All search engines have one goal: to find content that is both relevant AND helpful for its users. SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is what helps search engines (like Google Search) serve up the best content for their users.
Customizing your SEO in SnapPages can make your site more appealing to search engines, which will move your site higher up in search results!
Start by opening up the Settings Menu on the SnapPages Main Menu and going to SEO. There you will find our four different tools to refine your SEO: Website Description, Keywords, Searchability, and URL Redirects.
Website Description
When browsing the internet, there are two ways to search for content and sites. The first way is by typing in a short description. Our Website Description tool allows you to set a description for your site so it can be quickly found by web crawlers. So, if someone searches for “Bakery and Coffee shop in Georgetown,” the search engines would look for websites with descriptions that match.
Keywords
The second way to search is by keywords. For example, rather than typing out “Bakery and Coffee shop in Georgetown,” a user could simply search “Coffee Georgetown espresso.” Search Engines will then crawl the web and pull any websites that feature those words. Using our Keywords tool, you can quickly and easily fill in all relevant keywords to optimize online searches.
Description and Keywords are both available under Settings > SEO for each page of your site as well! Taking some time to fill these out for each page (or at the very least, the pages in your Navigation) can give you a huge SEO boost!
Searchable
This toggle switch decides whether your site allows itself to be indexed by search engines. As long as it is toggled on, search engines will occasionally reindex your site to keep their records of your available content up to date.
If this is ever toggled off, your site will begin rejecting the bots that "scrape" websites on behalf of search engines. This stops search engines from indexing it, and your site will eventually disappear from all search results.
URL Redirect
Setting up a URL Redirect is quick and easy on SnapPages, and can be set up as either a temporary or a permanent redirect.
This is a great feature that you can utilize to make sure your end-users get to your active content as you delete or migrate content over time! These types of redirects are intended to be from one page to another internally on one's site, or can also be used to reroute your users to external online resources.
Choosing between a Temporary or Permanent redirect only affects how a search engine will consider the redirect when it indexes your site. If it sees a permanent redirect, it will remove the original page from its index of your site, thus removing it from search results, and it will be replaced by the new page in the index.
For a temporary redirect, it does not adjust the index. This tells them that the change is only temporary and the original page will be back soon, so there is no reason to adjust the index.
To direct from a previously existing page to a new page:
Head to SEO under Settings and scroll to the bottom
Click Add Redirect
In the Redirect From field, add a forward-slash ( "/" ) then the old page you want to redirect people away from.
In the To field, add a forward slash ( "/" ) and the name of the page you would like to redirect to.
Lastly, choose if you would like the Redirect to be Permanent or Temporary
To redirect from a page to another website:
Under Settings, click SEO and scroll to the bottom
Click Add Redirect
In the Redirect From field, add a forward slash ( "/" ) and the name of the SnapPages page you would like to redirect away from.
In the To field, add the full URL of the destination you would like to redirect to.
Choose if you would like the Redirect to be Permanent or Temporary
Google Search Console
Synonymous with SEO is Google's SEO-focused tool, Google Search Console. By creating a Google Search Console account and then verifying that you own your domain, you can then manage how Google treats your website to some degree. This includes receiving reports every time Google reindexes your site. These reports can let you know if there are any pages on your site that Google tried and failed to index, as well as a number of possible reasons/errors.
Google Article: Getting Started with Search Console
When you first move your website from one content host to another by changing which site your domain is connected to, updating Google Search Console's expectations of your site can be very beneficial to your SEO. If Google is still expecting to detect all of the same pages from your old website when it suddenly indexes your new site instead, it will catalog a lot of inconsistencies between the two, and these will likely be listed as "failed to index". These will be page addresses on the old site that do not have a 1-to-1 match on the new site, so they result in a 404 error when Google checks for them. If you update Google's expectations of what it should be seeing and indexing, this will clean up most, if not all, of the errors so that you can focus on more meaningful insights in the Search Console.
If you are starting a website for the first time or starting with a new domain, rather than moving to a new site for your existing domain, you can use Google's URL Inspection Tool to request that your site be indexed sooner rather than later! This tool can also offer insights into the index status of specific pages!
Google Search Console informs Google's website indexing expectations using your website's "sitemap." If it still has the sitemap of your old site to work with, it will base its indexing on outdated information. You can follow the steps in Google's article here to provide Google with an updated sitemap. During the short process, Google will ask you for the address of your new sitemap. The scheme for this is simple:
If your website is "https://mychurchname.org", then the sitemap address is: https://mychurchname.org/sitemap.xml
Google Article: Sitemap Management
Updating the sitemap will lead to much more accurate indexing and better SEO scores with Google. This, along with filling out all of the SEO information in your website's settings, translates directly to your website showing higher up in search results and being more discoverable!