Whether your site is an ecommerce store or a cooking blog, your visitors expect to find it through search engines. Beyond that, you probably want your site to appear in search results.
As search engines strive to return the most relevant results, search engine optimization (SEO) has become more than just adding the right keywords. Today, the best SEO techniques involve making sure search engines know exactly what your page is about.
The SiteStudio has a variety of tools, spread throughout the platform, that allow you to pass this information along to search engines.
When a search engine displays your page on a list of search results, the summary that's shown is generally the text that you enter here.
The meta description that you write is generally the summary that search engines use when displaying your page in search results.
Here are a couple quick tips to writing your description:
To set a page’s meta description:
Enter the meta description for a page in the Page Settings.
Keywords are another way to describe your site's content. Keep in mind that many search engines don't use them, and meta keywords are generally viewed as one of the least important forms of SEO. Some reports say that false keywords can even hurt your site's SEO ranking, so use this field wisely.
To add meta keywords:
Add meta keywords for a page in the Page Settings.
Each page has a title that’s used by browsers and by search engines when displaying information about a page.
Search engines use titles when returning results:
Titles appear at the top of browser tabs:
Titles also appear in browser history:
In the SiteStudio, every page’s title is made up by a few fields:
<title>Site Prefix Title Page Title Site Tag Line</title>
And to configure these fields:
For example, you might set every title to begin with your company name (which is set on your site's Settings page):
Deffell’s |
And end with your motto (which is also set on your site's Settings page):
| Innovative pants since 1901
Next, for each page, set its Page Title. So on each page, click Page Settings in the upper right, and then click the Settings tab. For example:
Tip For blog pages (or other dynamic pages) set the Page Title to a content set field—like Blog: Title
So when visitors land on your About page, they would see:
Deffell’s | About | Innovative pants since 1901
Here are a couple tips to writing titles:
You can set a page’s friendly URL and page slug in the Page Settings.
A friendly URL is way of including a page’s title in the URL. Set up friendly URLs for dynamic pages that use a content set. For example, use a friendly URL for a blog post page or for a product description page.
Without a friendly URL, an individual blog post might have a URL that looks like:
http://example.com/blog-post?id=4bffa20d-a74c-9559-4709-5231fc8b0be8
Here, the id, ?id=4bffa20d-a74c-9559-4709-5231fc8b0be8
, tells The SiteStudio which blog post to display. Search engines have a hard time distinguishing between pages that use the ?id=
.
Search engines prefer a friendlier URL that looks like:
http://example.com/blog-post/why-peppermint-tea-is-great/4bffa20d-a74c-9559-4709-5231fc8b0be8
That URL still has the id, but it also has a human-readable title. And the slashes help search engines understand that each blog post is a separate page.
A page slug is one component that makes a URL friendly. If the page is static, then the slug is basically the page’s URL. For example, your Home page is static, and it has the slug home
, and if your site’s URL is example.com
, then your home page is at example.com/home
.
However, for a dynamic page that uses a content set, the page slug is only the first part of the URL. For example, an individual blog post might have a URL that looks like:
http://example.com/blog-post/why-peppermint-tea-is-great/4bffa20d-a74c-9559-4709-5231fc8b0be8
Another post on the same blog might be:
http://example.com/blog-post/is-hojicha-green/7afe7944-4753-fd50-602d-51d0e6d2195f
In those URLs, blog-post
is the page slug, and why-peppermint-tea-is-great/4bffa20d…
indicates the individual post.
To create this type of URL:
Blog: Title
).
If you've set up your page to use a content set, then in the Friendly URL field, select the title and _id fields: title/_id.
A favicon is the icon that displays next to your title in a browser tab. While it doesn’t necessarily affect your SEO, setting a custom favicon will affect how users differentiate your site in their browser.
A few tips to using a favicon:
To set a custom favicon, use the Favicon widget.
Tip To use the same image on every page, add the Favicon widget to the Header or Footer, which are the same on every page.
If you have separate desktop and mobile sites, canonical links help search engines understand the configuration of your sites. A canonical link points from a mobile-optimized page to the equivalent desktop-optimized page.
Note Canonical links are necessary only if you have a separate mobile and desktop site. Your site is responsive, so it automatically works with mobile and desktop screens. So if you're using one site for all devices, then you don’t have to worry about this.
Google actually prefers that you use one responsive site to separate mobile and desktop sites. See Google Developers for more information on smartphone optimization (and canonical links).
If you’re using The SiteStudio as your separate mobile site, to add a canonical link:
In the Canonical Link box, paste a link to the equivalent desktop-optimized page.
Google’s Webmaster Tools allow you to properly optimize your site for Google.
To manage Webmaster Tools for your site, you must verify that you own the site. An easy way to do this is with meta tag verification:
content
property (it will look something like X1x1xXtBrd-27cxfR-RyYJd9fVAOdi1XDP1dV5x1dOs
).
Your site is well integrated with Google Analytics, so with just a few clicks, you can quickly start gathering a variety of data about who is using your site.
To link your site to your Google account:
To connect your Google Analytics account to your site, on the Statistics page, enter your Tracking ID (which you get from Google), and then click Save.
Every site comes with a basic URL (called a domain) that looks like example.site.moboom.com. While that domain is perfectly fine for testing, when you launch your site, you probably want something a little more customized—like example.com.
For directions on how to set up your custom domain, see Custom Domain.
An XML sitemap is a list of all pages on your site. Search-engine crawlers work by following links from one page to another. A sitemap ensures that search engines know about every page on your site—even if the crawler would normally miss it.
So not only do you need a sitemap, but you need to tell search engines how to find it. Later, you’ll learn how to tell search engines about your sitemap in your robots.txt file.
Every site comes with a sitemap. You can:
To see your sitemap:
your-url/sitemap.xml
. For example: example.site.moboom.com/sitemap.xml
.If you don’t want a page to appear in your sitemap, exclude it.
To exclude a page from your sitemap:
If you add or remove pages (or if you exclude pages from your sitemap), generate a new sitemap.
To generate a new sitemap:
By default, the SiteStudio uses your site's subdomain when listing each page in the sitemap (example.site.moboom.com/blog…). If you’ve set up a custom domain for your site (like example.com), you can instead use this domain for your sitemap. (If you haven’t set up a custom domain, but you’d like to, check out the Custom Domain guide.)
To use a custom domain for your sitemap:
In case you’re not familiar with robots.txt, it’s a file on your site at example.com/robots.txt. The file tells web crawlers how to index your site, and if there are any pages or directories that they should ignore.
When a web crawler follows a link to your site, like example.com/blog/ insightful-blog-post-by-me, the web crawler checks for a robots.txt file at the top level of your site—example.com/robots.txt.
For detailed information on using a robots.txt file, check out Google’s explanation.
To edit your robots.txt file:
Typically, the robots.txt file is a way of removing pages from a search engine, but you can also use it to tell search engines about your XML sitemap.
To point search engines to your sitemap:
Sitemap: http://example.site.moboom.com/sitemap.xml
Tip The URL of your sitemap is located in the upper right, under Sitemap.