SEO Fundamentals That Still Work in 2025

SEO advice ages badly. Half of what worked in 2015 no longer works, and most of what 'experts' claim works today is noise. Here are the SEO fundamentals that have held up for 20 years and still drive organic traffic in 2025. Everything else is optimization around the edges.

Fundamental 1: Content That Answers Real Questions

Google's job is to show users the best answer to their query. Your job is to be that best answer. That means writing content about questions your customers actually ask, not content optimized for keyword volume.

The best signal is not search volume; it is 'would I send this article to a client who asked me this question?' If yes, publish. If no, rewrite.

Fundamental 2: Fast, Accessible Pages

Slow sites rank worse. Sites that break on mobile rank worse. Sites that fail accessibility checks rank worse. These are not 'ranking factors' you optimize; they are the baseline competence Google expects.

I check three numbers before publishing any page:

• Lighthouse Performance score (>90)
• Largest Contentful Paint (<2.5s)
• Cumulative Layout Shift (<0.1)

A static site on a CDN hits these without effort. A bloated JavaScript framework with hydration issues does not.

Fundamental 3: Clean Semantic HTML

One <h1> per page. Descriptive <a> text, not 'click here.' Actual <button> elements, not divs styled like buttons. Real <form> elements with <label> for accessibility.

<!-- Not this -->
<div class="button" onclick="submit()">Submit&lt;/div>
 
<!-- This -->
<button type="submit">Submit&lt;/button>

Google parses HTML. Screen readers parse HTML. Use the right tags and both audiences benefit.

Fundamental 4: Useful Metadata

Every page needs:

• A unique, descriptive <title> (<60 chars)
• A <meta name="description"> (~150 chars)
• Open Graph tags for social sharing
• A canonical URL

These show up in search results and social previews. Writing them well is free clicks.

Fundamental 5: Internal Linking

Link to related articles with descriptive anchor text. This distributes authority across your site and helps Google understand topic relationships. Three to five internal links per article is a reasonable target.

Fundamental 6: Sitemaps and Structured Data

Submit an XML sitemap to Google Search Console. Add JSON-LD structured data for articles, products, or events where applicable. Both give Google machine-readable signals about your content:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Article",
  "headline": "SEO Fundamentals",
  "author": {"@type": "Person", "name": "Your Name"},
  "datePublished": "2025-06-28"
}

Rich snippets in search results come from this markup.

What Does Not Work

• Keyword stuffing: hurts rankings, hurts readability
• Link farms and buying links: Google detects and penalizes
• Thin content written for search engines: fails both humans and search
• Exact-match domain names: mostly irrelevant since 2012

What to Skip

Most 'advanced SEO' tactics are noise. Keyword difficulty tools, LSI keywords, TF-IDF analysis. These are Google-adjacent content marketing products, not SEO. Your time is better spent writing one more great article than optimizing an existing one.

The Long Game

SEO compounds. One great article ranks for a year and drives traffic forever. Fifty great articles drive compounding traffic forever. Publish consistently. Each article is a permanent asset.

See the Google Search Central documentation for the official guidelines and Schema.org for structured data types.