Use the Settings Panel in each Ceros experience to add information that helps search engines more easily find your content. This article is a great place to start if you’re new to Ceros and are thinking about how you can incorporate it into your SEO strategy.
To access this panel, simply open an experience in the Studio and click the Settings gear in the top right-hand corner. The Settings panel contains five sections - Experience settings, SEO, Social, Custom HTML, and Performance.
Experience Settings
In the Experience Settings tab, there are a number of fields.
Experience Title does two things:
- It displays the title in your Ceros Admin so it’s easy to find when you have multiple experiences.
- It creates the first part of your site’s Page Title, which also displays in search engine results and at the top of your web browser.
Your title should be brief, and descriptive, and include any target keywords you’re trying to rank for with the page. For example, if your experience is about prom dresses, a title like “Cute Prom Dresses” would be an appropriate page title.
Experience URL tells the internet where visitors can find your site. It is automatically added to the end of your project URL and applied even if you’re using a vanity domain.
This bit of text can contain hyphens and numbers, but should not contain any spaces or special characters. You can also add additional keywords about your experience here; just be sure to separate each word with a hyphen.
Redirect URL is where users, visiting with an unsupported browser, will be redirected to.
SEO
This tab contains three fields that let you define what search engines will see when they index the content of your Ceros Experiences. The information you provide here will directly impact the search rankings for your standalone Ceros content.
Disabling SEO
If this content is for internal use only and you don’t want it indexed by search engines, toggle the top SEO slider button off. This will tell search engines to ignore the Experience completely.
Title Keywords & Meta Description
The Title Keywords and Meta Description are indexed and displayed in search results on Google and other search engines. They provide a brief teaser to let visitors determine whether your content is what they’re looking for.
Canonical URLs signal to search engines a firm hint as to which URL a page’s contents should be credited. The Canonical URL is located in the <head> of a web document, and looks something like this:
<link rel=canonical href=http://example.com/page.html/>
NoScript HTML
Every Ceros Experience has NoScript HTML automatically generated from the text content and image alt-text tags you include in the Studio. If you prefer to create a more structured, tagged version of your HTML content, you can override the default NoScript HTML in this field.
The content that you put in the NoScript HTML box will be presented to search engines as an alternative version to your main Ceros Experience. Use standard HTML markup on your content, then simply copy and paste it into this field. An easy way to do this is to do the following:
- Publish and view your Experience
- Open Developer Tools/View Source
- Copy the automatically generated “NoScript”
- Paste it into your favorite HTML editor, and mark it up as you see fit
Note: Custom NoScript HTML must be representative of your Ceros Experience. Search engines will penalize your ranking if your NoScript content if it’s different from what’s in your Experience.
Social
To optimize your Ceros experience for social media sharing, you can customize the title, description, and photo you want to appear within posts for Open Graph-enabled platforms and Twitter sharing.
How to Customize Your Posts
- Within the settings window of your Ceros experience, click on the Social Sharing tab.
- Enter the title, description, and photo you want to appear on social media (both for your Open Graph sites and for Twitter).
- Publish your experience. Now, when you share the Experience URL on social media or utilize a social media-related interaction such as On Click > “Post to Facebook”, you should see your new custom metadata populated in the post.
For more information on Social Sharing, take a look at this article: Preparing Your Content for Social Media Sharing
Custom HTML
The Custom HTML field is where you can drop external code snippets into your Ceros Experience. This includes:
- Marketing automation tracking pixels
- Tracking codes for SiteCatalyst, Google Tag Manager, and other analytics platforms. (Note: Google Tag Manager is best implemented via Ceros integration)
- Retargeting pixels for display and social ads
- Third-party pop-up forms from services like SumoMe or OptIn Monster
- A/B testing pixels from Optimizely and other services
- And other services
Performance
The Experience Performance tab has optional settings that you can enable to improve performance and decrease initial experience load times. These are:
Progressive Image Loading:
This feature will display your experience earlier by initially showing low-resolution images while high-resolution images load in the background.
Lazy Loading:
This feature will shorten load times by displaying the experience as soon as everything within the initial browsing window has loaded (rather than fully loading the first and second pages before displaying the experience).
Text Rendering Mode:
Text rendering mode dictates the way that search engines and screen readers can understand your content. Additionally, each option results in slightly different rendering effects of exactly how your content is positioned. The default mode will be Component which is optimal for ADA compliance as well as SEO. For more information on text rendering, check out this article.
