Control how your site describes itself

Global Settings

Settings, then Global Settings: site name, domain, and language. These reach the browser tab, the search result, and the structured data search engines parse.

The site name appends to page titles, so keep it short. "Pricing | Acme Bakery" reads well. "Pricing | Acme Bakery Artisan Sourdough Since 1998" is truncated before anyone reads the useful half.

The language field is what tells a search engine and a screen reader which language the page is written in. Setting it wrong is worse than leaving the default.

Social Media

Settings, then Social Media. Your profiles render as icons across the site and get embedded in the site metadata, which is what social platforms read when someone shares a link.

Per-page title and description

Each page, blog post, and article carries its own title and description. These are the two fields that build the search result.

Title. Say what the page is, using the words someone would type. Around 60 characters survives before Google truncates.

Description. One sentence that earns the click. Around 155 characters, and Google prints whatever it finds there, so an unfinished sentence appears in the result as an unfinished sentence.

Write both by hand. A description generated by slicing the first paragraph at a character count ends mid-word in public.

The structural things that matter

One H1 per page. The main heading, and only one. Then H2 for sections, H3 for subsections, in order, with no levels skipped. Heading order is how a screen reader navigates a page and how a search engine understands its shape.

Descriptive link text. "Read the pricing page" is a link. "Click here" is not, to anyone who cannot see the sentence around it.

Alt text on every image. Covered in images.

A page that answers the question it ranks for. No setting substitutes for this one.

What is handled for you

The sitemap and the robots file are generated by the build from your Page Map. Every page in the Page Map is discoverable; a page missing from it is invisible to search engines for the same reason it is invisible to visitors.

Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) certificates are issued and renewed automatically, and pages are served from a content delivery network (CDN). Both are ranking inputs and neither needs configuring.

Checking your work

Run a web audit on the built page. It reports missing titles, missing descriptions, heading structure faults, and missing alt text as findings rather than as opinions.

For the wider question of getting found at all, the guide to why a site is not showing up on Google covers what happens beyond your own settings.

Next