How to leverage SEO customization on beemy
Having great SEO ensures the right people discover your content on search engines. Of course, this is only one component of growing your audience, but definitely one that you should not ignore. Search engines rank your articles and pages based on how relevant they feel a given search matches your website content. There are a couple of things that need to be done in order to make sure your page ranks as high as possible on search engines. In this article, you'll learn how to maximize your SEO rating using beemy.
On beemy, you get granular access to SEO meta variables.
Page Title
The page title field corresponds to the piece of text that appears within the browser tab next to the website icon. If the page is an article page, this is usually the title of the article (what beemy defaults page title to). If the page is a blog page, it might be a brief description of what the page relates to. Either way, you have the ability to customize the page title in both the page builder and article editor.
For Articles
Because the recommended length of a page title is 65 characters, sometimes an article title might be too long to serve as the page title within the browser tab (causing the last portion of the page title to trail off). This is where it makes the most sense to customize the page title.
Preview
This is the short piece of text that appears below your title on search engines to give context to your page. We highly recommend customizing search engine previews for your articles and pages. This will maximize the relevance between the preview and the content of your page - and can also compel a reader to click on your link!
For Articles
If no preview is provided, beemy will parse your article and include the first few sentences of your article as the preview to show up on search engines.
Helpful tip - previews should not exceed 300 characters. This ensures that the preview fits nicely!
Keywords
The keywords meta tag is said to no longer be used to rank a website's SEO, and many SEO tools have opted to no longer support this tag. However, on beemy, if an article has any tags, they are used as keywords for the article's SEO. You also have the option to add keywords for blog pages. Keywords will not hurt your website's SEO, but they may add little to no benefit either.
Slug
This section applies to articles only
Slugs are what appear on your article URL and often correspond to the title of your article. Have you ever clicked on an article and seen a bunch of random letters and digits at the end of a URL? Most likely - that character garble is an identification value that is assigned to the article for database purposes. However, readers shouldn't see this! On top of this, having relevant keywords in your URL is important for SEO. beemy, again, handles this for you on the back end. Your article slug will correspond to the title of your article.
With this being said, there are occasions when you would want to customize URL slugs. Some possible reasons that you might want to customize your article slug are:
Very Long Article Titles
Let's say you have a really long article title:
"Malitpoos are the Best Dog Breed Because they are White and Floofy".
Having that much text show up on your article URL may not be beneficial. As a result - you can customize your slug to the following:
"maltipoos-the-best-dog-breed" -> Perfect!
Symbols Having Meanings in Article Titles
Let's say you have the following article title:
"How to make $$$"
Website URLs are limited to certain types of special characters, and many are not able to appear in URLs. In this example, the "$" would become encoded into "%24" -> ew! That shouldn't show up in the URL! Because of this, beemy automatically removes all special characters that show up in an article title from the URL slug. However, in this case, "$$$" has meaning to the article title. So you might want to customize your article title to the following:
"how-to-make-money" -> Perfect!
Other attributes
We plan on supporting custom meta attributes in the future. Currently, we support the following meta tags automatically:
For Pages
titledescriptionkeywords (tags)og:titleog:descriptionog:urlog:site_name-> is just beemy for now. Will be customizable with the release of custom domainstwitter:card
For Articles
...Everything for pages
authorog:type = articleog:image-> corresponds to article preview image.
If you made it through this article, you are on your way to creating article and blog pages with great SEO! Combining these best practices with great social strategy, keyword planning, and metric monitoring will give you the best chance to expand your audience.