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The Best SEO Guide For 2026🚀

Updated for AI Search (May 2026) TL;DR: SEO in 2026 still rewards the fundamentals — a clean site, strong internal links, content that answers the query — but classic Google rankings are now one of two surfaces. The other is AI search: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude. The strategies below still wor

Alejandro Rioja
Alejandro Rioja
Updated 23 min read
TL;DR

SEO in 2026 still rewards the fundamentals — a clean site, strong internal links, content that answers the query — but classic Google rankings are now one of two surfaces. The other is AI search: ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, and Claude.

Table of contents

Open Table of contents

The basics of SEO

Definition of SEO

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization, which is a way to reverse-engineer how a Search Engine (i.e. Google) works in order to rank higher in the Search Engine Results Page (SERPs).

Why is SEO important?

SEO is probably the most important competitive digital marketing advantage that you can have over your competition. 

A strong SEO will get you free organic traffic that otherwise you would have need to pay for (e.g. via Google PPC Adwords or Facebook Ads). Easier said than done, ranking on the first page of Google is both a science and an art.

In this day and age, if you rank anything past the first page on Google you will barely get any traffic so you need to work on your Search Engine Optimization game if you’re serious about your online presence. 

Ranking high for your target keywords not only puts you in the spotlight but also can help you steal business from your competition. It creates brand awareness and helps you close more sales.

Now that you have a clear understanding of what SEO is, keep reading to find out how to do SEO like a PRO.

Which factors affect SEO?

SEO is affected by a multitude of factors such as the authority of your root domain (flux.la), your subdomain (sub.flux.la) and the authority of the url itself https://flux.la/hidden-seo-tricks.

Also Google takes thousands of other cues when it comes to ranking your site, such as time on site, bounce rate, social shares and more.

Remember, the goal of Google is to show visitors the best information within the first few results, so their algorithms must analyze a lot of factors to achieve that.  

We can subdivide these SEO ranking factors into two sections: On-Page and Off-Page SEO.

Ready to get your hands dirty?

Master These 8 On-page SEO Factors and Crush Google Rankings

On-page SEO refers to any optimization that you can do to the structure of your site itself. Here are the most important aspects:

(Note: Every time I used a list I have ranked the steps to take in terms of easiness over ROI, i.e. the first items in each actionable list will bring you the most results. )

  1. Optimize your meta title and meta description. Install Yoast SEO and make sure all your blog posts have a green light. Make sure to fill in a keyword rich title and description. You can find very valuable and highly-converting keywords by looking at the Google Adwords being displayed when you search for your keyword.

  2. Increase your page CTR by adding any of these proven keywords to the title and description of your post: Today, Right Now, Fast, Step-by-Step, Simple, Guide. Also add numbers, i.e. “22 Marketing Techniques You Must Try Today”. Having a high CTR will bump your page towards the top of the results.

  3. Use descriptive and straightforward URLS. example: https://alejandrorioja.com/seo-tips/

  4. Link to authority sites. Various studies show that linking to high domain authority sites like Wikipedia or Harvard can increase your Google rankings. Make sure you include at least 3-4 outbound links on each post.

  5. Make your site load fast. Google has indicated in their webmaster’s blog that page load time is one of the signals they look at when evaluating your site: “Faster sites create happy users and we’ve seen in our internal studies that when a site responds slowly, visitors spend less time there.”
    Here is what you can do to improve your site speed    

    • Install WP Super Cache (easy to use, less control) or W3 Total Cache (more control, harder to use)

    • If you’re using WordPress, Install Ewww Image Optimizer or Shortpixels to reduce your image sizes.  

    • Otherwise, you will need to do the following    

      • Compress your HTML, JS, and CSS files via Gzip (Don’t do images)  

      • Use a content distribution network (CDN) like Amazon Cloudfront. (A CDN is a network of servers located all over the world all of which contain copies of your site. Using a CDN, you can distribute the load of serving your pages so that your sites can load faster.)  

      • Use Photoshop and optimize your images for web.  

  6. (Must have) Get an SSL certificate (i.e. https). This will make your site more “legit” but also will also give you a boost in the search results. Read the official announcement about SSL by Google.

  7. Learn how to write the perfect SEO article of 2500+ words. By perfect I not only mean SEO-wise but also content-wise such as this article, so you keep people on your site and also generate business from it.

  8. Add multimedia to your posts (i.e. images and videos). That will make your site more useful to the user and will also make them spend more time on it.

  9. (Bonus) Read my in-depth article that covers all the on-page SEO factors.

In short, make sure your User Experience (UX) is top-notch.

After you’ve cleared out your on-page SEO


Don’t Forget These 3 Equally Important Off-Page SEO Factors

Here are some key factors that most people miss when it comes to off-page SEO:

  1. You need tons of Social Signals. Yes, Google DOES care about how much social traffic and shares your article gets. Here are some ideas to boost that.
    • Join a lot (and I mean a lot) of Facebook Groups in your niche. Post to all those groups every time you create a new post, and repost every 2-3 months. This will increase your traffic like crazy, not to mention that each share, like, and comment adds to your social score.
    • As you can imagine, you would need to spend a lot of time posting to 100s of Facebook groups every time you wanted to promote an article. If you have been reading my articles, you know how much I hate doing repetitive tasks, so I suggest to hire a Virtual Assistant on Fiverr to help you increase your productivity. 
  2. It’s never too early (or too late) to build Press and Powerful backlinks from high authority sites. Here quality trumps quantity, although quantity shouldn’t be overlooked. A shout out from Forbes is worth a lot more than 100 lower-tier sites, but the lower-tier sites can help you achieve good backlink volume. Here’s how to get all those backlinks.  
    • Build relationships with writers in your space so that they cover you not just once but multiple times. Provide value first before asking for anything. A good way to build a relationship is to feature them first on your blog by accepting a guest post from them.    Reach out to other bloggers and writers to see if they want to cover your story. My most effective way to reach out is via Facebook Messenger or Twitter (in that order), email requests usually hit the spam folder but a carefully crafted A/B testing campaign will yield you good results. You can also use AuthoritySpy to find the movers and shakers in your industry. 
    • If you’re an entrepreneur, I will feature you on my projects Future Sharks and So Influential. I can help you with more quality backlinks.    
    • For starters, if you want to guest post on my sites, by all means message me with a couple sample writings and ideas (send the article on your first email directly). Find out more here.   
  3. Build a Brand. Building a brand will help you get even more traffic over time. When you see a results that shows NYTimes and OnlineNewsNet, which one are you more likely to click? Exactly. (More on this at the bottom)

Read the full article on off-site SEO.

Forget Search Engine Optimization, it’s now time for Search Engine DOMINATION

Now that we’ve covered the basics of Search Engine Optimization, it is time to talk about Search Engine Domination. 

With the introduction of Rankbrain, coming up first on Google really requires 2 major activities.

To dominate the results you need two things: Superb Content + High Quality Backlinks.

Let’s first dive into content.

Related: Curious about what other SEO experts see as a trend this year?

How long should your article be to rank on the first page?

Generally, long content will out-seo any other short form.

In a study done of over a million of blog posts, researchers found that the ideal length of a blog post is 1900+ words as shown in this graphic:

length of content seo

300 word blog posts won’t cut it in the long term for the following reason: people will only click on your site, read the article in 30 seconds and leave, without giving you the opportunity to convert that click into a client.

Also, long posts will naturally contain a healthy sprinkle of keywords throughout the text instead of a jam-packed 300-word article in which 50 of the words are just your target keywords. 

More importantly, long content will increase the time on site (also known as dwell time) that someone spends on your site, which is a key metric when it comes to rankings. 

The general strategy to write a blog post is to create one that adds value (just like this one, I hope). This naturally leads you to write extensive content. This blog post for instance is a monster ~3800 words. 

You must aim to write the best article ever written on the topic that you chose. The easiest way is to search for a keyword and condense the top 10 search results. For more info, check out this Skyscraper Technique by Brian Dean.

If you want me to write an article for you with all the perfect SEO, Clearscope reports, keyword research and links, get this:

Now that we got content out of the way. We need to focus on backlinks.

Let me say that again.  Backlinks are the holy grail of SEO.

How do you get backlinks?

If you follow these 11 white hat SEO strategies (great content and solid backlinks) you can be sure your site will be safe of any Hummingbird, Penguin, Panda or Fred updates.

Best SEO tools to rank in 2020

As evidenced throughout this SEO blog post, I am a big fan of tools and scripts to make my life easier.

I have probably tested more than 30 tools over the years. 

Here are my personal favorites to outrank my competitors. You can also read my full list of SEO tools. 

5 Essential SEO tools:

  1. (paid) Ahrefs. This tool will allow you to spy on your competitors backlinks and do advanced Keyword Research. I have the Lite plan for $100/mo. 
  2. (paid) SEMRush. Similar to Ahrefs but now recently launched a beta version of a content optimizer that I really like. I am on the free trial.
  3. (free) Google Keyword Planner. You can use the Keyword Planner to see the search volume and difficulty of a particular set of keywords.
  4. (free) Keywords Everywhere. I love that I can see information about volume, CPC and competition on every Google search I make.
  5. (free) SEOQuake. Shows great insights underneath each search result.

Nice to have:

  1. (free) Alexa Toolbar. Although the Alexa Rank of a site has nothing to do with its SEO, I still find it valuable to understand what kind of traffic my sites and competitors sites are getting and where it is coming from. Here is how to lower your Alexa Rank.
  2. (free) The Moz Toolbar, which helps me look at various metrics of a page (such as its domain authority) at a quick glance
  3. (free) the brand new Chrome Extension SEO Minion, which will help you analyze the on-page SEO health of any site.

My Exact Step-by-Step SEO Strategy to Optimize Any Site

I have a lot of sites (from insurance to interviews to digital marketing).

While each site has its own tone and audience, the SEO principles are the exact same.

This is the blueprint I follow for each website I optimize:

1. Define your content strategy

There is no point in ranking high if that blog post is not allowing you to forge a relationship with your readers, earn more Adsense Revenue or generate sales and sign ups.

Thus, the first step in writing is determining what you want to achieve with your post. Are you writing to generate leads? Collecting emails? Do you want to be perceived as an industry leader?

The goal of your content strategy will largely determine how you will structure your blog post.

For instance, if you want to be a thought leader then you need a long post, to collect sign ups you need an easier to follow funnel with reviews (and ideally a video at the top of the page).

2. Define your area of expertise (aka your niche)

After you have defined your content strategy, think about what information your readers will find valuable.

If you’re writing about diet and weight loss with the hopes of selling your program to your subscribers, you want to create a relationship with your readers throughout a series of posts that inform the reader and that set you apart as a thought leader or expert in that field. 

You might even want to build an email list and then sell your products by means of email marketing.

Once you know what information will resonate you will be able to find keyword inspiration much quicker.

3. Do amazing keyword research

Ranking for “seo” is hard. Ranking for “seo tips” is a bit easier (medium tail keyword).

How do you do proper keyword research?

You can use multiple tools to find the keywords with the perfect balance of difficulty and search volume.

In Ahrefs, you can go to Keyword Research and type in a few of the keywords that relate to the blog post that you are looking to write.

After their algorithm runs, you will be presented with the stats for your keywords plus other keywords that you should consider.

Here, I like to pick keywords with difficulty <60 and volume > 500. Hint: You can sort this on Ahrefs. (Btw, I’m not affiliated with Ahrefs, I just love their tools)

Once you have 3 or 4 keywords identified, I get to writing.

(in my case “best seo tips”, “seo optimization tips”, “wordpress seo tips”)

Another method to find keywords is using the Search Console

Did you know that the answer to ranking #1 has been given to you by Google?

Yes, it is just hidden under your Search Console.

If you jump to Search Analytics, you can see valuable data like keywords that you already rank for. I suggest you install the Keywords Everywhere Chrome plugin to see information like Monthly Volume, CPC and Competition.

Sometimes it is easier to optimize and update your old blog posts than writing a new one. (For instance, I constantly update this particular post to include information that I might have missed).

When I want to update my posts, I grab all the keywords that each post ranks for, put them into a Google doc and then sort them by either Volume or Competition and then see if there are any content holes I could fix. (For instance, this article was lacking a section about “keyword research” so I added it in).

You can also find keywords using Keywords Everywhere and running through a couple Google searches.

After you find the right keywords, you should know how to do keyword clustering. (I plan to do a post about it later)

4. Write the perfect content that SEOs almost naturally

I already mentioned that you should think about 2500 word posts or longer.

Here’s how I write one of those monster posts with the least amount of effort and time spent.

First, I search the keywords found in step 3 and see what the top rankers are writing about and see if they are mentioning something I don’t already know. From there, I structure my post simply by headers. 

After the keywords are strategically placed in the H2 headers, the paragraphs pretty much write themselves. (from this step, you could outsource it to a writer if you want. I’ve had great experience with Freeeup) 

Once the blog post is drafted up, it’s time for an SEO check via Yoast (WordPress Plugin). On the focus keyword, I pick the keyword with the highest volume from the 3-4 target keywords.

After that I include images and videos. 

I hit Publish and then I pray and hope it ranks. 

No, of course not. That’s just the beginning the secret of ranking is what comes after.  

5. The half-automatic, half-manual way of ranking the content

You wouldn’t want all the hard work of writing the perfect blog post to just go to waste, right?

A blog post is only valuable if it ranks on the first page, otherwise it really doesn’t matter. Period. 

Here are few things I do to rank such content:

Another big bonus: build a reputation

When you become the authority in your niche, you will notice that ranking your content is much easier.

This is due to the fact that Google is now using humans to manually evaluate sites (among 200 other ranking factors).

If you can position yourself as the expert, you will crush the Google SERPs.

Here’s how you can boost your personal brand:

In case you aren’t familiar, the featured snippet looks like this:

win the featured snippet on Google

There are several types of Featured Snippets, such as:

Since it takes up so much real estate on the search page, you can be sure it drives a ton of clicks.

The way to get to a featured snippet is to first rank top 10 for the given query.

However, not all queries will have a featured snippet. To check if a given query has a featured snippet you can use Ahrefs.

Find the Featured Snippet option under SERP features.

featured snippets on ahrefs

Now for a given query, try to answer it in a the most succinct way possible (<40 words)

Another tool you can use is AnswerThePublic.

October update on Featured Snippets:

Now Google is allowing publishers to set up their own snippet markup using the robots tag. Here are those variables:

An example usage might be

<meta name="robots" content="max-snippet:60, max-image-preview:large">

Bottom line

That’s all. I just described the step-by-step white-hat SEO strategy that I use for my own sites and for my clients. Hopefully, you found it valuable and you act on this today.

Whatever you do, make sure you don’t fall in the trap and start doing some black-hat SEO techniques like cloaking or spammy backlink building, it can get you seriously penalized by Google. Plus, your high rankings will only be short-lived.

Have a friend that is struggling with SEO? Send them this guide to help them out. 

Also help me out by sharing this guide on Facebook and Twitter. 🙂

Did you learn something new? Let me know in the comments. If you know any other techniques that are not mentioned in this SEO post, please share them so that we can all benefit. 

Make sure to also check out these other great content and opportunities by me Don SEO:

How SEO works in AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Google AI Overviews, Claude)

AI engines don’t ‘rank’ pages the way Google does — they extract answers and cite sources. In my own logs, AI Overviews and Perplexity preferentially pull from posts that have a clean TL;DR at the top, a numbered step-by-step section, and an FAQ block underneath. That’s the same scaffold I’m now adding to every pillar post on this site.

If you’re already doing classic SEO well, getting cited in AI search is a structural overlay — not a separate strategy. The page that ranks #3 on Google for a head term is usually the page Perplexity and ChatGPT pull from. The trick is making sure that page is structured so the LLM can lift the answer cleanly. Schema markup, semantic chunking, and citation-friendly formatting do most of the work.

The 4-block GEO scaffold for SEO

  1. Lead with a TL;DR. 2-4 sentences at the top of the post that answer the head query directly. AI Overviews and Perplexity preferentially cite this block.
  2. Add a numbered step-by-step section. Generative engines extract clean ordered lists into their answers more reliably than prose.
  3. Close with an FAQ. Use the literal phrasing of questions people actually ask in your niche; mark up with FAQPage schema.
  4. Cite primary sources. Link to Google’s own AI Overviews documentation, OpenAI’s structured-data guidance, and Anthropic’s content-quality posts. LLMs trust pages that cite the model providers themselves.

Internal reading on AI SEO + GEO

If you’re building this into your stack, also read: What is SEO?, 11 on-page SEO tips, 17 white-hat SEO techniques, the complete keyword research guide, the schema markup tutorial, the programmatic SEO guide, how I drive 250,000+ monthly visits.

FAQ — SEO in the AI search era

Yes — and it matters more, not less. AI Overviews don’t replace the underlying organic results; they sit on top of them and pull from the same pool. If you don’t rank in classic Google, you don’t get cited in the AI Overview. SEO is now the prerequisite for AI visibility.

How is GEO different from SEO?

GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) optimizes for citation inside generative answers — ChatGPT, Perplexity, AI Overviews, Claude. SEO optimizes for ranking in classic search results. They overlap heavily on fundamentals (page authority, content depth, schema), but GEO adds structural requirements: a quotable TL;DR, a numbered step-by-step block, an FAQ that mirrors literal user questions, and primary-source citations the LLM can verify.

What’s the single highest-leverage change I can make this week?

Add a TL;DR block and an FAQ section to your top 5 organic pages. That alone moves AI-engine citation rates noticeably in my testing. Everything else in this guide still applies — but if you only have an hour, that’s the hour.

Where I’d take this next

If you operate inside any of the loops above, I build custom AI agent systems that automate them. The whole site you’re reading is one — here’s the stack.

Updated for May 2026

SEO in 2026 is unrecognizable from the 2020-era playbook. Three shifts that matter for anything written before mid-2024:

  1. AI Overviews are the new SERP zero position. Google’s AI Overviews default to roughly 60% of US informational queries, eating most “what is” / “how to” CTR. Optimizing for citation inside the AI Overview is now as important as ranking #1.
  2. GEO (Generative Engine Optimization) is the working term for cross-engine optimization — getting cited inside ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, and Gemini answers. ~12% of high-intent commercial queries in late 2025 sample studies showed a direct-citation flow from these engines (vs. zero pre-2023).
  3. E-E-A-T (now E^3-A-T, Experience + Expertise + Establishment + Authoritativeness + Trustworthiness) continues to be the framing Google uses internally — “Establishment” was the 2024 addition emphasizing brand-level signals.

Tool landscape (May 2026): Ahrefs and Semrush both shipped Generative Engine tracking. Surfer SEO + the Topical Authority crowd added GEO scoring. Screaming Frog still the standard crawler. AlsoAsked, Keyword Insights, and Frase shifted heavily into AI-Overview snippet engineering.

If this post predates May 2024, treat its core advice as the Google-search baseline and layer the GEO playbook on top.

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