Search Engine Optimization (SEO) covers all measures that help a website become more visible in unpaid (organic) search results.Open glossary entry → bundles all measures that help a website rank better in organic, that is unpaid, search results. It differs from Search Engine Advertising (SEA) means paid ads in the search results, usually billed on a pay-per-click basis.Open glossary entry → advertising (SEA) and tends to work over the medium to long term.
SEO is traditionally split into three areas:
- technical SEO: crawlability, Indexing is the step in which a search engine processes crawled content and decides whether a URL is added to the search index. Only indexed pages can appear in search results.Open glossary entry →, PageSpeed refers to the loading time and responsiveness of a website. PageSpeed optimisation covers measures that improve loading time, responsiveness and visual stability.Open glossary entry →, Schema markup is code that describes a page's content in a structured way, so search engines understand it not just as text but as clearly classified information.Open glossary entry →,
- on-page SEO: content matched to Search intent is the goal behind a search query: does the user want to learn something, buy something or reach a specific page? Content only ranks well if it matches this intent.Open glossary entry →, The title tag is an HTML element in the page <head> that defines the page title. It appears in the browser tab and can be used as the clickable title in search results.Open glossary entry →, The meta description is an HTML element in the page <head> that briefly summarises the page's content. Google can display it as the description in the search result.Open glossary entry →, Internal linking refers to links that connect pages within the same website. They control how search engines and users find and thematically classify content.Open glossary entry →,
- off-page SEO: reputation and references from other websites.
Modern SEO increasingly considers AI Visibility describes whether and how visible a brand, website or person is in AI-generated answers. It measures mention, position, description and source linking across multiple platforms and prompts.Open glossary entry → too, because the same fundamentals (accessibility, clear structure, Citability describes how well individual sections of a piece of content can be extracted, summarized and used as an answer by search engines and AI systems.Open glossary entry →) also determine whether content appears in AI answers.