Being found
What search engines see
Every page is rendered on the server, so a search engine sees the finished text rather than an empty shell. That is done for you and there is nothing to switch on.
Two things are yours to write.
A title. What appears in the browser tab and as the blue line in search results. Under about 60 characters or it is cut off.
A search description. The grey paragraph underneath it. Around 150 characters. Write it for a person deciding whether to click, not for a machine — a list of keywords reads exactly like a list of keywords.
Set them site-wide under SEO, and per-page in that page's own settings. A page with nothing of its own falls back to the site-wide one.
Sharing a link
SEO → Share image is the picture that appears when somebody posts your address in Slack, WhatsApp, LinkedIn or a text message. Without one, the link is a naked grey box.
Roughly 1200 by 630 pixels. Put the words large: it is often shown at the size of a postage stamp.
The sitemap
Generated for you at /sitemap.xml, listing every published page. Nothing to maintain. Give that address to Google Search Console once and you are done.
Pages you have marked "keep out of search" are left out of it, as is anything still in draft.
Keeping something out of search
Each page has a switch for it. Useful for a page you send to one client. Note what it is not: the page is still public to anybody with the address. It asks search engines not to list it; it does not lock the door.
What the dashboard is telling you
It checks your published site for what is missing. The ones that matter most for being found:
- No search description — the grey paragraph is being guessed from your page.
- Description too long — it will be cut off mid-sentence.
- No share image — links to you look like nothing.
- An image with no description — bad for screen readers and a wasted signal.
- A menu link pointing at a page that does not exist — a visible dead end.
Each links to the screen that fixes it.