Add SEO title and meta description

Learn how to set the SEO title and meta description for each page on your website.

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Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the process of improving your site’s visibility in search engines to increase the quantity and quality of traffic to your site. You can modify the title and description that appear in search engine results when someone searches for your site or a keyword relevant to content on one of your site’s pages, or you can disable search engine indexing of specific static pages on your site. 

Note: After updating your SEO settings, remember to publish your site to allow your changes to take effect. If you’re still finding outdated SEO settings in search results after publishing your site, check out the FAQ and troubleshooting section below

In this lesson, you’ll learn:

  1. How to set SEO settings
  2. How to set dynamic SEO settings
  3. How to set sitemap indexing
  4. FAQ and troubleshooting

How to set SEO settings

Good to know: SEO titles and meta descriptions work best when they’re specific and relevant to the page’s content. For example, your home page’s SEO settings should be different from your pricing page’s SEO settings. You can’t set SEO settings globally, and SEO settings apply only to the page on which you’ve set them — so it’s best practice to set SEO settings for each of your pages.

You can manage 2 SEO settings: 

  • Title — the text that typically displays as the page’s title in search results. It’s best practice to keep the title under 60 characters 
  • Meta description — the text that typically appears below the page’s title in search results. Meta descriptions can prompt people to click through to your site’s page, especially if the description is relevant to your page’s content. There’s no character limit for meta descriptions, but search engines truncate long descriptions. 
Note: Meta descriptions aren’t always used in search results. Sometimes Google shows a text snippet from the site page that contains the search term that was typed into Google. 

You can view and manage the SEO settings for a page by going to Pages panel > Page settings > SEO settings.

Pro tip: On sites with Localization enabled, you can localize your page-level SEO settings. Learn more about localizing SEO settings.

After updating your SEO settings, remember to publish your site to allow your changes to take effect. 

Important: Resist the urge to cram these fields with keywords to rig search results. Google ignores (and, in some cases, penalizes) deceptive practices.

How to set dynamic SEO settings

On Collection pages, you can define a pattern that all pages in a Collection will use for their SEO titles and meta descriptions. That way, rather than manually writing the SEO settings for each Collection item, all Collection items automatically generate their SEO title and meta description based on the pattern you set. For example, if you have a Collection of blog posts, you can use dynamic data in your SEO settings to pull content from your post’s name or title Collection field.

Just like static pages, you can edit this information by going to Pages panel > Page settings > Open Graph settings. To populate your SEO settings with dynamic data from a Collection field, click Add field

After updating your SEO settings, remember to publish your site to allow your changes to take effect. Changes made to your site’s title tag and meta description can take days, weeks, or even months to get indexed and start showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs).  

Pro tip: On sites with Localization enabled, you can localize your page-level SEO settings. Learn more about localizing SEO settings.

How to set sitemap indexing

You can disable indexing of a static site page with the Sitemap indexing toggle, so that page will no longer be indexed by search engines and will no longer be included in your site’s sitemap. You can only disable indexing with the toggle if you’ve enabled your site’s auto-generated sitemap. Learn more about disabling indexing of site pages.

FAQ and troubleshooting

Why doesn’t Webflow support site-wide SEO title tags and meta descriptions? 

Unique titles and descriptions for each page of your site are significantly better for SEO and lead to a better user experience. 

Why doesn’t Webflow support SEO meta keywords? 

Most major search engines don’t use meta keywords for rankings. Learn more about why Google doesn’t use the keywords meta tag in web ranking.

How can I localize my SEO settings?

Check out our lesson on localizing page-level SEO settings, or learn how Webflow handles localized SEO at the site level.

Help! I updated my SEO settings but search engines show an incorrect title or description. 

Make sure you’ve published your site after updating your SEO settings. After publishing your site, changes made to your site’s meta title and description can take days, weeks, or even months to be indexed and start showing up in search engine results pages (SERPs). You may need to wait a bit longer for search engines to re-index your content and update their search results to reflect your changes. You can request for Google to recrawl your site, although this is no guarantee the process will occur faster. 

It’s also important to note that even after your updated SEO content is indexed, Google still decides what to display as the description. Google should never decide to display an outdated version of your SEO content, but it will sometimes display snippets of body text from your page if that text better matches what they believe is the query intent. Check out this resource for more reasons Google may show a different meta description for your site.

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