SEO has a terrible name.
Search engine optimization.
Three words. Two sound technical, and optimization sounds as though somebody is about to sell us software.
Let’s not start there.
Let’s start in the kitchen.
You put a few eggs in a pot because you want hard-boiled eggs. The water is heating up when you realize you can’t remember how long you are supposed to cook them.
Seven minutes? Ten? Does the timer start when the eggs go in or when the water boils?
So you pick up your phone and type:
how to hard boil eggs
A second later, Google gives you a page full of choices.
One says How to Make Perfect Hard-Boiled Eggs. Another promises to show you how to keep the shells from sticking. There may be a video showing somebody making them. You might also see something about soft-boiled eggs, deviled eggs or egg salad. You didn’t ask for those, but they are close enough that Google thinks they might help.
You probably don’t stop to think about any of this. You wanted to know how to boil an egg. Google gave you some possible answers. You pick one and get back to the eggs.
But where did those answers come from?
Google didn’t write them.
Somebody wrote the recipe and took the step-by-step photographs. Somebody else made the video. Another person may have written an entire article about why eggshells stick.
Then they put all of that information online where other people could find it.
What actually happened when you searched?
Long before you typed anything, Google had software moving around public parts of the internet, finding pages and following links from one place to another.
It might find a recipe about hard-boiled eggs, follow a link to another recipe about soft-boiled eggs, then find an article explaining why the shells stick.
Those programs are called crawlers.
I always picture tiny spiders with notebooks, which is unfortunately much more interesting than what is really happening.
They are pieces of software doing a repetitive job automatically: finding pages, following links and bringing information back so Google can work out what it found.
Google then sorts information about many of those pages into an enormous library-like catalogue called Google’s index.
So when you type:
how to hard boil eggs
Google doesn’t suddenly start reading the whole internet. It looks through information it has already found and organized.
But this brings up another problem.
Google’s index may contain an enormous amount of information from articles, recipes and other things that mention eggs.
You didn’t ask for everything about eggs. You didn’t ask how to make deviled eggs, why are eggs good for you or what is the biggest egg in the world.
You want to know how to hard-boil one.
Now Google has to choose. Out of all that egg-related information, which results seem most likely to answer your question? Which ones should come first?
That order is called ranking.
That find-it, organize-it, choose-what-to-show job is what a search engine does.
Google Search is the one we’ll use in our examples. Bing, DuckDuckGo and Brave Search are other search engines. They use different systems, but from our side the job feels much the same: we ask for something, and they try to give us useful choices.
Now let’s turn the whole thing around
So far, you’ve been standing in the kitchen with the eggs.
Somewhere else is the woman who wrote one of those hard-boiled egg articles.
Why did she bother?
Perhaps she really does just enjoy teaching people how to cook. Fair enough.
But she may also be trying to make money.
Maybe she’s selling a cookbook or offering an online cooking course. Perhaps she’s recommending a little egg cooker and earning a small commission—a share of the sale—if someone buys one. A kitchen-equipment company might be paying to place an advertisement beside her recipe.
It could be almost anything.
The important part is that she wants people to find her article.
More readers means more people seeing whatever she’s selling, and more chances that somebody buys something.
She isn’t checking where Google puts the article because she has suddenly developed a passion for rankings. She cares because nobody can buy what they never see.
Now imagine 10,000 people have written something about hard-boiled eggs. A lot of them would be very happy if Google put their article near the top.
Why?
Your eggs are sitting in the kitchen. You are probably not going to inspect hundreds of search results before choosing one. You’ll look at the first few, pick something that seems useful and get back to the eggs.
That gives everyone with an egg article a very good reason to care where Google puts it.
They want to be seen.
There are only a few places near the top, and a lot of people want them.
Google has its own reason to care about what ends up there.
If you ask how to boil an egg and Google gives you page after page about lawn furniture, Google isn’t doing a very good job. If that keeps happening, sooner or later you stop trusting Google to find things for you.
So Google wants the results it puts in front of you to fit what you searched for and actually help when you get there.
That means Google has to do a little policing.
People have spent years looking for ways to fool it.
Suppose somebody writes an article about hard-boiled eggs and decides Google will like it more if hard-boiled eggs appears as many times as possible:
Hard-boiled eggs are the best hard-boiled eggs. If you like hard-boiled eggs, our hard-boiled egg guide will teach you how to make hard-boiled eggs so your hard-boiled eggs are perfect hard-boiled eggs.
That is awful.
Nobody standing over a pot of eggs needs that paragraph.
It wasn’t written to help them. It was written to fool Google into thinking the article must be terribly important for hard-boiled eggs.
People really have tried things like this.
Google doesn’t want that, so it makes rules. The real rules are more complicated, but a decent place for us to begin is:
Give people what you promised them.
Make it useful.
Don’t try to fool me.
Google doesn’t police the whole internet—there is plenty of rubbish out there, and it couldn’t if it tried. What it can police is Google Search. It gets to make the rules for what it is willing to put in front of people using Google.
So an article that is useful and plays by the rules has a better chance of being shown. If Google decides someone is trying to cheat, the opposite can happen: the article may be pushed farther down or not shown at all.
A good article can still be hard to find
Now go back to the woman with the egg recipe.
Her recipe may be excellent, but suppose she gives it this title:
My Exciting Adventures With Eggs and Hot Water
I actually rather like that title. It just does a poor job of telling somebody with boiling eggs what the article is about.
You, meanwhile, are searching for:
how to hard boil eggs
If My Exciting Adventures With Eggs and Hot Water appears in the results, would you immediately know it has the answer you need? Probably not, especially if your eggs are already boiling.
Now suppose she changes the title to:
How to Make Hard-Boiled Eggs
The difference is immediate. You can tell at a glance what the article is about, and Google has a much clearer clue too.
This is where the language people use when they search starts to matter.
You searched for how to hard boil eggs. Someone else might type:
how long do hard boiled eggs take
or:
easy peel hard boiled eggs
The wording changes, but the need is closely related.
The words and phrases people type into search are commonly called keywords. A keyword is a word or phrase someone types into a search engine to describe what they want to find. Despite the name, it can be several words long or even a complete question.
For the woman writing the article, those keywords are useful clues. They show her the words people naturally use for the problem and what they want to know about it.
If people are asking how long hard-boiled eggs take, cooking time belongs in the article. If they are asking why the shells stick or whether to start with hot or cold water, those are probably worth covering too.
The trouble starts when a writer notices that a search phrase matters and starts forcing it into the article again and again.
Remember that ridiculous paragraph from earlier? It repeated hard-boiled eggs in almost every sentence, not because the reader needed it, but because the writer was trying to influence where Google put the article.
That is keyword stuffing—repeating a keyword unnaturally in an attempt to manipulate search rankings.
The phrase can help describe the subject. Repeating it mechanically just makes the writing worse.
And none of that changes what you need from the article.
You are standing over a pot of eggs. You need to know how long to cook them, whether to start with hot or cold water, how to cool them and what to do if the shells keep sticking.
Her article needs to give you those answers.
When it does, it becomes easier to find because its subject is clear, and worth finding because it actually helps.
So, after all that, what is SEO?
Now the terrible name finally has somewhere to go.
SEO stands for search engine optimization.
We already know what a search engine is. Optimization simply means improving something so it works better for a particular purpose.
In other words, it is tuning rather than rebuilding. You already have the thing; you are making adjustments so it does its job better. The word sounds like a laboratory. The reality is often closer to tightening a loose screw or oiling the bit that keeps squeaking.
For the woman with the egg article, none of that is especially mysterious. She gives the article a title that tells people what it is about. She pays attention to the words people use when they search. She answers the questions they actually have. She makes the article useful, and she makes it easier for Google to understand what she has written.
That, in plain English, is SEO.
It is the work of improving an article or page so a search engine can find it, understand it and consider showing it when somebody searches for something the page can genuinely help with.
There is more to it once we start working with many pages. We can connect related articles, improve older work, research what people search for and fix technical problems that get in the way.
But the basic relationship does not get more complicated.
You were looking for an answer.
She had one.
Google had to decide whether to put it in front of you.
That is why businesses care about SEO. Nobody is chasing a high ranking because it looks nice in a frame. They want people to arrive. If nobody finds the article, nobody sees the cookbook, the course, the egg cooker or anything else she has to offer—and she loses the chance to make money from those readers.
I do not think of SEO as pleasing Google. That gets the relationship backwards. The person searching is still the point. Google is simply standing in the middle deciding which answers to show.
And Google cannot be ordered around. SEO does not guarantee first place, no matter how confidently somebody selling SEO might suggest otherwise.
What it can do is give a useful page a better chance of being found, understood and considered when it really does fit what somebody searched for.
That is enough to build on.
Now we can go back to some of the machinery we skipped over earlier.
How does Google actually find all that information, organize it and decide what to show first?
That is what we will look at next in How Google Search Works.