What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of making your website easier to find, understand, and trust, both for search engines and the people using them.

When someone searches for something, search engines scan their massive index of websites to find the most helpful, relevant matches. SEO helps your site become one of those matches by improving the signals search systems rely on.

SEO focuses on helping your site appear in organic search results — the unpaid listings on Google, Bing, and other platforms. And even as search evolves, SEO remains one of the most powerful, sustainable ways to increase your visibility online.

Search engines want to recommend pages that are clear, helpful, and dependable. SEO strengthens the signals they look for:

• Clear site structure
• Meaningful, relevant content
• Accurate metadata
• Fast, accessible page experience
• Etc.

Together, these signals help search engines understand what your pages are about, interpret how your content is organized, evaluate whether it’s trustworthy and useful, and decide when it should appear in search results.

Think of SEO as making your website easier to “read”, both for the people visiting it and the systems that help people find answers online.

How search engines understand your site

Search engines use automated systems (called crawlers or bots) to travel across the web, discover pages, and store them in a massive searchable index.

Here’s an overview of how it works:

1. Crawling: Bots discover your pages by following links
2. Indexing: Search engines analyze and store what your pages contain
3. Ranking: When someone searches, the most relevant and helpful pages are shown

You can’t control the ranking itself, but you can improve the quality and clarity of the signals your site sends at every step.

The evolution of search in an AI world

Search is changing — and fast. People are asking more natural-language questions, expecting quick answers, and looking for content that feels trustworthy and experience-driven. At the same time, search engines are introducing more tools to help users get answers faster: summaries, snippets, AI-powered explanations, and conversational responses.

It may feel like everything is shifting. But here’s the reassuring part: The core of SEO hasn’t changed.

Search engines and AI systems still rely on well-structured, meaningful, performant websites to understand and recommend content. If your site is clear, helpful, logically structured, and fast, you're already doing the most important work.

How is AI impacting SEO?

You might hear terms like AEO (Answer Engine Optimization) as AI-driven systems become more common. This is not a replacement for SEO — it’s an extension of the same principles.

• SEO helps search engines find and understand your content
• AEO helps them use that content when generating answers

Everything in this course strengthens your SEO foundation and prepares you naturally for modern search experiences. 

Want to go deeper? Check out our AEO from Webflow course for a deeper dive into optimizing your site specifically for answer engines.

What you’ll learn in this course

In this course, you’ll learn how to:

• Use Webflow’s built-in tools to set up site-level SEO
• Structure your site with clear navigation and clean URLs
• Optimize individual pages with meaningful content and metadata
• Apply semantic HTML, alt text, Open Graph settings, and schema
• Improve page speed and experience
• Audit your site and measure your SEO performance
• Prepare your content for traditional search and modern answer-based experiences

By the end, you’ll know how to build Webflow sites that are ready for how search works today and resilient for whatever comes next.

Ready to dive in?

Click Complete & continue to head to the next lesson, where we’ll walk through the SEO tools available in Webflow.

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