Simple Tips to Step Up Your SEO Game

Search engine optimization (SEO) might feel like a confusing game with too many rules to rank highly on any search terms you consider important to your business. And there are tons of websites all claiming they contain the best secrets to guarantee increased traffic and search rankings. But as with most things in life, SEO is best tackled one step at a time.

The first step? Putting Weebly's many simple and powerful SEO features to use.

Page Titles & Descriptions

Page titles and descriptions appear directly in search results when someone finds your site on a search engine, giving you a great opportunity to influence searchers to visit your site. These also provide you with the ability to use search phrases you'd like to rank for. For example, let’s say you own a business in Oakland called Rockridge Bakery that has been around since 1972.

Page title: About Rockridge Bakery: Serving Oakland since 1972

Page description: Rockridge Bakery is a family-owned bakery and cafe that has been part of the North Oakland community since 1972.

The option to add Titles and Descriptions can be found in the same place as the permalinks discussed next.

Page Permalinks

Every page on your site has a name that you provide (separate from the title noted above), and this name is used by default to both generate your navigation and to create links for each individual page. You'll generally want to keep these names short and to the point for navigation purposes: Contact, About, Store, etc. And when you do this it also means that you end up with very short links: mysite.com/about, mysite.com/contact, etc.

The thing about using these short names for your links is that you're missing a valuable opportunity to use those links to highlight how you'd want them to be found via a search, since search engines take those names into consideration when ranking your site.

So for your About page, you could be more descriptive for your permalink (about-the-rockridge-bakery-team). But don't go overboard—try to keep your permalinks to five or six words.

If you’re using the classic Weebly website editor (with dark gray menus like the image below), go to Pages and select the page you'd like to update. Then choose the SEO Settings options for that page and enter a page permalink in the provided box. You'll need to publish your site for the change to take effect.