Introduction and Components to SEO

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.

SEO Components

There are four components to SEO:

Content

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).

Structure & Organization

How the site as a whole and the individual pages are organized and structured.

  • Pages. This would be the placement of heading tags and images, as well as the organization of the content on the page.

    • 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.

  • 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.

Back-end Information

What search engines see and potentially utilize. Following are some common backend elements:

  • Site title and description

  • Page titles and descriptions

  • Favicon

  • Page URLs

  • Keywords

  • Alt text

  • Sitemap

  • Schema

  • 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.

Search Engines Algorithm

Ultimately, all sites are at the discretion of these algorithms and they do change frequently. An SEO expert would be a great resource for recent updates and changes.

SEO Settings & Tools

IONOS sites offer a variety of settings and tools for SEO. For more information, see the following articles.

Site SEO Settings

Pages and Popups (page specific SEO)

How do I Set SEO Terms?

Does IONOS have better SEO than other platforms?

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.