How to Build a Website That Actually Ranks on Google

Most SEO advice is bloated, contradictory, or stuck in 2015. The truth is simpler than the gurus make it sound: Google wants to send people to fast, useful pages that answer their questions. That's it.

Here's what actually moves the needle in 2026, stripped of the fluff.

1. Speed and Stability Come First

If your page loads slowly or jumps around while loading, people leave. Google notices. These are the three numbers that matter, and they're called Core Web Vitals.

Metric What it measures Target LCP How fast the main content loads Under 2.5 seconds INP How quickly the page reacts to clicks Under 200ms CLS How much the layout shifts unexpectedly Under 0.1

Quick wins: serve images in WebP or AVIF, always set explicit width and height on images, and stop loading scripts you don't actually need on page load. Lazy-load anything below the fold.

2. Make It Easy to Crawl

Google's bots have to find your pages before they can rank them. Don't make their job hard.

Use clean URLs people can actually read. /blog/seo-guide beats /p?id=9832 every time.
Pick one version of your domain (https, with or without www) and 301 redirect everything else to it.
Add self-referencing canonical tags so Google knows which URL is the "real" one when filters or tracking parameters create duplicates.
Submit an XML sitemap and keep it clean. Don't list pages you've blocked in robots.txt.

3. Help Google Understand Your Content

Schema markup (JSON-LD) is how you label your content so search engines know what they're looking at. Done right, you earn rich snippets — those star ratings, FAQ dropdowns, and price tags that make your result stand out in a sea of plain blue links.

Drop something like this in your <head>:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "Your post title here",
  "author": { "@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name" }
}

Pick the schema type that actually fits — Article, Product, Recipe, FAQPage, HowTo. Don't just paste the same one everywhere.

4. Write for the Person, Not the Algorithm

This is where most sites lose. You can't game your way to the top anymore. Match what searchers actually want:

One H1 per page, with your main keyword near the start.
Answer the question in the first paragraph. Don't bury the point under 400 words of intro.
Use H2s and H3s to break the page into scannable chunks.
Keep paragraphs short — two or three sentences each. Walls of text kill engagement.
Link to your related posts with descriptive anchor text, not "click here."
Meta titles under 60 characters, meta descriptions under 155. Write them like ad copy, because that's what they are.

5. Earn the Time, Don't Steal It

Here's the part nobody likes to hear: SEO tricks don't beat good content. When someone clicks your link and actually reads to the end instead of bouncing back to the results, Google reads that as proof you deserved the spot.

So write like a human. Use real examples. Cut the filler. If you wouldn't read it yourself, no one else will either.

That's the whole game.