How to use the search engine optimization tools

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of getting the best results from search engines, espcially Google. Please see the related tutorial on Search Engine Optimization Concepts for more background information on this topic.

The Search Engine Optimization features in Main Street Sites can be found at Website > Settings > Search Engine Optimization. On this page, you will see a list of your webpages, including any Page Vault pages you may have added to your site. Here is an example of a set of pages with search engine information filled in:

Each page on your site can be configured for the best possible search engine results. To do this, you must provide the search engine web crawler programs with as much useful information as possible about your page. A given page should have a consistent title, description and content. For example, if the page title, description and the text on the page are all talking about making balloon animals in Boston, you will increase you chances of having a good search result placement for the search terms: "balloon animals Boston."

Below we see an example for how a "dance studio" page might be configured for good search engine placement. Of course, this will only be helpful if the page itself has content that matches the title and description. Also, having links to this page from other sites that reference dance studio classes would help enormously to make the page rank well in the search engine results.

A note regarding the "Meta keywords" field

Keywords were once used to tell search engines about the contents of the page. However, over time search engines became smarter, and their designers realized that the page content was a far better indicator of what the page is about than are the keywords (which makes sense). As a result, this field is not often used by many search engines any longer, and Google ignores them completely.