Improve SEO

Improve SEO for content pages

What's inside this article:


Basic information

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of optimizing webpages to increase the traffic that comes to your site via the free results section on search engine results pages.

Pangea CMS offers many settings and features to help improve the SEO for different pages on your site. This article describes the settings and features that impact SEO for the following types of content pages:

Text

Article | Backgrounder | Blog | FactCheck | Feature | Feature story | Live blog | News | Transcript

Multimedia

Audio clip | Document | Photo gallery | Slider gallery | Video

Interactive

Poll | Quiz | Static infographics



Meta title

The main title for a content page is always applied as the meta title.

Enter the main title via General > Title. It is important to make the title unique. No other page on your site should have the same meta title.

The meta title might be displayed as follows:

  • As the clickable headline on search engine results pages
  • In the browser tab for the page



Meta description

The meta description is defined differently, according to the type of content page. To ensure that a content page has a properly defined meta description, we suggest completing at least one of the following fields for every content page:

  • General > Introduction
  • Website teaser > Introduction

It is important to make the description unique. No other page on your site should have the same meta description.

The meta description might be displayed as the description on search engine results pages.

The meta description is your suggestion for what search engines should display as the page description. Unfortunately, we cannot guarantee that search engines will always follow this suggestion. Search engines might sometimes display other text from the page instead of the meta description.



URL slug

The URL slug is the part of a URL that identifies the page. When you create a content page in Pangea CMS, you can create a URL slug that is added to the URL. A URL slug is normally a few words of descriptive, human-readable text, separated by hyphens.

Consistently publishing content pages with effective URL slugs has the following benefits:

  • User experience: Descriptive URLs tell users where they will go after clicking a link.
  • SEO: URLs that include keywords might rank more highly on search engine results pages. Consistent use of effective URLs also boosts the authority of your domain for search engines.

Create a URL slug for a content page via General > URL slug.

For detailed information, see the following article:



Alt text

Alt text is a simple description of what is directly visible in an image. Alt text is important for both SEO and site accessibility. When you add an image to a content page, you can create custom alt text for the image. The alt text is included in the source code for the image and is not normally displayed on the public site.

Alt text serves the following purposes:

  • Read aloud by screen readers for visually impaired visitors to your site and visitors who are otherwise unable to see the screen.
  • Displayed on the public site if the image fails to load.
  • Helps search engines index the image, so the image ranks more highly in image searches.

For detailed information, see the following article:



Authors

The following practices might help your content pages rank more highly on search engine results pages:

  • Consistently add authors to content pages.
  • Maintain high-quality author bio pages.

For detailed information, see the following articles:

While judging the effectiveness of Google search results, the authority of the content creator is one of the main factors that Quality Raters are told to consider. This signals that Google is seeking to prioritize content produced by individuals with demonstrable expertise and experience in the relevant field.



Link text

Link text (or anchor text) is a string of words / characters on the public site that opens another page when clicked or tapped. Search engines use link text to understand how the linked page is viewed by other sources. Effective link text can positively influence how the linked page ranks on search engine results pages.

You cannot influence links to your pages from third-party sites. However, you can pay close attention to the link text when inserting links to other pages from your site. Google recommends link text that is "descriptive, reasonably concise, and relevant to the page that it's on and to the page it links to".



Meta keywords

Meta keywords might influence how a content page ranks via search engines such as Yandex and Baidu. Meta keywords no longer factor in the ranking algorithms for Google and other popular search engines.

For content pages, Tags are applied as meta keywords. Add Tags via Tags in the left panel.

For detailed information, see the following article: