Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of affecting the visibility of a website or a web page in a search engine's "natural" or "organic" search results. In general, the earlier and more frequently a site appears in the search results list, the more visitors it will receive from the search engine's users. SEO may target different kinds of searches, including image search, local search, video search, academic search, news search and industry-specific vertical search engines.
While SEO techniques and strategies need to adapt to the latest search engines algorithms, what makes up SEO should remain mostly consistent.
Note
Google now factors Core Web Vitals in their search engine ranking. For more information, see Core Web Vitals.
There are four components to SEO:
This is what is visually able to be seen, your text as well as images (what visitors are able to see on your website).
Note
If content is hidden, it will still show up in the HTML of a site as there currently isn’t a way of removing it. Search engines should be aware of this and ignore hidden items (for instance if there are multiple H1 tags, but only one can be seen by visitors, search engines should only detect the visible H1). For more information, see Why is Content I have Hidden Showing in Audits?.
How the site as a whole and the individual pages are organized and structured.
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Pages. This would be the placement of heading tags and images, as well as the organization of the content on the page.
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Heading tags. In technical terms, heading tags are headings and subheadings that are denoted as important text with HTML tags. There are six tags: H1-H6.
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Whole site. This pertains to how the pages are organized and presented as well as how visitors will navigate your site. This also includes how and where internal links are utilized.
What search engines see and potentially utilize. Following are some common backend elements:
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Site title and description
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Page titles and descriptions
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Favicon
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Page URLs
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Keywords (search engines do not use meta keywords to impact website ranking; their use is optional)
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Alt text
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Sitemap
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Schema
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Page speed
There is a little bit of overlap here as some elements (such as a page title and URL) can technically be seen by visitors, but aren’t included on the actual site.
Website Builder sites offer a variety of settings and tools for SEO. For more information, see the following articles.
When it comes down to it, the platform does not matter as much for SEO as does the content. As long as you have access to the site header to insert any special SEO tags and easy access to the other SEO settings (such as the site title and keyword information), then any site you build regardless of if it is on the Website Builder or not has the potential to rank high in SEO.
There are two places to set site SEO terms, see the following articles for more information:
Tip
Search engines do not use meta keywords to impact website rankings. Their use is optional.
Yes, the Site Overview has a summary of your site's SEO health. For detailed information, see Site Dashboard: SEO OverviewSEO Overview.