This article is divided into two parts (part 1 & 2). This is the first part. There’s a link for the second part at the end of this post. As the title of this post suggests, this tutorial will cover two aspects of weebly SE0 configurations:
- How to configure Weebly Pages for SEO
- How to configure weebly Blog Posts for SEO
Within the SETTINGS tab on your weebly editor, you will find SEO tab and from there you can configure a site-wide seo for your website. But this is not enough. In order to get a better ranking, you need to configure individual pages and posts for search engines. I will guide you step-by-step on how to optimize both your weebly individual pages and weebly individual blog post for search engines.
Within your weebly editor, click PAGES, all your pages should be listed on the left panel, click the page you wish to optimize. You are taken to the PAGE OPTIONS panel, click “Advanced”. You are now in the “Advanced Page Options” panel.
Now you can see other SEO option fields similar to the ones you’ve been seeing on the SETTINGS tab. Within this section, you will be able to write meta descriptions and meta keywords for each page.
But before we go any further, let’s learn the meaning of meta description and meta keywords.
A meta description is an HTML and XHTML element that describes your page to search engines.
The screenshot above shows meta description. By default, search engines will take the first few lines of texts that appears on your webpage. By this standard, we should probably make sure that the first texts on our web pages are the ones we want search engines to display, but it doesn’t make any sense to begin your webpage or blog post contents as meta description, I will explain in just a moment.
Now, imagine that you are writing a post about “Body Building & Fitness“. Your meta description should probably look like this: “Body building and fitness experts in San Francisco with free fitness and body building lessons and coaching videos”.
Now, if I’m searching google or any other search engine and I find you this way on the search result, I will definitely click on your link.
But remember that the search engine will display the first few lines of texts it finds on your web page or post. So, when you are writing the contents of your post or page, are you going to start the contents with words or sentences you want found on a search page? Of course not. You’d probably start your post with a humor, and you don’t want that to appear on search result. That’s why meta descriptions are important. And that’s why it’s even more important to write meta description for each page and post.
To further explain it, let’s take an example from this very post, if you scroll up to the very beginning of this post, this is what my first few lines looks like:
This article is divided into two parts (part 1 & 2). This is the first part. There’s a link for the second part at the end of this post.
And unless I write a meta description for this post, the above is what search engine will display, and I definitely don’t want people to see that at a search point. Instead, I wrote my meta description as:
Weebly seo expert and free seo tips. Guides on how top optimize a weebly website, pages and blog post for search engines.
I really don’t need to write too much because I already have a great blog title that explains what my article or page is about, and now I have a brief meta description to go along with the tile. That’s perfection!
Keep your meta description between 150 to 160 characters.
In conclusion, writing a meta description for a specific page or post simply tells the search engine “Look over here buddy, here’s what you are looking for, so there’s no need to pull it off my page“. In this way, you have control over what people should see and read when your pages appear on search results.
Meta Keywords are a specific type of meta tag that appear in the HTML code of a Web page and help tell search engines what the topic of the page is.
The screenshot above was taken from google search result and it shows meta keywords in bold letters. To get the above result, I searched google for “back up weebly website” You can see that the bold words are part of my search words and phrase. Keywords and meta tags used in describing the post (screenshot) above was intended for this exact purpose, so that if someone searched for “backup weebly”, search engine recognizes it and match the search to that very content.
The writer of the above keyword and description also imagined that “backup” might not be the only word that people will use to search. Some people might search for “Save weebly website”, and if you look at the screenshot closely, you can also see both the word “save” and the phrase “save weebly”. I would imagine that the keywords the writer used was something like this:
backup weebly, save weebly, duplicate weebly,
Each keyword and phrase is separated with a comma. You can see that the keywords appear in the meta description above. Make a comparison between the keywords and the screenshot of the meta description.
Most people will advice to keep the keywords/phrases between 15-20. But I prefer 10-15. And I usually never go beyond 10. You can keep it from 10-15 or to 20. But make sure that the keywords you enter have 100% relevancy to that specific web page or post.
Keep your meta keywords between 10-15 words or phrases.
It’s an excellent practice to pull some of your keywords from both the meta description and the page title.
- Defines a title in the browser toolbar - Displays a title for the page or post in search-engine results
There are a few more benefits of page and post titles but we’ll stick to the ones that concerns this post. The screenshot above shows a post title “HOW TO BACKUP A WEEBLY THEME – Weebly Expert”. By default, post titles are usually acceptable for seo because they usually go in the line of “3 Best Body Builders”, “How to make money from home“ etc. These are long titles that basically describes the post or tell someone at a search point what to expect and so on…
See those? They don’t look so good on search engine, if they even make it there. Those are the names you gave your pages as you should, so you did nothing wrong. All you need to do now is to write a better title for each page.
That’s awesome for blog posts, but what about pages? Pages usually look like this “Home – My Website“, “Portfolio – My Website“, “Services – My Website“, “Contact us – My Website“.
Let me give you an example: On Roomy Themes, I have a page called Themes. By default, search engine will display it as “Themes – Roomy Themes“. If you searched and found something like that, the next question on your mind is What themes? What for? etc. But I took the time to write a more appealing title for that page and every pages on my websites. So that instead of “Themes – Roomy Themes, you will see something like this:
Download Weebly Templates and Latest Weebly Themes - Roomy Themes.
That alone tells my audience at a search point what to expect from that very page.
I know I have taken a lot of time explaining and giving examples, don’t hold it against me. There are some of you who already know half of or even more than what I’m talking about here, but for the sake of someone who’s new to this, let’s take it step-by-step.
Now that we know what meta descriptions, meta keywords and page/post titles are, let’s move on to how you can configure them for weebly.
How to configure Weebly Pages for SEO
On your weebly editor, click “PAGES“, you should see a list of all your pages. Click on the page you want to optimize. On the page options panel, click Advanced. From there you can enter a great title for your page, enter a good meta description and meat keywords. Remember to keep your meta description between 150 to 160 characters. And to keep your meta keywords or phrases between 10-15 words or phrases.
I also imagine that there are pages you don’t want appeared on search engines. Pages like “Terms of use, Privacy Policy, Download or submission confirmation, etc. probably should not appear on search results.
Still within Advanced Page options, you should see a little check-box, “hide this page from search engines“. Check the box.
How to configure Weebly Blog Posts for SEO
I’m assuming you already have a blog page with at least one post. On your weebly editor, go to your blog page. Click on the post as if you wanted to edit it. On the bottom left corner, you should see a blue button “Post Options”. Click on that, then click ADVANCED.
Here you have two options only. You have options for “SEO Post Title” and SEO Post Description”. If the title of your blog page is good enough for you, that’s to say, it’s what you will want appeared on search results, then you don’t need the “SEO Post Title” field. In that case simply move on to SEO post description field. But if you want to write a better title for SEO (different from your post title), then use the “SEO Post Title” field.
Just as explained above, enter a description of your blog that you want people to see on search results. Again, keep it between 150 to 160 characters.
That’s it for this part. The second part will focus on submitting your website(s) to search engines like Google – websmaster tools and bing.
Read the PART 2 of this article here.
