Meta tags are short pieces of information in the head area of your pages that visitors do not see, but search engines read: the title, a description and keywords. They help search engines understand what your website is about and how to present it in the results.
Meta tags for the whole website
- Log in at admin.hpage.com and open Settings → Header Area.
- Under Meta Tags enter your Keywords: terms that describe your website, for example "pottery, ceramics, workshop, Hamburg".
- Write a Description: one or two sentences that say what your website offers. Search engines often show this text below your title in the results, so make it inviting.
- Under Search Engine Listing keep List in Search Engines ticked. If you untick it, your pages are marked "noindex, nofollow" and disappear from the search results over time.
- Click Save.
The same page holds the fields Google Verification and Bing Verification for the webmaster tools of the search engines, see Why is my website not found on Google?.
Website title
The title of your website appears in the browser tab, in bookmarks and as the headline of a search result. Change it under Settings → General in the field Website Title (3 to 40 characters). Put your most important keyword into it, for example "Pottery workshop Hamburg".
Meta tags per page (Premium)
With the Premium package every page can have its own title, keywords and description. This is useful because every page deals with a different topic.
- Open Pages → Manage Pages and click Page Settings on the page.
- Click Show Advanced Settings.
- Fill in Meta Tag Title, Meta tag Keywords and Meta Tag Description and save.
Under Meta Tag Robots you can exclude a single page from the search results with the option Prevent search engines from indexing content and follow links. (noindex, nofollow). This option is available in every package.
Sitemap, robots.txt and 404 page
- Sitemap: hPage creates a sitemap.xml of your pages automatically. Its address is listed under Pages → View Page URLs in the section Special URLs. Password-protected pages and pages that are not shown on your website are not included. Premium websites get an improved sitemap that is better visible to search engines.
- robots.txt: under Settings → General, section Robots.txt, you can edit the File Content of robots.txt to restrict what search engine bots may read.
- Error 404 page: under Settings → General, tick Use a custom 404 Error Page and choose one of your pages. Visitors who open an address that does not exist see this page instead of a plain error message.