We have received many queries from bloggers and site owners whether blog posts created with Weebly are making to the search engines similar to other platforms like WordPress. As far as we have seen there are not much difference between Weebly and other platforms as long as you are writing a SEO effective blog posts. In this article let us explore the tools Weebly provide to bloggers for writing SEO effective blog posts.
Basics of Weebly Blog
Before we talk about SEO, it is necessary to understand few basic things with Weebly with respect to blogging. Weebly blog is essentially a part of the whole website have the following features:
- You need to create a page and name it as anything you want like blog, articles, etc.
- This page is an index page showing the index of your posts. The number of posts shown on the index page can be controlled under “Settings > Blog > General > Posts per page”.
- In case of change the name of the blog index page, Weebly does automatically set 301 redirect from the old URL to new URL for each individual post and the index page.
- You can enable or disable blog sidebar under “Settings > Blog > Blog sidebar”.
Note that the index page contains all your articles; hence deleting it by mistakenly will delete all of your blog content with no way to revert back. Hence, never delete the blog page unless it is needed.
How to Write SEO Effective Blog Posts in Weebly?
When you are in the blog editor there are few things to be ensured on each blog posts so that search engines can easily understand and index the content.
- Blog Post Title – Weebly uses H2 title throughout the site which will be an issue for SEO. Check out this article on how to change Weebly blog titles to H1.
- Content – what we noticed is that most of the users just copy and paste the whole article from a Word document to Weebly editor inside a single “Text” element. We recommend structuring your article on Word or any text editor so that you know how many elements are to be used for that post. Ensure to breakup your content and provide a “Read more break” so that when viewed on the index page it will show “Read more” link. Also add “Alt Text” for all your images so that search engines can understand the meaning of the image easily.
- Categories – categorize your post into two or three groups so that search engines will index the category URL as well as the blog post URL improving the visibility on the search.
- Permalink – this is a permanent URL of a post displayed in search engines and browsers. Ensure to use relevant and short URL so that it has the required keyword.
- SEO Post Title – this is the title displayed on Google, Bing, Yahoo! Or any other search results. If it is not provided then the blog post title will be considered as a SEO title. This is more useful especially when your blog posts title is long or not actually the one you want to show in search results. Ensure to limit your title length to 60 – 70 characters so that it will not get truncated on the search result.
- SEO Post Description – this is the text shown on the search engines and hence provide the description related to the article with 150 – 160 characters length.
The SEO title and descriptions are most important factors for the search engines. So, ensure the targeted keywords are present and they are most relevant and useful for users as well.
Structuring Your Blog Post
Structuring the article not only improves the readability of the users but also helps the search engines to understand your content better. Use different available elements and spread your content length so that the article looks more professional. Below is a simple example of structuring an article with different elements:
Understanding Header & Footer Code Sections
Weebly has header/footer code section under three different places:
- “Pages > Choose a page > Advanced > Header/Footer Code” – any code entered here will only affect that page. This is not related to blog index page or posts, hence we will not discuss this here.
- “Settings > SEO > Header/Footer Code” – any code entered here will affect the complete site including blog index page and individual posts. For example, here you need to insert Google Analytics code so that it will be effective on each blog article. You can view the source of blog index page and articles by right clicking and selecting “View Page Source” and look for the code entered under header/footer section is present on the code.
- “Settings > Blog > Post header/footer code” – any code entered here will be only effective on all blog posts and not effective on blog index page. It is also not possible to insert header/footer code on individual blog posts since Weebly does not provide these options at post level.
Weebly Blog Feed URL
When you create a blog page (some themes by default have a blog page) the default feed URL will be like – https://yoursite.com/1/feed. The number will be incremented if you have multiple blog pages. The “RSS Feed” element will be added to blog’s sidebar by default when you create a blog page and clicking on the will show you the correct feed URL for your blog page. This is useful in case if you have deleted and added the blog page many times.
In addition to submitting Sitemap also submit your Weebly blog feed URL to search engines so that the latest content will be crawled. Also visitors can subscribe to your RSS feed to get the latest content through the feed icon available on the sidebar. You also can promote the feed using any third party services like Feedburner.
Note that the maximum number of posts shown on the feed URL is controlled under “Settings > Blog > Posts per page” and Weebly restricts the maximum to 25 posts.
301 Redirect Settings
If you change the post URL then don’t forget to set the redirect under “Settings > SEO > 301 Redirects”. Learn more on how to setup redirects in Weebly site.
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