SEO stands for search engine optimisation, you can use SEO tools to improve the appearance and positioning of web pages in organic search results on search engines like Google and Bing. 

You can find more information on SEO at Google’s Search Central documentation.

Sitemap

The Membes platform automatically generates a sitemap of your site. This is located at yourdomain.com/sitemap.

Directing a search engine to your sitemap

Your site automatically has a dynamic sitemap available in your site root (https://www.yourdomain.org/sitemap.xml). You do not need to do anything to enable this sitemap. This sitemap is dynamic and will always be updated and reflect your page structure and SEO settings as you change them. So all you need to do is refer your search engine to this sitemap.xml (located at https://www.yourdomain.org/sitemap.xml) and Membes will make sure it is always up to date whenever the search engine references it.

Downloading a sitemap

You can also download an XML or TXT sitemap file.

To download the sitemap file, from the menu on the left under CMS > Sitemaps.

There are a range of filters you can use if desired, but if you just want a full sitemap all you need to do is leave the filters blank and click the XML or Text buttons to download the full site map containing all your sites pages. Or if you would like to filter to only show certain pages based on filterable fields enter or select a filter in these fields to download a sitemap that only matches the filters your entered.

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SEO tools

All of the website pages you create in your CMS have an Advanced / SEO section where you can add additional SEO information.

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Meta description

The meta description is displayed below the link in search results and designed to provide users with a brief summary of the content on your page so that users know if the page will answer their question. A meta description should have a maximum of 155 characters.

Meta keywords

Meta keywords are used to give more information to search engines on what a page is about. They appear “behind the scenes” in the website’s source code.

Meta keywords are no longer commonly used for SEO purposes.

Change frequency (included in sitemaps)

This is an optional sitemap field to describe how often content in this page is likely to be updated. This gives the search engines an indicator of how often they should check this page for updates.

Priority

The priority attribute is optional, search engines won’t penalise you for not having it; it’s simply a way that search engines can ‘weight’ the importance of this page relative to other pages.

A priority of zero indicates content that is low priority, while a priority of one indicates that the content is important to your site. The scale typically looks a little like this:

• 0.1 – 0.3: Old news posts, outdated guides, irrelevant pages you nevertheless don’t want to delete, merge, or update.

• 0.4 – 0.7: Articles, blog posts, category pages, FAQs, system pages. The bulk of your site’s content falls into this range.

• 0.8 – 1.0: Extremely important content, such as your homepage, major category pages, product pages, and subdomain indexes.

Typically most content will be 0.5 and this is the default value set by Membes.