For your website to be indexed and ranked by search engines, you need to optimize your website. Pixpa makes it easy for you to optimize your website for search engines.
The SEO metadata can be easily defined for your website and pages in Pixpa.
To make sure your site is optimized for search engines before it goes live, we recommend you follow the guidelines stated below.
Tip: Visit optimize your website for search engines to know how to optimize your site.
In this article:
- Prepare your site before going live
- Things to do after going live
- Enhance your site for search engines
- Tips for your site content
Prepare your site before going live
Things to do before going live in order to optimize your site for search engines.
- Specify your Site Title – We recommend you specify a site title for your site even if you have uploaded the site logo because the text (site title) can be used be for indexing by the search engines. You can add a keyword in the site title too but it should not exceed 55-60 characters.
- Specify site description – Specify a small, crisp, appropriate description for your site. This would be shown by search engines for your website in the search results along with the title. It should be between 150-160 characters.
- Upload Featured/social sharing images – Add a social sharing image (that exhibits your entire site) and thumbnail images (that exhibits a particular menu item) which will be used when someone shares your site/site’s page.
Note: When there’s no thumbnail image available for a menu item and it is shared in the social media, then the social sharing image will be used.
- Show your location – Your site’s visibility as a search result would increase if the search engines know your location. We recommend you add a contact page to your wherein you provide your business information/address along with the location (map).
- Link your social media – Showcase your social media profile’s on your site so that your site visitors follow you and your brand, and enable social media sharing as well which allows your site visitors/customers to share your site pages.
- Upload a favicon – Upload a favicon to your site that represents your brand. This icon appears on browser tabs, and bookmarked pages. Some web services and search engines also use favicon for the saved URLs. The ideal size for a Favicon is 64 pixels x 64 pixels. Learn more.
- Add page Title and Descriptions – You can add the SEO Metadata i.e. Title and Description for all your pages in one go from the SEO Manager. The Title and Description should be small and should define the page’s content. Learn more.
- Set up your 404 page – Design your site’s 404 page and add links to few important pages of your site so that even if any visitor visits an unavailable page, he/she can visit any other page inside your site.
- Review all your page’s URLs – Ensure that your page URL is related to the content of that particular page. Learn more.
- Connect your custom domain – Connect your custom domain to your Pixpa site instead of using the default .pixpa.com URL. This allows your customers to easily find your site.
- Verify your site’s SSL – All the Pixpa websites are secured with SSLs. Pixpa itself would be applying the SSL certificate on your website. Learn more.
Tip
More than one page can not have the same slug. System will add a number after the slug in such a case so you can change the slug according to the page content
Things to do after going live
Things to do after going live in order to optimize your site for search engines.
- Verify your site with Google Search Console – Set up your webmaster account and verify your domain ownership. Learn more
- Submit your Sitemap – You can access your website sitemap at /sitemap.xml. Read more. You should submit your sitemap in your webmaster account. Learn More.
- Request that Google index your site – You should ask Google to (re)index/crawl your pages using the Fetch as Google tool. So Google will reindex/recrawl your pages quickly.
- Verify your site with Bing Webmaster Tools – Create your Bing Webmaster account and verify your domain ownership with Bing. You can add the Meta tag to validate the domain in the Head section in External Scripts.
- Using Google Analytics – Set up your Google Analytics account and connect with your Pixpa website to track and manage the website traffic. Learn More
Enhance your site for search engines
- Create 301 Redirects – Any page that you are not using or is broken or deleted should always be redirected to an active website page. Redirects help you forward visitors automatically from an Original URL (the source) to the New URL (the destination). Learn more.
- Update site’s content frequently – SEO is an ongoing process. Updating your content regularly keeps your site active for the Search Engine bots. Blogging is one way to frequently update the website content.
Tips for your site content
- Add keywords – Add a Blog and add your target keywords in the blog post content to target those specific keywords. You can add an unlimited blog and blog post in Pixpa. Know more.
- Organize the content – Structure your content using the heading and paragraph fonts so that the search engines navigate your content easily.
- Specify the alt text – Search bots do not read images. Specify the image Headlines which will be used as the Alt tags which will be used for image SEO. Learn more.
- Add page descriptions and thumbnail images – Every time you add/create a new menu item/store product or anything, make sure that you add the SEO description, and a thumbnail image.
- Add relevant file names for images – Note these best practices for image file naming and follow them to add relevant file names to your images.
- Use categories & tags – Create and add categories and tags in your folders, blogs, and products so it is easy to filter in the website for your visitors for easy navigation and more time on the website.
- Link to your site’s content – Try to interlink the pages. Add buttons or Text links to your pages so users can navigate easily. Use the breadcrumb navigation of the folders to easily navigate between the galleries/pages of the folder.
- Use Mobile Information Bar – Add a mobile information bar so your visitors can connect with you easily from the mobile. Learn More.
- Review all your page’s URLs – Ensure that your page URL is related to the content of that particular menu item. Learn more.
- Optimize your page size – By default, the system will create web versions of the images for faster loading on different devices. It is recommended not to keep the pages very long which increases the loading time and also visitors may miss something important. Better to separate the long pages.
Google’s process of indexing your site, and subsequently displaying it in search results, is automated. It can sometimes take months before your site is listed or before any changes you make are reflected in your search results.
You can not directly define when Google’s indexing takes place and what rank they assign your pages, however, you can prompt them to re-index via Google’s Webmaster Tools. Know more.