What Is SEO? Search Engine Optimisation Explained Simply
SEO is making your pages easy for search engines to find, understand and show. How crawling and ranking work, what matters, and what to ask your AI builder.
Mythex Team · · 6 min read
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making your website easy for search engines like Google to find, understand and show to people searching for what you offer. It has three parts: technical (can search engines reach and read your pages?), content (do your pages answer what people search for?) and reputation (do other sites link to you?). Good SEO means more of the right visitors arrive without you paying for each click.
Why it matters when you build with AI
An AI builder can produce a good-looking site in minutes. Whether anyone finds it through search is a separate question, and some of the answer is decided by how the site is built.
- Rendering. Many AI builders create single-page apps, where the browser receives a nearly empty HTML file and JavaScript draws the content. Google can render JavaScript, but its own documentation says server-side rendering or prerendering is still a great idea, because it's faster and not all bots can run JavaScript.
- Page basics. Each page needs its own URL, title and description. AI-generated sites often ship with one title shared by every page.
- Content. AI can write text quickly, but search engines reward content that is genuinely helpful and original, not generic filler.
Knowing the basics lets you ask for the right structure from the start, instead of discovering the problems months after launch.
An everyday analogy
Think of a huge library with one very busy librarian.
- Crawling is the librarian walking the shelves, finding new books, often by following references from books already known.
- Indexing is reading each book and filing a note about what it covers.
- Ranking is what happens when someone asks a question: the librarian picks the books that answer it best and hands over a short list.
SEO is making your book easy to find (on a shelf the librarian visits), easy to understand (clear title, clear chapters), and worth recommending (it genuinely answers the question, and other good books cite it).
How search engines work
Google describes three stages:
- Crawling. Automated programs called crawlers download pages they discover. Google notes that the vast majority of new pages it finds are found through links.
- Indexing. Google analyses the page's text, images and structure, and stores what it learns in its index. If there are duplicates, it picks one version as the main (canonical) one.
- Serving results. When someone searches, Google chooses and orders results from its index, using many signals about relevance and quality.
Two points from Google's own documentation are worth remembering: Google doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher, and it doesn't guarantee it will crawl, index or show any page, even one that follows all its guidelines.
The three parts of SEO
| Part | What it covers | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| Technical SEO | Can search engines reach, render and understand your pages? | Crawlable links, unique URLs, fast loading, mobile-friendly layout, sitemap, HTTPS |
| On-page SEO | Does each page clearly say what it's about? | Title, meta description, headings, descriptive image alt text, structured data |
| Off-page SEO | Do others vouch for you? | Links from relevant sites, mentions, reviews on other platforms |
Underneath all three is content. Google's starter guide asks for content that is helpful, reliable, easy to read, well organised and written for people first.
A worked example: a dog groomer's website
Say you're building a site for a dog groomer in Leeds. Here's how SEO shapes it.
Research what people search for. Customers are likely to search things like "dog grooming Leeds", "puppy first groom" or "hand stripping terrier Leeds". Those become pages or sections.
One page per topic. Instead of a single long page, the site has a home page, a page per service (full groom, puppy groom, hand stripping), a prices page, and a contact page with the address and opening hours.
Unique titles and descriptions. For example:
- Title:
Puppy Grooming in Leeds | Pawfect Grooming - Description:
Gentle first grooms for puppies aged 12 weeks and up, in our quiet Headingley salon. See prices and book online.
Content that answers questions. The puppy page explains what happens at a first groom, how long it takes, what to bring, and the price. Real photos of the salon, with descriptive alt text.
Technical basics. The site is prerendered, so each page's HTML already contains the text. It has a sitemap, works well on phones and loads quickly.
Local presence. The groomer claims a Google Business Profile with the same name, address and phone number as the website, and asks happy customers for reviews.
Measure. After launch, the owner verifies the site in Google Search Console, submits the sitemap, and checks which searches bring visitors.
Common terms explained
| Term | What it means |
|---|---|
| SERP | Search engine results page — the list you see after searching. |
| Organic results | Unpaid results, as opposed to ads. |
| Keyword / query | The words people type into a search engine. |
| Crawler (bot) | A program that discovers and downloads web pages, such as Googlebot. |
| Index | A search engine's database of pages it knows about. |
| Title tag | The page title, often shown as the clickable headline in results. |
| Meta description | A short summary that may be shown under the title in results. |
| Backlink | A link to your site from another site. |
| Canonical URL | The preferred address when the same content exists at several URLs. |
| robots.txt | A file telling crawlers which parts of a site they may crawl. |
| Sitemap | A file listing the pages you want search engines to know about. |
| Rendering | Running a page's code to produce what users see. |
| Google Search Console | Google's free tool for seeing how your site performs in search. |
Common mistakes and misconceptions
- "SEO is a one-off task." It's ongoing: new content, fixing problems, earning links.
- Keyword stuffing. Repeating a phrase unnaturally doesn't help; Google's guide lists it among things to avoid.
- Same title on every page. Each page needs its own clear title and description.
- Content only visible after JavaScript runs. Google can often handle it, but prerendering or server rendering is safer and faster.
- Hash-based URLs like
/#/pricing. Google's JavaScript SEO guide recommends real URLs via the History API instead of fragments. - Expecting instant results. Google says some changes take months to show.
- Believing in magic numbers. Google's starter guide says there's no minimum or maximum word count for ranking.
- Mass-producing thin pages. Hundreds of near-identical AI-written pages are more likely to hurt than help.
What to ask your AI builder for
- "Give every page its own URL, a unique title under 60 characters and a meta description."
- "Make sure page content is in the HTML the server sends — use prerendering, static generation or server rendering."
- "Use real paths like
/services/puppy-grooming, not#URLs." - "Use one H1 per page and descriptive headings."
- "Add descriptive alt text to meaningful images."
- "Generate a
sitemap.xmlwith absolute URLs and arobots.txtthat points to it." - "Return a real 404 status for pages that don't exist."
- "Add Open Graph tags so links look good when shared."
- "Keep the site fast on mobile: compress images and avoid heavy scripts."
For a deeper technical walk-through, see SEO for AI-built websites. After launch, set up Google Search Console. For the marketing side, read SEO for startups.
SEO in Mythex
Mythex doesn't have a separate SEO panel. You improve SEO by changing the app itself — in chat, or in the code editor on Pro. The default setup is a Vite + React single-page app, which is weaker for search than static or server-rendered pages, so if search traffic matters, say so in your first prompt and ask for a static-friendly or prerendered structure. The docs recipe on SEO for your published app has a starter prompt covering titles, meta descriptions, Open Graph tags, a sitemap and robots.txt. After changes, publish again. Pro plans can use a custom domain, and website templates give you starting prompts for common kinds of site.
Questions
What is SEO in simple terms?
SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of making your website easy for search engines to find, understand and show to people searching for what you offer. It covers technical setup, the content on your pages, and how other sites link to you.
How long does SEO take to work?
Google says some changes take effect within hours and others take months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging the effect of a change. A brand-new site usually needs more time to be discovered and trusted.
Can I pay Google to rank higher?
No. Google states that it doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more often or rank it higher. Paid search ads are a separate product and are labelled as ads.
Do meta keywords help SEO?
No. Google says it doesn't use the keywords meta tag. A unique, accurate title and meta description for each page are far more useful.
Is an AI-built website bad for SEO?
Not in itself. Search engines judge the page, not the tool that made it. The usual issue is technical: many AI-built sites render content with JavaScript in the browser, which some crawlers handle poorly. Prerendering or server rendering helps.