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:

• 155 characters or so. Keep the description to about 155 characters or it will be cut off.
• Not used to return results. Google uses other factors to determine if your page is relevant to a searcher. The meta description is just the summary that searchers see, so write your description for people—not search engines.

To set a page’s meta description:

1. Open the page, and then in the upper right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab.
2. Enter the description in the Meta Description field.
3. Click Apply to save your changes, and then click Publish to see your change on the live site.

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:

1. Open the page, and then in the upper right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab.
2. Enter the keywords in the Meta Keywords field. Separate each keyword with a comma—for example, responsive, web design, mobile.
3. Click Apply to save your changes, and then click Publish to see your change on the live site.

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.

• Where titles are used
• Parts of a title
• Tips to writing titles

Where titles are used

Search engines use titles when returning results:

Titles appear at the top of browser tabs:

Titles also appear in browser history:

Parts of a title

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:

• Site Prefix Title. Set this on your site's Settings page.
• Page Title. Set this on each page in the Page Settings.
• Site Tag Line. Set this on your site's Settings page.

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

Tips to writing titles

Here are a couple tips to writing titles:

• Under 55 characters. Search engines typically cut off titles after 55 characters or so. So do the math with the Site Prefix Title and the Site Tag Line when naming individual pages.
• Consider everywhere that a title appears. Since your visitors will see the page title in a few different places, consider your title carefully, and write a title that concisely describes the page.

You can set a page’s friendly URL and page slug in the Page Settings.

• What’s friendly URL?
• What’s a page slug?
• Set up a friendly URL

What’s a friendly URL?

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.

What’s a page slug

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.

Set up a friendly URL

To create this type of URL:

1. On your dynamic page (e.g., your blog-post page), in the upper-right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab.
2. Click in the Friendly URL box, press Down, and then select the field that you want in the URL (e.g., Blog: Title).

3. Next, after the title, add a forward slash (/), and then press Down again, and select the _id field of your content set.

4. Click Apply to save your changes, and then click Publish to see your change on the live site.

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:

• .ico or .png. When creating a favicon, use a .png or .ico file.
• Keep it small. The typical size is 32 × 32 pixels. Larger images are scaled down by the browser, and so they might not look quite right.
• Use a favicon generator. If you already have a logo or image, you can plug it into a favicon generator and receive an image of the appropriate size and file type. Just use your favorite search engine to find a generator.

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.

If you’re using The SiteStudio as your separate mobile site, to add a canonical link:

1. Open the page, and then in the upper right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab.
2. In Canonical Link, paste a link to the equivalent desktop-optimized page.
3. Click Apply to save your changes, and then click Publish to see your change on the live site.

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:

1. First, create a Google Webmaster account, and then add your site's URL. Google will ask you to verify that you own the site by making a specific change, and you will see a several different methods that you can use for verification.
2. Verify with a meta tag, so on the Alternate methods tab, click HTML tag. You will see instructions describing how to insert the meta tag. Don't worry about the instructions—the SiteStudio has already taken care of the details.
3. Copy the text in the content property (it will look something like X1x1xXtBrd-27cxfR-RyYJd9fVAOdi1XDP1dV5x1dOs).

4. Back in the SiteStudio, open your site, and then on the left menu, click Settings.
5. Next, paste the text into Google Webmaster Tools Verification Meta Tag, and then click Save Settings.

6. Back on your Google account, click Verify to finish the process.

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:

1. Create a Google Analytics account.
2. Copy your Tracking ID.
3. Open your site, and then on the left menu, click Statistics.
4. Paste your Tracking ID into the box, and then click Save.

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:

• See your sitemap
• Exclude a page from your sitemap
• Generate a new sitemap
• Use a custom domain in the sitemap

See your sitemap

To see your sitemap:

• Go to your-url/sitemap.xml. For example: example.site.moboom.com/sitemap.xml.

Exclude a page from your sitemap

If you don’t want a page to appear in your sitemap, exclude it.

To exclude a page from your sitemap:

1. Open the page, and then in the upper right, click Page Settings, and then click the Settings tab.
2. Select Exclude from Sitemap.
3. Click Apply to save, and then Publish.

Generate a new sitemap

If you add or remove pages (or if you exclude pages from your sitemap), generate a new sitemap.

To generate a new sitemap:

1. On the left menu, click Settings.
2. Now, in the upper right, click Generate Site Map to generate a new sitemap.

Use a custom domain in the 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:

1. Open your site in the SiteStudio, and then on the left menu, click Domains.
2. Under Site Map Domain, select your domain (for example, example.com), and then click Save Domain Settings in the upper right.

3. Next, generate a new sitemap using that domain. So, on the left menu, click Settings.
4. Now, in the upper right, click Generate Site Map to generate a new 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:

1. Open your site, and on the left click Settings.
2. To edit your robots.txt file, just add text to the robots.txt box.
3. Click Save Settings in the upper right to save your changes.

Point search engines to your sitemap

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:

1. Open your site, and on the left, click Settings.
2. Under Robots, in the robots.txt box, paste in Sitemap: followed by the full URL of your sitemap. For example:

Sitemap: http://example.site.moboom.com/sitemap.xml

Tip   The URL of your sitemap is located in the upper right, under Sitemap.

3. Next, click Save Settings in the upper right to save your changes.