SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) refers to measures taken to improve your site's visibility. Some of the common SEO features and use cases are mentioned below. 

Accessible Content

Search engines consider page organization and readability when ranking. Following Accessibility best practices will put you on a good path for creating well-formatted content. Best practices include things like using hierarchical headings, using table headings, proving alt text for images, and more. Read all about Accessibility and content formatting best practices on the a11y website.    

Metadata

Page metadata is read by search engines, social media platforms, publishing platforms and other digital spaces (all of these can generally be referred to as “crawlers”) to provide better information and experiences to the end users of those services. It also helps with better exposure and findability of your site's content off-site.

When third party services "index" a page of your site, they scan it to look for a title, description, and image. They use these values when displaying data about the page. You can control these three values:

  • Title: This is the same as the title of the A individual item of content. For example, a page, a news article, and an event are all content items, which correspond to the Page, News, and Event content types, respectively. .
  • Description: When editing a content item, expand the "Metatags" section in the sidebar. By default, a special value "[Exactly the same as "content item". The term "node" is Drupal's terminology, but WDS prefers to use "content item" which is easier to understand. :field_ps_body:computed_summary]" is used here, which is automatically replaced with the contents of the summary field on the content item. If no summary is provided, one is generated automatically based on the contents of the main body field. You can replace this token with your own custom meta description if you'd like.
  • Image: Specify a Featured Image for the content item you're sharing (most of our standard content types have this field). If you don't want the image to actually show up on the page for visitors, you can select the “Hide” option for the “Featured Image Display” field.

Site Search

All sites come with a built in search engine. It relies heavily on keywords in a content item's title or body to find and return results. Read more about how this site search works.

Google and Bing Analytics

The ability to measure your site content's performance can help with your content strategy. Where is your traffic coming from? What types of keywords and content are you ranking for? Access to an analytics tool will help you answer these questions. 

Site administrators can include a Google Analytics tracking ID to their website. Once applied, the owner of that tracking ID will begin seeing their site's tracked data in google.com/analytics. Visit our Google Analytics page for more information about setting up a GA account, getting a tracking ID, and including it on your site. 

Site administrators can also claim their site for use in tools like Bing Webmaster Tools and Google Search Console (if they cannot connect via Google Analytics), by adding those services' alphanumeric string to Configuration > System > Basic Site Settings. 

Discourage Search Indexing With 'noindex'

It's possible to discourage search engines from indexing specific content items (pages, news, events, etc)*. Edit the content item and expand the "Metatags" section on the right sidebar. There is a "noindex" checkbox to enable this behavior. The next time search engines crawl this page, they should remove it from their index or ignore it if it's not already in it.

Keep in mind that if there is a cached version of your previously public content stored elsewhere, it will continue to exist publicly in that location.

Site Admins can also configure a site-wide "noindex" setting by visiting the Basic Site Settings form. Enabling this will disable the individual content item control.

* Note that this feature assumes that the search engine actually respects the value. The major search engines (Google, Bing) do respect it, but others may simply ignore it and index the page anyway.

Sitemaps

XML sitemaps are automatically generated. Sitemaps are located at the /sitemap.xml path of all sites and are re-generated once per day. Search engines periodically scan for these files and use them to help discover what content to index on a site.

Sitemaps will include all published content items (e.g. pages, news articles, events, etc) with the following exclusions:

  • Content items that have access controls enabled (via the "Advanced" method of the optional Access Control module).
  • Content items that have the "noindex" checkbox checked (described in an earlier section on this page).
  • Content items belonging to content types where the detail page been disabled (some content types offer the ability to disable detail pages).

A term is an individual item that belongs to some taxonomy vocabulary, typically used for categorizing content. For example, a vocabulary "Colors" may have terms in it "Red", "Green", "Blue". detail pages are not included in the sitemap at this time.