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Guide

What is SEO?

The work that helps Google understand your site and helps searchers choose you: how Search works, the basic steps and when results come.

In short

  1. SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work that helps Google understand your website and helps searchers choose you.
  2. There is no secret that puts you in first place; sites that follow Google's guidelines and offer useful content are seen more.
  3. According to Google, changes can take anywhere from a few hours to several months to have an effect.

What exactly does SEO mean?

According to Google, SEO is the process of helping search engines understand your content and helping people find your site and decide to visit it. So you have two audiences: Google, which reads your page, and the person searching, who picks where to click among the results.

SEO is different from paid advertising: you work for the unpaid (organic) places in search results and you don't pay per click. In return, results come more slowly and cannot be guaranteed.

How does Google Search work?

  1. Crawling: Google's crawlers constantly explore the web, mostly finding pages through links on other pages.
  2. Indexing: a found page is analysed and added to Google's index. Google needs to see the page as a visitor would; don't block your design and script files.
  3. Serving results: when someone searches, Google ranks the most relevant pages from its index.

In most cases, publishing your site is enough for Google to find it. Submitting a sitemap is optional but helps; Google's own tool for this is Search Console.

The basic steps Google recommends

  • A title for each page: a short, clear <title> unique to the page. The headline in search results usually comes from it.
  • A short description: a page-specific summary of the page's main point. Google sometimes shows it, sometimes text from the page.
  • Meaningful URLs: readable addresses like /services/dental-fillings/ instead of random characters.
  • Useful content: easy to read, well organised, original, up to date and trustworthy. Don't repeat the same text across many pages.
  • Descriptive links: link text that says where the link goes, instead of "click here".
  • Images: near the related text, good quality, with descriptive alternative text (alt).

SEO for a local business

If you serve your neighbourhood, what searchers often see first is the top 3 results on Google Maps; those results come not from your website but from your Google Business Profile. So local SEO stands on two legs: the profile (category, hours, photos, reviews) and the website (service pages, address and phone written the same way as on the profile, fast and mobile-friendly pages).

When will you see results?

According to Google, changes can take from a few hours to several months to be reflected in Search, and you usually need to wait a few weeks to see their effect. Not every change will have a visible effect. That is why SEO should be measured monthly: on the same keywords, with the same method.

Watch out for

  • Promises like "we'll get you to number one": according to Google, there is no secret that ranks you first.
  • Stuffing pages with keywords and copied content.
  • Bought or irrelevant links.

Sources

The information was taken from Google's own pages on the date below and may change.

Published 21 October 2026

Outside Türkiye we offer SEO, priced by written quote: see SEO services. With Google Ads management, visibility starts as soon as the ads run.