Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for Weebly Site

Search engine optimization (SEO) is an art of making your website friendly to search engines like Google and Bing/Yahoo! so that it will be listed top in the search results pages. SEO is as important as building a website with quality content and Weebly provides very useful SEO settings which can be done by yourself without depending on any external agencies.

In this article we will discuss all possible settings you can do to improve your Weebly site’s search ranking.

SEO settings on Weebly site are to be taken care with the following options:

Site level settings under “Settings” tab.
Individual page level settings under “Pages > Individual Page > Advanced Settings“.
Other important settings.

Download Free Weebly SEO Guide

Search Results Format

Before we discuss SEO settings on Weebly, first let us have look on a search result in Google to understand different elements.

Sample Google Search Format

The “Site Title” comes from the site settings and all other elements are relevant to individual page’s settings.

Site Level SEO Settings

“Settings” tab available in the top menu of the Weebly editor offers various site level SEO features as below:

General Settings Tab

Site address is your domain name and ensure to use a custom domain for your Weebly site to get better results in search engines. You need to upgrade to a minimum of starter plan in order to connect your custom domain.
Set your site’s title which will be displayed in search results at the end of Page Title. Generally, site title could be your domain name itself or your business brand. Use the description effectively with single or two words and do not stuff site title with many keywords. Since site title appears on each search results links, this is most important for SEO as well as branding. Ensure to select the checkbox “Show title on the top of your pages”.

Weebly Site Level SEO Settings

SSL is not only a must for sites selling online products nowadays search engines also provide more weightage for secured https:// sites compared to other http:// sites. With SSL users will access the site content over 128-bit encrypted connection and a lock icon will also be displayed in the browser’s address bar to indicate your site is secured. You can also allow the buyers to checkout on your own domain thus increase the confident and security with SSL. But Weebly only offers SSL as free with business ecommerce plan.
Favicon is though not affecting your SEO it is also displayed on browsers and on some search engine results like Yandex thus improving your brand visibility. Learn how to add Favicon to your free Weebly site.
Facebook Sharing option allows you to connect your Facebook profile or page and automatically share the blog posts with your followers. This is a simple and effective way to promote your site content for free.
Mobile Site – All new responsive themes are by default mobile device compatible and there is no need to do any action. You will not see any mobile settings if you use a responsive theme. Non-responsive theme users can enable “Display mobile optimized version…” checkbox under so that Weebly will automatically setup a mobile redirect and display your mobile site when opened in mobile devices.

SEO Tab

Site description is used as a Meta Description when your home page is shown in the search results. Use descriptive words to explain the purpose of your site to encourage users to click on it when shown as excerpt in the search results.
Google Analytics Tracking – Paste your Analytics tracking code at site level in the Footer Code section.

You can add Analytics tracking id for your store under “Store > Advanced” settings.

Webmaster Tools Code – Verify your site with Google, Bing, Yandex and Baidu webmaster tools by pasting code in Header Code section at site level.
Select the option “Hide Site from Search Engine” in order to automatically set your robots.txt file and disable search engines from indexing your site.
Whenever you change the URL of a page or blog post set 301 redirects to retain the search engine ranking of the previous page. Learn more about setting up of Weebly 301 redirects here.

Setting Weebly 301 Redirect

Page Level SEO Settings

Similar to site level settings page level advance setting options allows you to set page title and meta description for page each individual page.

Page Level Weebly SEO Settings

Page Title – Ensure to add a page title for each of your page with not more than 57 characters (including site title) otherwise it will get truncated in the search results. Also don’t forget to use the focus keywords of the page on the title.
Page Description – Enter 160 – 180 characters descriptive sentences explaining the excerpt of your page content. This will be shown as a meta description in search results and important for encouraging users to click on the results.
Header and Footer Code sections are used for Analytics and Webmaster Tools code or any other purpose to add codes applicable only for that page.
You can also hide your page from search engines by selecting the check box “hide this page from search engines”.

Other Important Settings

Set ALT text for Weebly Images

Alternative Text or ALT text is a text used by search engines to identify your image content and index the images in the database. By default Weebly set this ALT text of all the images to “Picture” and you can change it as per your image description under “Advanced” option. Learn more about SEO for images here.

Alt Text for Weebly Image

Weebly Sitemap and Blog Feed

Weebly offers a dynamic Sitemap and Blog feed. You can submit both Sitemap as well as Blog feed to the search engines in your Webmaster Tools account.
Weebly Sitemap format is “www.your-site-name.com/sitemap.xml” and the Sitemap will dynamically get updated whenever you publish new pages or change the existing URL. Hence submitting the Sitemap once in the webmaster tools is sufficient.
Weebly blog feed format is “http://You-blog.com/1/feed” and the blog feed can also be submitted to search engines.

Using Title Element

Weebly’s drag and drop title element adds a H2 heading by default which is not good for SEO when there are many H2 headings through out your page. Hence, hence organize your content and use appropriate headings from H1 to H6 whenever required. Learn more how to do this here.

Using Keywords

Above all content is the key for successful SEO and ensure that your keyword is part of content, title and description so that it will be highlighted in the search results pages.

Custom 404 Page

404 page though not going to affect your site’s SEO, it disappoints users who landed on your site looking for something. Default Weebly’s 404 page not found page does not offer any additional customizing options and hence design you own 404 page with search box and useful links to offer visitors an alternate to look for.

Blog Settings

Similar to site and page level settings, for blogs, the blog level settings are available under “Settings > Blog” and individual post level settings are available under “Post Options > Advanced“. Enter SEO post title and SEO post description for each posts since they will appear in search results like individual pages.

Meta keywords are not used by search engines, hence you do not need to use this for SEO purposes.

David Munroe

· Reply

February 15, 2016 at 3:13 AM

can you somehow add alt text for the logo image?

kamlesh

January 19, 2016 at 5:37 AM

when ever i am publishing my website in weebly its showing your site will not found in search engine as google..upgrade

WebNots Admin
· Reply

January 26, 2016 at 1:09 AM
Check your site’s robots.txt file with the URL – yoursite.com/robots.txt.
If you find the below lines then your site is blocked for search engines.
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
We understand from users that Weebly changed the indexing options (probably for new users and for blogs) that allowing search engines need upgrade to premium plan.
- anonyme849
  · Reply
  
  March 10, 2016 at 1:07 AM
  This new change in Weebly makes free websites useless. Now it’s pay or move away! Fortunately there are many other free hosting options.
  P.S. Using the 301 redirect function for url “robots.txt” seems to work, at least temporarily.
  - WebNots Staff
    · Reply
    
    March 14, 2016 at 11:56 AM
    That’s how free things work!!! Weebly guys don’t have the habit of communicating to users on such big changes. Last year they tried with limiting number of pages to 5 for free users then reverted the changes and now disallowing search engines. Since they have updated this in the pricing plans we also don’t think this will be reverted.
    - WebNots Staff
      
      July 27, 2016 at 10:56 PM
      We monitored for the past few months – the changes were reverted back quietly and the search engine indexing option was also removed from the pricing plans allowing all free sites to be indexed.

dongae

December 20, 2015 at 11:29 PM

unfortunately, your article is not up to date..
for now, weebly disable a new blog from search engine indexing via robots.txt ..
unless, purchase their service

Hardy Germany

October 28, 2015 at 6:34 AM

Is there a way to edit the robots.txt file?

I have read that someone recommends to add entries like:

—-
user-agent: abcd
disallow: /
—-

Would it be possible to edit?

Frank

October 17, 2015 at 9:52 AM

I share the same concerns with Robert. I too have published a online help site a few weeks back. And until now it has not been indexed by Google. I tried searching for the exact URL in Google, came back with no results. Is it possible that the rest of the site still says “Under Construction”? but this url/support/onlinehelp.htm is complete and should show up on Google search after a few days right? But it’s been over two weeks and still not indexed at all.

WebNots Staff
· Reply

October 17, 2015 at 11:30 AM
There are no strict guidelines when the page / post should be indexed by Google, sometimes it is on the same day and sometime even it takes months. Even if the exact URL does not show up we do not see there is a problem with Weebly.
Please check your Google search console account and ensure you have submitted XML Sitemap and the last date of crawling. You can also use “Fetch as Google” option to manually submit the particular URL and request Google to index it.
As a note – hide all those under construction pages from search engines and ensure they are blocked with robots.txt and not part of Sitemap.
- Eric
  · Reply
  
  December 22, 2015 at 6:24 AM
  So is there a way to edit the robots.txt on weebly?
- Nick
  · Reply
  
  March 14, 2016 at 1:36 PM
  “As a note – hide all those under construction pages from search engines and ensure they are blocked with robots.txt and not part of Sitemap.”
  How do I block them with robots.txt? I thouth it was not possible to edit the robots.txt file on Weebly?
  - WebNots Staff
    · Reply
    
    March 14, 2016 at 4:24 PM
    Robots.txt file entries will be automatically created when you hide a page from search engines under “Advanced” settings of “Pages” tab.

Robert Foy

August 21, 2015 at 6:52 AM

I am concerned…it seems that content I write…specifically blog posts do not show on google results. The blog posts I place on blogspot make the rankings…even my old website shows. Weebly…nothing. Google does see it, but only if I use keywords that go to a painful level that no normal human would. I.E. I have to search “my website domain exactly” and “subject”. I know you can’t help this…it is part of your engineering…just disappointing is all.

Tare Torres

May 7, 2015 at 2:56 AM

I’ve read several posts on SEO for weebly sites but I must say your article was truly helpful, thank you. I’ve now added my site to google analytics and hope to be able to track improvements soon.

jaket parka

April 7, 2015 at 12:13 PM

my weebly don’t have Mobile Settings Tab, why.?

Editorial Staff
· Reply

Author
April 8, 2015 at 12:41 AM
Mobile option is now moved under “General” settings tab.
Editorial Staff
· Reply

Author
July 23, 2015 at 10:37 PM
You will also not see “Mobile” option under “General” settings tab if you use responsive theme.

Darren

December 3, 2014 at 9:05 PM

How about Alt text for product images??

SmithJ
· Reply

December 8, 2014 at 2:22 AM
there is no separate alt text for product images. As for as i can see, these images are not shown in Google image search. Product search uses description and title which are part of the Weebly products as well.

Yan

December 2, 2014 at 9:53 PM

Alt text isn’t available in latest version of weebly, is there an HTML workaround?

Editorial Staff
· Reply

Author
December 3, 2014 at 1:29 AM
We can see Alt Text is still available under Advanced option.
Russ Alman
· Reply

May 19, 2015 at 12:13 AM
Alt text is only available for stand-alone images — not gallery items and product images. However, you can add a caption. I haven’t looked at the HTML, but this might be a tag that Google still recognizes in lieu of an Alt tag.