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.
If you would like assistance with optimizing SEO, a Duda expert may be able to assist. To browse the experts, visit experts.duda.co.
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.
Duda sites offer a variety of settings and tools for SEO.
Duda takes care of these for every site, so you don't need to set them up:
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Fast-loading pages that search engines can easily find and read.
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A sitemap, which tells search engines which pages to crawl. For more information, see Site Configuration Files.
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Canonical URLs, which tell search engines which address is the main one for each page.
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A 404 page for addresses that don't exist on your site.
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An llms.txt file for each published site, which helps AI tools such as ChatGPT and Claude understand your site. For more information, see Site Configuration Files.
Note
In Duda Vibe, fast-loading pages, sitemaps, canonical URLs, page titles and descriptions, and 404 pages are available on projects built on version 2.0 or later. To check your project's version, click the menu icon at the top left of the Vibe workspace. Version 2.0 is being released gradually. New projects will be built on it, and existing projects will be updated automatically.
Most SEO and AEO tools are in the Optimization Center. To open it, go to the Project Dashboard for your site, click Performance, then expand Optimization Center. You can also click SEO/AEO in the side panel of the editor, or the Manage tab in Vibe.
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Site Audit summarizes your site's SEO and AEO health and links to each fix. See Site Audit.
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Content Suggestions and Off Page Suggestion recommend content to add to your site, and actions to take elsewhere, to help your brand appear in AI answers. Your site must be published to get suggestions. See Site Optimization: AEO Suggestions.
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Page SEO lists every page with its meta title, meta description, and No Index? setting, so you can edit them all in one place. Republish your site for changes to go live. To create tags with AI, see Generate SEO Content with AI.
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Image Alt Text checks the alt text on images across your site. For more on alt text, see Accessibility at Duda.
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Internal Links and External Links check the links across your site. See Site Audit.
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Additional Settings holds SEO settings for your whole site, such as the site meta title, the favicon, and No Index. See Site SEO/AEO Settings.
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Google Tools connects Google Analytics, a Google tag, or Google Tag Manager. See Google Tools.
Note
In Duda Vibe, Image Alt Text, Internal Links, and External Links aren’t available. Page SEO has no AI options, so to have AI write titles and descriptions, ask Copilot. After editing Page SEO, click Save Changes. You can't save while Copilot is working on a request.
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.
If you would like assistance with optimizing SEO, a Duda expert may be able to assist. To browse the experts, visit experts.duda.co.