This course covered a lot of separate pieces. This lesson puts them in the order you would actually work through them on a real site — starting with the things that make everything else irrelevant if they are wrong.
Nothing else matters until these pass. Every one of them can make an entire site invisible.
yoursite.com/robots.txt exist, and does it not contain Disallow: /?noindex tag? Check the actual HTML, not the CMS setting.http:// redirect to https://, and www resolve consistently one way?If a site is getting no search traffic at all, the cause is almost always in this stage — not in content quality or competition. Check these before optimising anything.
<title>?<h1> per page, and do heading levels form a sensible outline without skipping?alt text, sensible filenames, and width/height set?viewport meta tag, and does the mobile version contain all the content?Work strictly in stage order. A site failing Stage 1 gains nothing from perfect structured data. A site with excellent technical health and pages that do not answer their search will plateau regardless.
Within a stage, prioritise by reach: something affecting every page on the site is worth more than something affecting one page, even when the single-page fix looks more satisfying.
Results arrive on a scale of weeks and months. Impressions move before clicks. Some things you change will have no measurable effect, and you often will not know which. This is normal, and it is why the discipline of measuring over months rather than days matters so much in this field.
The thing worth remembering
The single most durable idea in this course: search engines are trying to answer questions well. Work that genuinely helps them do that keeps working. Work that only simulates helping stops working, usually without warning. When a new tactic appears, that is the test to apply to it.