SEO
Optimizing your site for search engines is important.
Mavenseed supports a number of unique features geared towards improving your sites rank within search engines. There are a lot of features that we support out-of-the-box, but there are also a few that require a small amount of configuration on your part.
Sitemap (beta)
Each site on the Mavenseed platform has its own, dynamically generated sitemap. This is a helpful tool to aid with search engines crawling your sites content. You can visit your sitemap at yoursite.mavenseed.com/sitemap.xml
Sitemaps should be updated at least weekly, but only if any content has changed. You can update your sitemap by going to admin/settings, and scrolling down to the bottom of the page.
Once you click Update Sitemap, it can take a few minutes for it to be updated. Refresh the page and you''ll see a Last updated: entry.
We'll also submit the sitemap to Google once it's updated.
Robots.txt
Similar to the sitemap above, each tenant on the Mavenseed platform has it's own dynamically generated robots.txt file. This file contains a link to your sitemap above and is something that search bots will be looking for.
Canonical URL
If your site has a custom domain setup, then it can be accessed via the subdomain version (yoursite.mavenseed.com), and the custom domain that you have setup. Search engines can get confused on which one they should be showing in the search results, often showing the URL with a lesser page rank.
To combat this, we set a canonical url in the <head> section of your site telling search engines that the custom domain version, is the authoritative version of the URL for your site.
Structured Data
This special type of data format helps search engines in what to display in its search results. Here's a link with more information:
We currently support structured data in a few different areas within your site:
on an individual forum topic (QA)
on a course (Course)
on a download (Product)
on a lesson (Breadcrumb)
on a post (Article)
Google Analytics Events
Events have a dramatic affects on reducing the (sometimes) artificially inflated bounce rate for your site. Because of this we highly recommend integrating with both Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. GTM will send Events to GA, which will allow you to determine things like:
which product is selling the best and where is the traffic coming from
how much you might be loosing on abandoned subscription signups
This does require some setup on your end before Events will be set. Integration takes just minutes, and getting GTM setup is as easy as uploading a single file.
Things you should do
There's a few additional steps that we recommend you take in order to ensure that your site is completely optimized for all of the SEO features that we currently support.
Site Title and Description
Really think about the Title and Description for your site. As a rule of thumb, the title should be under 72 characters in length, and the Description should be under 150'ish characters (Google will truncate this somewhere around that point).
A proper image will also make a big impact.
These things are displayed nicely on Facebook, and in apps like Slack.
You can unfurl the link to your sites URL and see what rich data will appear.
Ensure Excerpts are set
On all content, ensure that excerpts are set. This includes Courses, Downloads, Live Streams, and Posts. This will show similar to how the Title and Description are used above to craft rich previews, only it will use your contents Title, Excerpt, and Featured Image.
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