance

  In the Website playbook. Slow pages lose visitors before they read a word. Keep load, response and layout shift inside the limits.

• Ready for AI agents

  In the Website playbook. AI tools read sites too. Give them Markdown copies, a site guide and clear rules for each AI crawler.

• Multilingual websites

  In the Localization playbook. A site in several languages needs one address per language and hreflang links, or the versions compete.