What is SEO?

The abbreviation SEO stands for "Search Engine Optimization" and includes measures that serve to ensure that your website appears as far ahead as possible in search engine results. The most important factors in SEO include the use of relevant keywords, a good website structure, a fast loading time and a high user-friendliness. It is also important that the website is updated regularly and offers added value for the user. To improve your SEO performance, measures such as the use of redirects, robots.txt, sitemap.xml, ads.txt, Google Pagespeed Insights as well as the use of tools such as Google Search Console or Facebook Pixel can also be helpful. In this article, we will go into a large part of these measures and show you the setting options in the website editor.

SEO-Features in the Website Editor

You can find the global features in the CMS menu under More SEO/Meta. Here you can make your global SEO settings for the entire website, such as keywords, page titles and meta tags. You can get an overview of the individual features in this article.

What are SEO ranking factors?

A secure and accessible website

Search engines use programs, also called bots or search engine bots or crawlers, that periodically search the internet for websites. When a new website is found, it is added to the database. This process is called indexing. The crawlers also record websites that have already been indexed and enter possible changes into their database. This can be partially influenced with certain meta information, but ultimately the programs themselves decide when your page is visited again, so it can take some time before changes to your website are recognized and thus also displayed in the search results. 

Google and Bing offer tools that help you manage your websites in these search engines. Especially in case of extensive changes to the website, a request for re-indexing is often useful. 

You can use the following tools for this:

• Google Search Console
• Bing Webmaster Tools

Opinions are divided on the question of whether your site should go online with the subdomain www or without a subdomain. Currently, the trend is towards a website without the subdomain "www". However, this is not yet decisive for your SEO ranking. It is much more important that there is only one version of your site. In the Website Editor an automatic forwarding of your domain to www.yourcooldomain is set by default. Accordingly, it is advisable to specify only this domain in the search engines. Avoid duplicate content, not only on your website!

A thoughtful structure of your website

Besides a clean coded website, there are other technical ways to make your website fit for a good search engine ranking. In principle, it is about offering your website visitor an optimal experience on your website from a technical point of view. 

Meaningful adjustment of your page content and page titles

For all pages you can set appealing titles in the page settings. If you use a blog or other content that is combined in a collection, you can of course also adjust the title for this in the collection settings. In the collections you have the possibility to enter the most important information for each collection entry.

As a rule, website titles, page titles, blog post titles and headings are particularly important for search engines to evaluate the content of the page. These titles are displayed in browser tabs, but also in search results. It is therefore important to use wording that is both interesting for human readers and understandable for search engine bots. However, crawlers are now so good that it often makes more sense to think more about your target group than about the bots themselves.

You can define appealing titles for all pages in the page settings. If you use a blog or other content that is summarised in a collection, you can of course also adjust the title for this in the collection settings. In the collections, you have the option of entering the most important information for each individual collection entry.

Every page that you create in Website Builder has a name and an SEO title. You can edit these titles in the page settings.

• Name - This is the title that is displayed in the page overview. These should be kept short for overview and design reasons. Examples would be "About us" or "Contact". Depending on how you have your navigation menu created by Sitejet (by manual default or automatically from the list of all pages), you can customise this either in the settings of the menu element or in the page settings.
• SEO title - This title is displayed in the browser tabs and in the search results and therefore has the greatest influence on the ranking. These titles are usually longer as there is more space available. Therefore, utilise the space wisely by using important keywords for this page. In the page settings, a pixel counter hint shows you whether you are using the optimum number of pixels or whether you are using too many characters and the title would therefore not be displayed in full in the search results.

Add tags (keywords) and description

When searching websites, search engines not only look at the text on the page itself, but also at tags (keywords) and short descriptions to determine what the content (blog, product, etc.) is about. By describing this content accurately, you can improve your ranking in search engine results. Create a meta description for this. This is possible for each individual page as well as in the global SEO settings for the entire page. Use an interesting text for this that contains your keyword phrase and is also interesting for the reader.

Use a clear headline structure

Create a comprehensible hierarchy. Start with h1 for the title and use h2 and h3 for sub-headings. In general, headings should be used in descending order. If a heading seems too large/small, adjust the respective size in the design settings instead of selecting an inappropriate heading level based solely on the text size. Always use headings in the text throughout your pages to structure them.

Just like titles, headings are also important for search engines to determine the relevance of a page. Meaningful headings that describe the content of the following sentences make it easier for search engines to recognise the main content of your website. This also makes it easier for your website visitors to skim through your page so that they can find the information they want more quickly and are happy to return because they have been convinced by the first impression.

Use heading elements exclusively for headings; if you want to create formatting effects, such as text quotations, etc., there are presets for this.

Add alt text to images

Alternative text is text that is associated with an image and is displayed if the image cannot be loaded or the website visitor moves the mouse over the image. It also helps to improve accessibility, as screen reader tools read out the alternative text instead of the image. Search engines also use the alternative text, as bots can only capture text. The alternative text enables search engines to recognise what the image represents and take it into account for corresponding search queries.

Alternative texts should be as short as possible and consist of human-readable, coherent terms that describe the image and relate to the overall content of your website. Here too, over-optimisation can have a negative impact on the ranking.

Optimise your URL structure

Website visitors and search engines should be able to find their way around your website easily. It is therefore advisable to create a logical and simple structure. This applies to every website. A sketch can be very helpful here.

However, if you want to restructure an existing website, we recommend that you familiarise yourself intensively with the topic beforehand. This is because you only have a limited budget with the search engines and can "worsen" your ranking if, for example, you do not pay attention to correct redirects.

Quality content and sensible use of key terms (keywords)

Good content is one of the most important ranking factors for being presented well in search engine results. According to Google's own search quality ratings, the following factors are checked when indexing the main content of each page:

• What is the purpose of your page?
• How high quality and comprehensive is the content?
• Is all necessary website information and information about the creator of the page provided?
• How good is the reputation of the website and the content creator?
• How good is the user interaction with the page (e.g. time spent on the page, bounce rate, etc.)?
• Expertise, authority and trustworthiness (E-A-T for short, which stands for "Expertise, Authority, and Trustworthiness")

In 2018, Google made a very relevant update (the so-called "Medic Update"). The algorithm was significantly changed and improved. The aim of this change was to ensure that users not only receive the highest quality content, but also the right information from this content. And this is very important to understand. The "E-A-T factor" has become even more important for the rating. We recommend that you read more articles on this here, as this factor shows that a better ranking is not possible overnight and not just with the technically correct settings and keywords.

So-called "keywords" are another important method of improving your ranking. When users search for information, they type words into the search that they believe will give them better results. Ideally, these will match your website and the search engine will show your website to the searcher.

But be careful: don't overdo it with the keywords! If the term appears unnaturally often within the text, modern search engines will downgrade the relevance again because the text gives the impression that the keyword count has been artificially increased in order to rank better.

One way to increase your chances of a better ranking is regular, good content in the form of a blog or a news section! One or more blogs can be added to each project in the Website Builder. Regularly publishing blog posts has been proven to help search engines categorise the respective website as active and therefore more relevant than inactive websites. A blog page with regularly updated and relevant content could also be useful for companies for SEO purposes. As a side effect, the company's brand can be strengthened.

Domain age, URL and authority

Getting a good ranking in the search results takes time. This is also due to the age of the domain. A study by Ahrefs of two million websites found that only a few sites that are less than a year old rank in the top 10 Google searches.

Of course, the domain name also plays a certain role in the ranking. But first of all, it is best to concentrate on a domain that reflects your company. Optimise the name and focus on the many possibilities around it instead of choosing a name that is a compromise between your vision and search engine optimisation.

Authority is another important factor for ranking well in search results. Authority is usually a combination of great content, links, shared posts on social media and the E-A-T, which we'll come back to later. There is an interesting tool from Moz called Open Site Explorer (external link) and the all-in-one solution from Xovi that you can use to check domain and page authority.

Page speed and mobile friendliness

Page speed has been one of the most important factors in ranking in search results for years. Search engines want to display high-quality results and this includes websites that are fast and also load quickly on mobile devices. This also increases the positive user experience. We recommend that you use the Google Search Console if you are not already doing so. There is a whole category here with lots of information about the performance of your site. Please note that these are external tools and our support for them is limited.

The images and videos and the compression will certainly be a sticking point for your site. Images in particular are decisive for this, but fonts, external tools, etc. also generally have a greater or lesser influence on the loading time - depending on the size of the file and on which server it is located.

• Images: Alongside videos, images are the main cause of long loading times on most websites due to their size. In the Website Builder, it is possible to either upload the images already compressed and in the correct format, or to have them scaled by the Website Editor. The latter is done in the background for the required resolution. How to add images and how compression works is explained in the article on adding images.
• Videos: Videos are often much larger than image files. For mobile devices in particular, it is therefore a good idea to use streaming services such as YouTube or Vimeo. These platforms are optimised to compress videos to the maximum with as little loss of quality as possible and only load the video after the entire page has loaded. In addition, the videos are never loaded completely, but only "piece by piece". All of this ensures that loading the video only slightly affects the loading time of the page. We explain how to embed videos in the this article.
• Fonts: Different fonts often contribute to the authenticity of your design and/or give it the finishing touch. However, as soon as custom fonts have to be loaded, this can negatively affect the loading time of your website, so you should really only include the fonts that you actually use. In our article on adding fonts, we also explain how to remove superfluous fonts.
• External tools: If you integrate external plugins/tools using JavaScript, for example, as described in our article on custom code, this can also have a negative impact on the loading of the page. Make sure that the code is only loaded on the pages where it is actually needed. The code should be optimised and, above all, from trustworthy sources. If additional coders or libraries need to be loaded from external servers, please make sure that this code is delivered by so-called CDN servers (CDN = Content Delivery Network). These can usually be recognised by a "cdn" in the URL.

Mobile-friendliness is another important SEO ranking factor. Today, 70% of global traffic is generated via mobile devices. Therefore, if you don't make sure that your website looks good on mobile devices, you will not only scare away website visitors, but many search engines will now give you a lower ranking. In Sitejet, all elements and presets are already implemented in such a way that they are responsive - in other words, they adapt to the size of the device on which they are displayed. You can use Google's test tool (external link) to test your site directly and see how it performs.

Links and Social Media

The internet is built on links. It is therefore absolutely clear that these are also very important for the ranking of your site. They contribute significantly to the E-A-T described above.

Links can be divided into three categories:

• Ingoing links: These types of links are often used by search engines to determine your authority and relevance. Inbound links are also called "backlinks".
• Outgoung links: These types of links are great for showing both your readers and the search engines that you are creating quality content by pointing to relevant content. Now this doesn't mean that you should create tonnes of links. It's just to show that you're using high quality sources in your research. In other words, what you should be doing anyway.
• Internal links: Internal links are great for linking pages together and making them more valuable. This helps your visitors and the search engines.

Website redirects are an important part of search engine optimisation. They help to ensure that users reach the correct page if an original URL is no longer available because it has been moved or removed. We recommend our article on the topic of redirects.

Sharing your content on social media is not a direct ranking factor according to some search engine companies. However, if visitors to your website share content on networks, this is of course a sign that it is valuable. There's no denying that the best search results also have a large number of shares. More shared content means more "traffic" to your site. The more this content is shared, the more likely it is that there will be backlinks as a result.

Genuine business information

If you have a business with a fixed location, providing the address on the website can help visitors to find out whether the offer is relevant. Search engines now also use such information, which is why it is advisable to provide this information several times in different ways.

Sitejet offers several options for specifying the address:

• Map element
• Text blocks on a contact page or in the imprint (Sitejet automatically creates the latter for you)
• Text blocks in a footer (this is already the case by default in most footer presets)
  in-tags such as "geo.location" and "geo.position" (Sitejet also adds these automatically and uses the customer data stored in the project for this)

Use "data bindings" to specify contact information such as telephone numbers and addresses. If you subsequently change the contact information, it will be automatically adjusted throughout the website. You can find out more about this in our article on the use of customer data.

Google also offers the option of improving local rankings in search results with "My Business".

Avoid careless mistakes

Mistakes can creep into any project and avoiding them seems obvious. However, actually avoiding them is easier said than done.

The Website Builder therefore offers you the Website Check, which puts your entire project through its paces and then tells you all the points that could be improved. You can then set the changes as ToDo's so that you can see directly in the Website Builder (CMS) what still needs to be revised.

Test the performance of your website before publishing

You can check the performance of your website before publication.

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