All About SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, and at its core, it is all about increasing traffic to your site from search engines. SEO encompasses many aspects of your online presence, including the code and content of your website, your business listings, incoming backlinks, and even how visitors use and interact with your site once they land on it.

If you build it, they will come

Field of Dreams was a lie!

It has also changed a lot in the last couple of years. Google now answers a huge share of questions directly on the results page with an AI summary, and a growing number of people skip Google entirely and ask ChatGPT or another assistant instead. The fundamentals have not changed — but “ranking #1” is no longer the whole job.

This article will go over the various facets of SEO, how they affect your site’s ranking and traffic, and — since this is a plugin site — how your WordPress theme and plugins fit into all of it.

The three parts of SEO

Almost everything in SEO falls into one of three buckets:

1. On-Page SEO: the way your site is coded, structured, and written.
2. Off-Page SEO: signals from the rest of the internet that suggest your site is worth trusting.
3. User Experience: what happens after somebody actually clicks through.

None of them work in isolation. Perfect code with nothing to say ranks about as well as brilliant writing that search engines can’t index.

On-Page SEO

On-Page SEO is primarily about two things: the way your site is coded and structured, and the words that your site says.

The way a website is coded has drastic effects on how well it performs and ranks in search engines. A well-coded site achieves two goals: it makes your content easy for a machine to read, and it makes your site fast and pleasant for a human to use. We’ll get to the second one in the User Experience section.

A well coded and optimized website makes it easier for search engines to index and understand the site and its content. This is crucial to ranking well and serves as the foundation that all SEO is built upon.

No matter how much money you throw at an SEO campaign, if a search engine like Google can’t properly crawl your site, or otherwise cannot determine which content is relevant, you will not rank well. This is why properly structuring your pages and content is so important.

Can it even be found?

Before structure or content matters at all, a search engine has to be able to reach the page, render it, and be allowed to keep it. That comes down to a short list of nerdy, but important things:

• Crawlable — not blocked in robots.txt, not buried behind a login, not orphaned with zero internal links pointing at it.
• Indexable — no stray noindex tag. This one bites people constantly. WordPress has a “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checkbox under Settings → Reading, and staging sites that go live with it still ticked are a genuinely common cause of “my new site gets no traffic.”
• Canonical — one authoritative URL per piece of content, so ?ref=newsletter and /page/ and /page don’t compete with each other.
• Renderable — if your content only exists after a pile of JavaScript executes, you are gambling on the render queue. Server-rendered HTML is not a preference here, it’s insurance.
• Secure — HTTPS. Non-negotiable.
• Mobile — Google indexes the mobile version of your site, full stop. If your mobile layout hides content that exists on desktop, then Google will assume that content isn’t as important.

An XML sitemap and a Google Search Console account round it out. Search Console is free, takes ten minutes to verify, and will tell you exactly which pages Google has chosen not to index and why. If you do nothing else after reading this article, do that.

Proper Content Structure

Think of each page on your website as a school course and textbook.

If you were to take a class called “Intro to Biology“, the name of that class gives you a pretty good indicator of what you can expect to learn. This is the name/title of your website. Now you get your textbook, and it’s called “Biology 101: A beginner’s guide to high school biology“. Great — this reaffirms what we can expect to learn and adds some specificity. This would be the title of one of your pages.

Now you open the textbook and see that it’s broken into chapters, each chapter broken into subsections and headings. Important terms are bolded or italicized to designate that they matter. You get the picture. Your website and each page need to be structured similarly.

In practice, that means:

• One <h1> per page, describing what that page is actually about. Not your logo. Not “Welcome.”
• <h2> and <h3> used as a hierarchy, not as a font size picker. If a heading looks wrong, fix the CSS — don’t demote it to <h4> because <h4> happens to be smaller.
• A <title> tag written for a human, roughly 50–60 characters, with the distinguishing part first. Guitar Lessons in Hamilton | Smith Music beats Home | Smith Music.
• A meta description that reads like ad copy. It isn’t a ranking factor, but it heavily influences whether anyone clicks, and clicks are a signal (more on that later).
• Descriptive alt text on images, because it’s how search engines read pictures and how screen readers describe them. Two birds.
• Semantic HTML — <nav>, <main>, <article>, <footer>. A page built entirely from <div> tags is technically valid and practically illegible.
• Internal links with meaningful anchor text. Internal linking is the most underused, highest-leverage on-page tactic there is. It tells search engines which of your pages matter and what they’re about, and it does so entirely under your control.

By properly structuring your content, you are taking away the guesswork that search engines have to do in order to prioritize and categorize your content.

Structured data (schema)

Structure your headings well and a search engine can infer what your page is about. Add structured data and you get to simply tell it.

Schema markup — usually JSON-LD dropped into the <head> — describes your page in a format machines parse without ambiguity: this is a LocalBusiness, here are its hours, here is its address; this is an Article by this Person, published on this date; this is a Product with this price and this many reviews.

It won’t lift your rankings by itself. What it does is make you eligible for rich results — review stars, FAQ dropdowns, recipe cards, event listings, the little breadcrumb trail under your URL — and those meaningfully change how often people click. It also feeds the AI answer systems, which lean on structured data heavily when deciding who to cite.

Mark up what’s actually true and actually on the page. Schema describing reviews you don’t have is the fastest route to a manual penalty.

Words Matter

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but words have meaning and matter.

Dylan – Harmonic Design

We live in an amazing world full of machine learning, digital assistants, and wearable smart devices. These devices have become so good at predicting our needs and intentions that it can sometimes feel like they can read our minds. But they can’t. The output of any system is limited by the data you put into it. On a website, the content — the words you write — are the input.

Let’s imagine that you own a music store, sell guitars, offer repairs, and have a dedicated staff of teachers at the ready to train the next generation of rock stars.

You know, exactly like this

If you want to show up for “music lessons near me” or “guitar lessons”, you’ll need relevant, quality, well-organized content on your site. If nowhere on your site do you ever mention that you offer lessons, then how is Google supposed to know that you do?

Two things worth understanding beyond that:

Intent beats keywords. Search engines stopped counting keyword repetitions a very long time ago. They now work with meaning — related concepts, synonyms, entities, and the type of answer a query calls for. Someone searching “guitar lessons” wants a local business page with prices and a booking option. Someone searching “how to tune a guitar” wants a two-minute answer, not a sales pitch. Give a query the format it’s asking for, or watch a page that “should” rank sit at position 30 forever.

Depth beats volume. One thorough page on beginner guitar lessons will always outperform eight thin pages built around eight keyword variations of the same idea. Those eight pages also compete with each other, splitting the internal links and relevance that should have concentrated on one strong page.

Show your work. Google’s raters — and increasingly its ranking systems — look for signals of experience, expertise, authority, and trust. Named authors with real credentials. First-hand experience. Original photos instead of stock. Prices, specifics, and details you can only know if you actually do the thing. This matters most for anything touching health, money, or safety, but it helps everywhere.

Local SEO

Offering guitar lessons is inherently local — something only customers in your city care about. Search engines know roughly where a search is coming from and prioritize results near the user. This is why searching “guitar lessons” in Hamilton doesn’t return studios in London.

Because of that, the content of your website should reference your service area naturally, and your Google Business Profile needs to be claimed, complete, and accurate. (You may remember it as Google My Business — Google retired that name back in 2021, though half the internet hasn’t noticed.)

For local, the profile often matters more than the website:

• Correct name, address, phone, and hours — matching exactly what’s on your site and other directories.
• The right primary category, chosen carefully. It’s one of the strongest local ranking factors.
• Real photos, updated occasionally.
• Reviews, gathered steadily and responded to. Not bought. Never bought.
• A dedicated page on your site for each service and each location you actually serve, with genuinely different content on each.

Off-Page SEO

Off-Page SEO comes down to how much the rest of the internet vouches for you. Let’s imagine that you are a dentist in Hamilton, and you have a well-coded and optimized site with fantastic and relevant content. The problem is that your competition also has a well-designed and coded site with great content. So how do search engines decide which site ranks higher?

To go back to the high school analogy — the answer is popularity.

SEO is pretty fetch

The idea is that if website A is more popular than website B, users must prefer something about it. Search engines approximate that popularity in a few ways: backlinks, brand signals, and behaviour on the results page itself.

Backlinks

A backlink is any link from another website pointing back at yours — but not all backlinks are created equally. Some of the more important factors that determine what a single link is worth:

• Just like with real popularity, a link is worth more when it comes from a site that is itself well-linked and trusted.
• Links from unrelated sources carry very little weight. A link from a dental association beats a link from a discount furniture blog every time.
• Anchor text — the words that make up the link — should describe the destination. “Book a dentist in Hamilton” is a useful signal. “Click here” is not.
• Links should sit inside relevant content, not in a footer, sidebar, or link dump.
• Editorially given links — someone linked to you because they wanted to — are the only kind worth pursuing.

One correction to something you’ll still read on older SEO blogs: it is often claimed that links must be “dofollow” to count for anything. That stopped being strictly true in 2020, when Google began treating nofollow (along with the newer sponsored and ugc values) as a hint rather than a hard directive. Google may consider such links or ignore them, at its discretion. It’s still true that a followed editorial link is the stronger bet — just don’t dismiss a great mention from a major publication because someone tagged it nofollow.

You could generate tens of thousands of low quality, spammy links, and they would be worth roughly nothing — or worse. Google’s link spam systems are designed to neutralize purchased and manipulated links, and buying links violates their spam policies outright. A single backlink from a high quality, authoritative site in a related niche is what you actually want, and the only reliable way to get those is to publish something worth linking to, then tell relevant people it exists.

Brand and mentions

Links are the classic measure, but they aren’t the only one. Consistent mentions of your business name across the web, an active and complete business profile, reviews on the platforms your industry uses, and people searching for you by name all contribute to a picture of a real, established entity rather than a website that appeared last Tuesday.

This has become considerably more important in the AI era, where a system deciding who to cite is weighing whether your brand shows up repeatedly and consistently in the sources it trusts.

User Experience

The user experience metrics are important because they’re good for your users. The things search engines care about here overlap almost perfectly with the things you should already care about — which is convenient, because it means you rarely have to choose between optimizing for Google and optimizing for people.

Testimony from the DOJ antitrust trial and the 2024 leak of Google’s internal search API documentation both described a system called NavBoost, which records clicks on search results across a long rolling window and distinguishes between clicks where the user stayed, clicks where the user bounced straight back to the results page to try something else, and the result a user finally settled on longest.

Clicking your result, going “nope,” and immediately returning to Google to pick a competitor is a terrible outcome for you as it indicates that user’s are either not getting the information they are looking for, or the experience they are looking for.

• Write titles and descriptions that earn the click and accurately describe the page. Clickbait that oversells gets clicked once and abandoned, which is a net negative.
• Answer the question the person searched for, near the top, before you sell anything.
• Make the page fast enough that the content appears before patience runs out.

Core Web Vitals

Google’s public, measurable version of “is this page pleasant to use” is Core Web Vitals, three metrics measured from real Chrome users rather than from a lab test:

Two details that trip people up. First, INP replaced First Input Delay in March 2024 — if a guide still tells you to optimize FID, it’s out of date. Second, these are graded at the 75th percentile of real visits, using field data from the Chrome User Experience Report on a rolling 28-day window. A perfect Lighthouse score on your desktop with fibre internet is not the test. The test is whether three out of four real people, many of them on mid-range phones on mobile data, get a good experience. It also means that after you ship a fix, you wait several weeks before the reported numbers catch up.

Be realistic about the size of the effect: page experience is a tiebreaker, not a trump card. A slow page with the best answer will still outrank a fast page with a mediocre one. But when you and a competitor are otherwise evenly matched, this is exactly the kind of thing that decides it.

Speed is a business metric, not just an SEO one

The classic numbers here are old but the direction has never reversed. Amazon found that every additional 100ms of latency cost them roughly 1% in sales, and Google found that adding half a second to search result generation dropped traffic by about 20%. Those experiments are from 2006, back when the average connection was a fraction of today’s — and users have only grown less patient since.

A slow site encourages visitors to leave before they ever see the content, and that costs you the conversion regardless of where you ranked.

Design and accessibility

A well-designed site leads the user where they need to go without frustration. It makes it as easy as possible to find what they came for, while captivating the eye and encouraging engagement.

A well-coded site is fast, secure, compatible across devices, operating systems, and browsers, and accessible to everyone. Accessibility isn’t a ranking factor per se, but nearly everything you do for it — semantic markup, real heading hierarchy, descriptive alt text, meaningful link text, sufficient contrast, keyboard navigation — is the same work that makes a page legible to a search engine. And in Ontario, accessible web content is a legal obligation for many organizations under the AODA, not merely a nice idea.

So where do plugins and themes fit in?

This is the question that brings most WordPress users to an article like this one, and it deserves a direct answer: your theme and plugins do not improve your rankings, but they can absolutely destroy them.

SEO plugins don’t do SEO. Yoast, Rank Math, SEOPress, and the rest are tools — they help you write title tags, generate a sitemap, output schema, and set canonicals. Useful, genuinely. But installing one does not optimize anything, and the little green light does not mean you’re going to rank. It means you put a keyword in a heading. Nobody at Google can see that light.

Plugin sprawl is a performance problem. Every active plugin is more PHP on every request, and often more CSS and JavaScript on every page load, on every page — including the pages that don’t use it. Twenty plugins doing what five could do is how a site quietly fails INP. If a plugin isn’t earning its place, deactivate it and delete it.

Page builders carry a real cost. The convenience is genuine, but so is the markup they generate — deeply nested wrappers, heading levels chosen for size rather than hierarchy, layout shift as sections initialize, and a stylesheet that ships every feature whether the page uses it or not. This is precisely why we build custom themes rather than assembling sites out of builders.

Your theme decides most of your Core Web Vitals before you write a word. How images are sized and lazy-loaded, whether fonts block rendering, whether space is reserved for elements that load late, how much JavaScript runs on first paint — all theme-level decisions. You can’t plugin your way out of a heavy theme.

Watch what your plugins load in the <head>. Third-party scripts — chat widgets, popups, review embeds, heat mapping, analytics — are among the most common causes of poor INP scores, and they’re rarely doing enough to justify themselves. (This, incidentally, is a large part of why we built HDAnalytics: a lightweight, cookieless alternative to loading Google Analytics on every page view.)

Keep everything updated. A hacked site is an SEO catastrophe. Injected spam content, malicious redirects, and a “this site may be hacked” label in the results is a hole that takes months to climb out of.

We wrote more about the performance side of this in Why Fast Websites Matter (and how to make yours faster).

What about AI?

You cannot write honestly about SEO in 2026 without addressing the elephant: a large share of searches now end without anyone clicking through to a website at all. Google answers the question in an AI Overview at the top of the page, and the user moves on.

This is a real shift and the numbers are not small. But “SEO is dead” is the wrong conclusion, for a few reasons:

• Informational queries are hit hardest. “How do I tune a guitar” gets answered on the results page. “Guitar lessons in Hamilton” still sends people to businesses, because the user’s goal is a transaction, not a fact.
• Being cited is the new position one. AI answers link their sources, and the sites cited inside them tend to earn more clicks than they would have from an uncited result. The goal shifts from “rank first” to “be the source.”
• The work to get cited is the work described in this entire article. Clear structure, direct answers near the top of the page, accurate schema, specifics and original information, and a brand that appears consistently and credibly across the web.

The one practical change worth making: answer the question before you elaborate. A page that buries its conclusion under four paragraphs of preamble is harder to extract a citation from than one that states the answer plainly and then explains it. Which is, not coincidentally, also better for the humans who came for an answer.

Also worth knowing: your traffic reports are going to look strange for a while. Impressions up, clicks down, is now a normal pattern rather than a sign that something broke.

Things that do not work

A quick list, because a surprising amount of the advice still floating around is either obsolete or was never true:

• Meta keywords. Google has ignored this tag since 2009.
• Keyword density. There is no magic percentage. Writing to hit one produces text that reads like it was written to hit one.
• Buying backlinks. Against Google’s spam policies, and their link systems are built specifically to neutralize them.
• “Submitting” your site to hundreds of search engines. Two search engines matter in North America. Both find you via links and your sitemap.
• Guaranteed #1 rankings. Nobody can guarantee this. Anybody offering it is selling either brand-name rankings you already had, or trouble.
• Hidden text, doorway pages, and cloaking. These work right up until the manual action arrives.
• Publishing volume for its own sake. Fifty thin AI-generated posts will not outrank five genuinely useful ones, and may well get the whole site demoted.
• Expecting results in two weeks. SEO compounds slowly. Three to six months before meaningful movement is normal.

Where to actually start

If this all feels like a lot, here’s the order we’d tackle it in:

1. Set up Google Search Console. You cannot fix what you can’t see.
2. Confirm your pages are indexed and that no staging-era noindex is still in place.
3. Fix your titles and headings. One <h1> per page, descriptive <title> tags, real heading hierarchy.
4. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile if you serve customers locally.
5. Run PageSpeed Insights and look at the field data section, not the score. Fix whatever sits in the red.
6. Audit your plugins. Delete what you don’t use.
7. Write the pages you’re missing — one solid page per service you actually offer.
8. Add structured data describing what’s genuinely on those pages.
9. Then, and only then, think about backlinks.

Most of the value is in steps one through seven, and most businesses never get past step one.

Thank you for taking the time to read this article. I hope you now have a solid understanding of what SEO is, what has changed recently, and why it matters for your business. Please feel free to contact us for a free quote, or leave a comment or question below.