Search engine optimisation — SEO — is the process of making your site better for search engines. According to Google's official SEO Starter Guide, the goal is to help search engines understand your content and help users find your site and decide whether to visit it. Rather than chasing ranking tricks, sustainable SEO is built on a clear technical foundation, quality content, and consistent signals of relevance. Official documentation: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/seo-starter-guide
The Core Practices Google Recommends
Google's Search Essentials (formerly Webmaster Guidelines) identify a small set of core practices that have the greatest impact on how your content ranks and appears. These have not fundamentally changed, but they remain the most reliable foundation.
The primary actions are: creating helpful, reliable, people-first content; placing relevant keywords in prominent locations such as page titles, main headings, and descriptive alt text; ensuring links are crawlable so Google can discover other pages on your site; and making sure content such as images, videos, structured data, and JavaScript follows Google's specific best practices for each format.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/essentials
- Create content that is genuinely helpful to real users — not written for search engines
- Use relevant keywords in titles, headings, alt text, and link text
- Ensure all links are crawlable with standard anchor elements
- Submit XML sitemaps and request recrawling after significant changes
- Make sure resources (images, CSS, JS) are accessible to Googlebot
Technical SEO: What Developers Need to Handle
Google's developer-focused SEO guide outlines what needs to happen at the code and infrastructure level. The starting point is testing your site in Google's URL Inspection Tool or Rich Results Test to understand how Googlebot sees your pages.
For JavaScript-heavy applications — including React and Next.js apps — there are important considerations. While Google does run JavaScript, there are differences in how and when it is processed. Googlebot can only find content that is textually visible in the rendered output, so content that relies entirely on client-side rendering may be indexed more slowly or incompletely. Using server-side rendering or static generation improves discoverability.
Additional technical priorities include: managing robots.txt to control crawl access; using canonical tags to prevent duplicate content issues; implementing hreflang for multilingual sites; and using 301 redirects when migrating pages or domains.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/fundamentals/get-started-developers
- Use Google's URL Inspection Tool to verify how your pages are indexed
- Server-side rendering or static generation improves JS-heavy app discoverability
- Manage robots.txt, canonical tags, and sitemaps as standard practice
- Implement 301 redirects for any page or domain migration
- Use structured data (schema.org) to help Google understand page content
SEO in the Age of AI Overviews
Google's Search now includes AI Overviews and AI Mode, which surface relevant links alongside generated answers. According to Google's official guidance, there are no additional technical requirements to appear in these features — the same foundational SEO best practices apply.
To be eligible as a supporting link in AI Overviews, a page must be indexed and eligible to appear in standard Google Search results with a snippet. Google notes that indexing and serving are never guaranteed, even when all best practices are followed.
The principle remains consistent: focus on building pages that are genuinely useful, technically accessible, and accurately represent their content. SEO that serves users well tends to serve search engines well — including AI-powered features.
Reference: https://developers.google.com/search/docs/appearance/ai-features