SEO is two jobs wearing one title. Technical SEO makes the site legible to machines: fast pages, clean HTML, sitemaps, canonicals, structured data, no crawl traps. Content SEO makes it worth finding: pages that answer what people search, written as if a person will read them, because one will.
The durable version of it is boring: publish things genuinely useful, keep the site fast and honest, earn links by being linkable. The shortcuts — bought links, spun content, keyword-stuffed doorways — work until the algorithm notices, and the noticing is the expensive part. Rankings follow usefulness; the trick is there is no trick.
Related terms
Answer engine optimization (AEO)
Structuring content so that answer engines — chat assistants and AI overviews — can find it, quote it and attribute it correctly.
Indexing
A search engine adding a page to its searchable database — crawling fetches it, indexing makes it findable; unindexed is invisible.
Structured data
Machine-readable markup — usually JSON-LD written in the schema.org vocabulary — that tells search and answer engines what the entities on a page are.
The bench this belongs to
Web performanceA rebuild that loads on a phone on mobile data, in the country your customers are actually in. Core Web Vitals are the measurement, revenue is the point.
