These features are available on all paid plans.
Readymag projects are tailored by default to be highly optimized for search engine indexing. After you publish your project under the custom domain, the files robots.txt and sitemap.xml will be created automatically.
A canonical URL is also added by default to all published projects, regardless of whether they are hosted under a custom domain or not. The canonical URL indicates the preferred URL version that represents a page's content. When multiple URLs contain identical or very similar content, search engines may see them as duplicates, which can negatively affect the website's search engine rankings. To avoid this, we add a corresponding tag to the <head> section of your project’s source code once you hit Publish—there are no additional actions required on your end.
However, there are several settings you need to customize to ensure that your website gets higher rankings on search engines.
One of them is open access for search engine crawlers on your website. To do so, go to Project settings—>Domain and enable the Search engine indexing toggle. This setting can’t be enabled for projects protected with a password.
SEO
1. Specify the Title and Description for your website in the Project settings. Add relevant keywords to your title and description. This will help search engines understand the content and purpose of your page. A title should be around 50-60 characters, while a description should be around 150-160 characters. As a result, the corresponding meta tags will be added to your project’s source code automatically.
Additionally, you can add a title, description, and keywords for every page of your project. To do so, go to the Editor mode, click on Pages (the number of your page in the lower right corner), and click on the Settings icon on the preview of a page —> SEO. Remember that the metadata you use for your pages should be different from the title and description you specified for the website in general.
2. The keywords should be separated by a comma. There are no limits to the number of keywords you can use, but it’s better to focus on quality instead of quantity: select relevant keywords that align with your website’s content. Avoid “keyword stuffing” by excessively repeating keywords, which can lead to penalties from search engines.
3. Apply the HTML tags to the titles in your Text widgets: <h1>, <h2>, etc. To do so, click on a Text widget, choose Styles in its attributes, and click the style title., You’ll see the tag that’s used for this style and the icon of the drop-down menu. By default, the H1 and H2 styles are wrapped accordingly with the <h1>…</h1> and <h2>…</h2> tags. All of the other styles are defined with <p>…</p> tags. To assign a different tag to your style, click the drop-down menu and choose the tag you need. As a result, the text in the final code will be wrapped with these tags
4. Add alt tags to images, shapes, and slideshows. Alt tags, or alternative text descriptions, are HTML attributes used to describe the content of images, videos, and other non-textual elements on a website. You can add alt tags by clicking the Semantics icon in your widget attributes. Learn more about alt tags and how to write them correctly in this article.
5. Optimize the size of your project. Search engines don’t like websites overloaded with heavy images, videos, and useless code. Read our detailed guide on how to speed up your project.
6. Set a custom URL for each page of your project: simply type a desired name in the Custom URL field of the page settings.
After that, your project will be ready for a visit from the search engine crawlers. It takes from several days up to a month for a website to be crawled and indexed—this process relies on the inner algorithms of search engines and cannot be accelerated through Readymag. The same goes for the ranking of your website in search results. Many factors influence this process, including how unique your content is, how often your visitors open it, and how long they stay to explore its pages. However, you can force Google to index or re-index your project using their URL Inspection Tool.
Known issues
The project is not displayed in search results
Usually, engines do their re-indexing once every 2-3 weeks: after a while, your site will be automatically adjusted in search results.
To speed up this process, we recommend manually adding your site to the Google URL Inspection Tool: https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/9012289 and Bing Webmaster Tools: https://www.bing.com/webmasters/about and requesting re-indexing.
The project description is not displayed by search engines
There might be two common reasons for this:
- Search engines don't display a meta description if it's too short or too long. The best practice is to keep the meta description under 160 symbols.
- Search engines can reject meta descriptions if their content appears throughout the website code several times. You need to make sure there's a single instance of the meta description in your project.
Google does not update the search results for your project
In this case, add your domain to Google Search Console. The option to update the search result will be available under the «URL inspection» menu on the left.
The project's title was changed in the editor, but the older title is still displayed in the published version
- This could be because you haven’t updated the Title itself: Check to see whether the new title was also added to the first page in the Page Settings (SEO tab)
- It might also be because your browser cached the old data: In this case, just clear the cache to see the updated result.