The types of SEO
The three types of SEO each act on a different part of your site, the technology behind it, the text on it and the reputation around it.
SEO comes in three main types that each act on a different part of how a search engine judges your site: technical SEO, on-page SEO and off-page SEO.
Technical SEO makes sure a search engine can crawl and index your site without trouble: loading time, sitemaps and a working mobile version. On-page SEO covers the text and structure on the page itself, such as headings, page titles and internal links. Off-page SEO covers what happens away from your site, mainly backlinks and mentions of your brand across the web. Each type solves a different problem and a site that scores on only one usually stays below what it could reach.
What technical SEO takes care of
- Crawlability. Search engines and AI crawlers have to reach your pages without blockages in robots.txt or slow servers. A page that is technically unreachable does not exist for a search engine, however good its text. Read more in technical SEO for AI.
- Speed. A page that loads slowly costs you positions and visitors, however good the text is. On mobile especially, visitors drop off after a slow first impression.
- Structure. Sitemaps, canonical tags and a logical URL setup help a search engine understand how your site fits together. Without that structure a crawler has to work out what belongs together, which costs time it is not always given.
What on-page and off-page take care of
- Content and headings. A clear H1, headings that divide the text and a text that answers the search intent form the core of on-page SEO. See on-page and off-page SEO for the full picture.
- Internal links. References between your own pages help search engines and visitors find their way and spread the trust of your strongest pages across the rest of your site. More on that in using internal links.
- Authority from outside. Backlinks and mentions build the trust that off-page SEO delivers and that trust is exactly what a new or small site still has to earn.
Want to see how your site scores on all three? Take the free AI-zichtbaarheidscheck.
Frequently asked questions
Do I have to tackle all three types of SEO at once?
Not necessarily at once, but eventually all three. A site with perfect content and a slow server loses as much as a fast site with weak text.
Which type of SEO delivers results fastest?
Technical fixes such as speed and crawlability often work fastest, because they remove a blockage that was holding existing content back.
Is off-page SEO the same as link building?
Link building is the largest part of off-page SEO, though mentions of your brand without a link count too, certainly for AI search engines.
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