SEO

SEO

Open SEO in the sidebar. A page's own title, description and social text are set in the page editor, next to a search result preview; this screen is for the whole site.

Site check

Check again reads every page and lists what to fix: Problems, To improve and Notes, by topic (titles, descriptions, headings, images, links, canonical, social, language, indexing, the whole site). Open page goes straight to the page.

Check links to other sites visits every link that leads off the site, on request (it takes a while on a big site). Only clear failures are reported: pages that are gone (404) and sites that aren't there.

Sitemap and robots.txt

• sitemap.xml lists your pages so search engines find all of them. With Keep sitemap.xml complete automatically on, it's rebuilt from every page (except the 404 page and noindex pages) before each publish. Leave out of the sitemap takes patterns such as thank-you/**.
• robots.txt tells search engines what they may crawl. Create default robots.txt writes one that points at the sitemap.

Site icon

Choose an image… (a square of at least 512 × 512 px, or an SVG) and Make the icon. CraftPages writes the full set at the top of the site: favicon.ico (16, 32 and 48 px), apple-touch-icon.png, icon-192.png, icon-512.png and site.webmanifest, plus favicon.svg when the image is an SVG. Every page gets the tags, replacing older icon tags.

Home screen background is the colour behind the icon when someone adds the site to a phone's home screen.

404 page

What visitors see at an address that doesn't exist. Make a 404 page builds 404.html from one of your pages (Made from), so it has your header, footer and styles; you set the title, heading, message and the link home, plus a search button when site search is on. Afterwards, edit it like any other page.

Cloudflare finds 404.html by itself. On a web host, CraftPages offers Add it to .htaccess so Apache uses it.

Redirects

Send an old address to a new one, so links and search results keep working after a page moves. Add redirect, then the Old address, the New address and the Kind:

• Moved for good (301) tells search engines to show the new address instead.
• For now (302) only for a page that's coming back.

Addresses start with a slash: /old-page, /old-folder/. For everything in a folder, end the old address with /old/* and put :splat where the rest goes: /new/:splat.

CraftPages warns when a page still exists at the old address, when the new address isn't a page of the site, and when it redirects again.

Redirects are written to _redirects, which Cloudflare reads. When you publish to a web host, they also go into a marked block in .htaccess (Apache; servers running only nginx ignore it). Rules you wrote into _redirects by hand, and the blog's own redirects for moved posts, stay as they are. Redirects work once the site is published.

Site identity

A block of structured data in the home page's <head> that tells search engines the site's name and logo. If it's missing, Add to the home page writes it.