SEO basics for beginners
If you can build a game but “SEO” still sounds like a dark art, this is for you. No jargon, no growth-hacking, no tricks. Just the handful of things that actually help the right people find your pages through search, and the order I'd learn them in.
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What SEO actually is
SEO is making your pages easy to find and easy to understand, both for the people searching and for the search engines showing them results. That's the whole idea. It isn't a trick you apply once. It's writing a clear page that answers a real question, structuring it so a machine can read it, and earning enough trust over time that it gets shown.
What actually matters
- A real search. Write to a question people actually type, not the one you wish they did.
- A clear page. Answer up top, sensible headings, one topic per page. Readers and crawlers both reward it.
- Trust, earned slowly. New sites rank slowly. Age, links and a track record compound. There's no shortcut around that.
- Free measurement. Google Search Console shows what you actually rank for. Start there before paying for any tool.
The SEO posts
Everything in the SEO and AI-search cluster, newest first.
Google core update 2026: is there one in August?Trackers spiked on 1 August and the forums called it an update. Google did not. Every confirmed 2026 core update, three things "Google sa…
How to rank in ChatGPT (and why the answer keeps changing)ChatGPT cites different sources depending on how hard it thinks: Semrush found only 25.6% overlap between reasoning modes on identical pr…
What is llms.txt? (And why Google says you don't need one)llms.txt is a Markdown file at your site's root that's supposed to hand your pages to AI models. Ahrefs checked 137,210 domains: 97% of t…
Humans hate text. AI needs it.Readers skim, so we build pages out of visuals. But the crawlers behind ChatGPT and Claude read raw HTML only — no JavaScript, no images…
AI search visibility won't sell your indie game. Here's what it actually does.Zero-click is real, but AI referrals are tiny and no storefront counts web traffic — Valve says so outright. So what is AI search visibil…
Free and cheap indie game marketing toolsA practical, no-budget stack of indie game marketing tools: the free ones worth setting up first, and the few cheap upgrades worth paying…
Indie Game Marketing BasicsThe unglamorous order that actually gets a game found: a burst of short clips, the two channels you own, and a Steam page that does its j…
The order I'd learn it in
You don't need all of it at once. This is the sequence that keeps a beginner from spinning their wheels.
01
Find real searches
Match a search people actually make. Free tools and Google's own autocomplete get you surprisingly far.
02
Structure the page
One question per page, answered in the first lines, with clear headings underneath.
03
Set up free tracking
Google Search Console from day one, so you have a baseline to judge against later.
04
Be patient
Rankings move over months, not days. Judge by the trend, not by tomorrow.
05
Then go deeper
Internal links, technical SEO, schema. Worth it, but only once the basics hold.
The honest bit: SEO is slow, and there's no hack that skips the line. Anyone selling one is selling something. What works is boring and repeatable: clear pages, real answers, patience. That's the whole game.
The basics guides
Every beginner guide here, newest first. New ones show up automatically as I write them.
Free and cheap indie game marketing tools
A practical, no-budget stack of indie game marketing tools: the free ones worth setting up first, and the few cheap upgrades worth paying for. Under €20 a month.
Indie Game Marketing Basics
The unglamorous order that actually gets a game found: a burst of short clips, the two channels you own, and a Steam page that does its job. What matters, and what's noise.
Common questions
How long does SEO take to work?
Longer than you want. New sites rank slowly because age, links and a track record compound, and there's no shortcut that survives contact with an update. Expect months, not weeks — which is exactly why you start before launch, not at it.
Do I need to know how to code?
No. If you can build a game you're already over-qualified for the technical side. Most of what matters is writing a page that answers a real question clearly, and that's a writing problem, not an engineering one.
What's the first thing I should fix?
Connect Google Search Console and look at what you already rank for. Most people are surprised. You can't fix a page you have no data on, and this is the one measurement that's free and honest.
Is SEO dead now that AI answers everything?
No, but the payoff is shifting. AI assistants get their answers from pages they can read, so a clear, well-structured page is now the thing that gets cited as well as the thing that ranks. The work is the same; the audience for it got bigger.
Can I do SEO for a game that isn't out yet?
That's the best time. Ranking takes months, so a page that goes up during development has time to earn its position before launch day — when you actually need the traffic.