Optimize your site for SEO

How to set meta defaults, add structured data, manage the sitemap, keep redirects clean, and build internal links that lift the site in search.

SEO settings in SGEN cover the everyday tuning that determines how a site shows up in search results.
The job is less about chasing tactics and more about keeping a small set of fundamentals correct over time.
This page walks the full SEO workflow for an SGEN site — meta defaults at the site level, per-page overrides, structured-data setup, sitemap behavior, redirect hygiene, and internal linking patterns.

The page is written for two operating modes.
The first is a fresh launch — the site is going live and the SEO foundations need to be set correctly from day one.
The second is ongoing tuning — the site has been live for a while and the team wants to lift performance by closing the open gaps the SEO health report surfaces.
Both modes share the same surfaces, and the discipline is the same across both — set the defaults, check the health report, fix what the report flags, and revisit on a regular cadence.

What is this for?

Use this page when you need to set up or improve how the site presents itself to search engines.
The SEO module covers site-level meta defaults, per-page overrides, structured-data settings, sitemap configuration, and the health report that surfaces gaps and inconsistencies.

The page is a how-to.
It does not promise rankings or describe search engine ranking algorithms.
The SGEN SEO surface gives you the levers; what you do with them — and how the content itself reads to a search engine — determines the result.
The page focuses on the levers under your control.

Good use cases

• A new site launch where the site-level meta defaults need to be set before the first pages are indexed.
• A content team that wants per-page meta overrides to read better in search result previews.
• A site with structured-data needs — articles, products, FAQ entries — that should appear as rich results in search.
• A site reshape where the sitemap needs to be regenerated and submitted to search engines after a section move.
• A quarterly tuning pass where the SEO health report drives a small set of targeted fixes.
• A migration in from another platform where the inherited URL structure needs review against SEO best patterns.

What NOT to use this for

• Buying ranking. Search engines do not sell ranking; the SEO module does not pretend to deliver it. The module gives you correctness, consistency, and discoverability — the rest depends on the content.
• Tracking search keywords in detail. For keyword research, use a dedicated keyword research tool. SGEN surfaces the search performance the site is already getting; it does not build a keyword strategy.
• Hiding pages from search. To take a page off the public index, use the page visibility settings and the robots directive on the page. The SEO module reflects the page's status; it does not enforce visibility.
• Replacing content quality. The SEO module cannot make weak content rank. The module's job is to make sure strong content is presented in the way search engines understand best.

How this connects to other features

• Manage redirects — clean redirect rules are a core part of SEO hygiene; the health report flags broken chains and missing rules.
• Set up a custom domain — the canonical URL points at the primary domain; a domain change touches every canonical tag in the site.
• Connect Google Analytics — analytics and SEO read the same audience from two angles; analytics confirms whether SEO wins are converting.
• Publishing Lifecycle — every publish event refreshes the sitemap and signals search engines to recrawl; the timing of publishes matters for discovery.

Before you start

• The site has a primary domain set up. If the site is still serving on the default subdomain, set up the custom domain first — search results favor a stable canonical name.
• You are signed in as a user with site-admin permission. The SEO settings touch site-level defaults that editors cannot change.
• The site has at least a handful of real pages and posts published. The SEO module is most useful once there is content to tune; an empty site has nothing for the health report to act on.
• The site's social presence is decided — the brand name, the social handles, the share image. These values land in the social-share defaults during setup.
• For structured-data setup, the content team has a sense of which content types matter — articles, products, events, FAQ — and which can be left as default.

Where to find it

The per-site surface is the admin → SEO inside the site you are tuning.
This surface holds the meta defaults, the social-share defaults, the structured-data settings, the sitemap controls, and the health report.

Per-page overrides live on each post or page edit screen under the SEO panel — usually in the right sidebar.
The panel inherits values from the site-level defaults and shows where each value is coming from.

The portfolio surface is SG-Dashboard → Site Manager → SEO at the account level.
This surface rolls up the SEO health score across every site in the account and surfaces the top issues per site.

Steps

The workflow has six parts — set site-level meta defaults, set per-page overrides, add structured data, manage the sitemap, keep redirects clean, and build internal links.
The steps below cover the per-site surface.

1. Set site-level meta defaults

Open the site in the admin.
Click SEO in the left navigation.
Click the Defaults tab.

The defaults panel shows the values that every page inherits unless an override is set on the page itself.

Set the Site title pattern — the rule that builds the browser tab title for each page.
A typical pattern reads {page title} — {site name}.
The pattern uses tokens that the platform replaces at render time; the token list is shown in the help text under the field.

Set the Default meta description.
This is the fallback description that appears when a page does not carry its own description.
Write something that reads well in a search result preview — a one-sentence summary of what the site is about.
Keep it under 155 characters; longer descriptions truncate in most search result layouts.

Set the Default social-share image.
This is the fallback share image used when a page does not carry its own.
Pick a 1200×630 image that represents the brand cleanly; the same image will appear in many share contexts.

Set the Site language in the language picker.
The language value lands in the page lang attribute and helps search engines route results to the right audience.

Set the Default robots directive.
Most sites should set this to index, follow so every page is discoverable by default; per-page overrides handle the exceptions.

Click Save Defaults.
The values land in the site-level defaults and apply to every page that does not carry an override.

2. Set per-page overrides where they matter

Open a post or page in the admin.
Find the SEO panel — usually in the right sidebar.

The panel shows the values for the current page.
Inherited values carry an Inherited badge; overridden values show the override.

Set the Page title override if the inherited title is not the right read for this page in search results.
A page title override often reads tighter than the page H1; the H1 is for the on-page reader, the title is for the search-result snippet.

Set the Meta description for the page.
The most important pages of the site — the home page, the top product pages, the top blog posts — deserve a hand-crafted description that reads well in a search result preview.
The fallback default is fine for the long tail.

Set the Social-share image for the page if a custom share image would read better than the site default.
Top product pages and feature blog posts usually benefit from a per-page share image.

Set the Canonical URL override only when you need to.
The platform writes a self-canonical by default — the page's own URL — which is the right choice for almost every page.
Use the canonical override only when content is intentionally duplicated across two URLs and one of them should be treated as the master.

Set the Robots directive if the page should not be indexed.
A search-results page on the site itself, a thank-you page after a form submission, and most admin-facing pages are good candidates for noindex, follow.

Click Save Page.
The overrides apply on the next render.

3. Add structured data for rich results

Click Structured Data in the SEO module.
The panel shows the data types the platform supports — Article, Product, FAQ, How-To, Event, Local Business, and Organization.

Enable the data types that match the site's content.
A blog-led site usually enables Article.
A product catalog enables Product.
A site with a help center often enables FAQ and How-To.
A site with a physical presence enables Local Business and fills in the address, hours, and phone fields.

For each enabled type, the platform maps the data automatically from existing page fields.
Article pulls from the post body, the publish date, and the author.
Product pulls from product fields.
FAQ pulls from the FAQ block components.

For data types that need extra fields beyond what the page already carries — Local Business address, Organization social links — the panel surfaces those fields directly.

Click Save Structured Data.
The schema markup lands in the page HTML on the next render.

Run a structured-data test on a sample page after saving.
The platform's preview shows the schema as a search engine would read it; an external testing surface confirms the schema is well-formed against the public schema spec.

Structured data is one of the highest-use SEO levers.
A page with clean schema is more likely to appear as a rich result in search — with star ratings, FAQ accordions, recipe cards, and the like — which lifts click-through against plain-text results.

4. Manage the sitemap

Click Sitemap in the SEO module.
The panel shows the active sitemap URL — usually /sitemap.xml — and the sitemap status.

The sitemap is generated automatically.
Every published page and post appears in the sitemap with its last-modified date.
Every publish event refreshes the sitemap.

Use the Sitemap inclusion filters to exclude content types that should not appear in search.
The default inclusion covers pages, posts, products if the site has them, and category index pages.
Exclude content types that are not meant for organic discovery — internal search results pages, account pages, system pages.

Submit the sitemap URL to the search engines you care about.
The submission step is one-time per search engine; once submitted, the search engine fetches the sitemap on its own cadence.

For sites with a very large catalog, the platform produces a sitemap index file with individual sitemap files for each content type.
The index URL is what gets submitted; the per-type files are referenced from the index.

The Sitemap health indicator in the panel shows whether the sitemap is being fetched regularly by major search engines and whether any URLs in the sitemap have been flagged as problematic.
Address flagged URLs before they accumulate.

5. Keep redirects clean

Click Health in the SEO module.
The health report surfaces issues across the site's SEO surface.

One core category in the health report is redirect hygiene.
The report flags redirect chains — A → B → C where the chain should be A → C — and redirects that land on pages that no longer exist.

For each flagged issue, the report links to the matching redirect rule.
Open the rule, edit the source or destination, and the flag clears on the next health-report run.

The redirect surface and the SEO surface read the same data; the redirect rule is the thing that gets edited, and the SEO health report is the lens that surfaces which rules need attention.

For a deep redirect cleanup pass, use the Manage Redirects page as the workflow surface.
The SEO health report is the trigger; the Redirects module is where the fixes get made.

Every cleanup pass lifts the SEO health score and reduces the number of unnecessary hops for inbound traffic.
Both effects compound over time.

6. Build internal links between related content

Click Internal Links in the SEO module.
The panel shows the site's internal link graph — which pages link to which, which pages have many inbound internal links, and which pages have no inbound internal links at all.

A page with no inbound internal links — an orphan page — is hard for search engines and audience to find.
The panel surfaces orphan pages for review; the fix is to link to them from a relevant neighboring page.

For each top-level content area in the site, identify two or three high-traffic anchor pages that should link to every supporting page in the area.
The anchor pages become the discovery hubs for the area.

For deep content — long-form articles, detailed product pages — add a Related content block that links to two or three other pages in the same area.
The platform's related-content component can surface these automatically based on tags; the panel also supports a manual override for cases where the automatic picks miss.

Internal linking is the lever that turns one well-ranked page into a doorway for the rest of the site.
A page that ranks well and links to two related pages lifts those neighbors over time.

What success looks like

Site-level defaults are set correctly when the Defaults tab in the SEO module shows non-empty values for every field, the social-share preview at the top of the panel reads well, and the test rendering of a sample page in the health report passes the meta checks.

Per-page overrides are working when the top twenty pages in the site — by traffic or by importance — each carry a hand-crafted title and description, and the SEO panel on each page shows the override badge rather than the inherited badge.

Structured data is working when the structured-data section in the health report shows zero validation errors, sample pages preview their schema correctly in the structured-data preview surface, and search results for the site start to show rich result decorations within a few weeks.

The sitemap is healthy when the sitemap URL returns a complete file, the Sitemap health indicator reads green, and every major search engine is fetching the sitemap on its expected cadence.

The internal link graph is healthy when the orphan-page count is low or zero, every key anchor page has the expected outbound links to its supporting content, and the link graph view shows clusters around each content area rather than isolated nodes.

What to do if it does not work

Examples

Example A — fresh launch SEO foundation.
A team is going live on a new domain.
Operator opens the admin → SEO → Defaults, sets the site title pattern {page title} — Brand, writes a one-sentence site-level description under 155 characters, uploads a 1200×630 share image, sets the site language and the default robots directive to index, follow.
Opens the Structured Data tab, enables Article and Organization, fills in the social links under Organization.
Opens the Sitemap tab and confirms the sitemap is active.
Submits the sitemap URL to two search engines.
By the end of the day the site is in good SEO foundational shape.

Example B — quarterly tuning pass.
A site has been live for a year.
Operator opens the admin → SEO → Health and reads the top ten issues.
Six are redirect chains; the operator walks the chains and flattens each over twenty minutes.
Three are orphan pages; the operator adds links from a related anchor page to each.
One is a missing structured-data field on the product schema; the operator fills the field on the product type defaults so every product picks it up.
The health report score lifts by twelve points after the next run.

Example C — structured data for a help center.
A site with a help center wants the FAQ entries to appear as rich results in search.
Operator opens Structured Data, enables FAQ, confirms the FAQ block components in the help center pages map automatically into FAQ schema.
Runs the structured-data preview on three sample pages and confirms the schema is well-formed.
Within four weeks, search results for common help-center queries start showing FAQ accordion decorations and click-through lifts noticeably on the affected pages.

Example D — sitemap cleanup after a section move.
A team moved a section of the site from /products/ to /shop/.
Operator opens the SEO module, confirms the sitemap reflects the new URL structure on the next refresh, opens the redirect health report to confirm 301 rules are in place from the old paths to the new.
Submits the updated sitemap URL to the major search engines as a fresh signal that the site has changed.
Over the next several weeks the search results catch up to the new URLs and the old paths drop out of the index.

Example E — orphan page rescue.
The health report flags fourteen orphan pages — long-form articles that no other page links to.
Operator opens each, reads the topic, picks a sensible anchor page in the same content area, adds a link from the anchor to the orphan with relevant anchor text.
By the next health-report run, orphan count drops to zero.
Over the following month, several of the rescued pages start to show up in search results for queries that match their topic.

Common questions about SEO settings

How often should I revisit the SEO health report?
A monthly walk catches most accumulating issues before they become a backlog.
For sites with high publish cadence, weekly is reasonable.
The point is to keep the issue count near zero; the cadence is whatever it takes for the site you run.

Does SGEN handle robots.txt automatically?
Yes.
The platform generates a sensible robots.txt for every site with sitemap reference, base allow rules, and any per-page noindex pages reflected.
To override, set custom robots.txt content in the SEO Defaults tab.

What does the SEO health score measure?
The score blends several signals — meta completeness, structured-data validity, redirect chain health, internal link coverage, sitemap freshness, and image alt-text coverage.
A higher score reflects fewer flagged issues; the report names each flagged issue and links to the fix.

Can I edit the structured data manually rather than using the auto-mapping?
For most sites the auto-mapping covers the cases.
For sites with bespoke schema needs — a custom content type that does not match the standard schema — contact support; bespoke schema mapping is a separate engineering path.

Does the platform support hreflang for multi-language sites?
Yes.
In a multi-language site, the platform writes hreflang tags automatically across language variants of each page.
Confirm the language variants are configured in the language settings; the SEO module reads from there.

How do I know if my changes are helping?
The SEO module surfaces internal signals — flagged issues going down, score going up.
External impact — actual search rankings, organic traffic — is measured in your search engine's search console and in your analytics surface.
Pair the SEO module's health report with the analytics view connected through the Google Analytics page.

Plan for large-site, enterprise, and multi-site SEO scenarios

A large content catalog, an enterprise account, or a multi-site portfolio raises the SEO operational stakes.
The mechanics stay the same; the discipline changes.

Large single-site planning

A site with thousands of pages cannot be tuned page-by-page.
Use the site-level defaults aggressively — pattern-based title rules, fallback descriptions, defaults for share images — to cover the long tail.
Reserve the per-page tuning energy for the top one or two hundred pages by traffic or by importance.

For a site with a heavy catalog — many product pages, many blog posts — pick one anchor page per major content area and treat it as a hub.
Build internal links from the hub to every supporting page in the area; build links back from the supporting pages to the hub.
The hub-and-spoke pattern is one of the highest-use SEO patterns at scale.

For a site that regularly retires content, set a quarterly retirement pass on the calendar.
Retired pages get a 301 redirect to the nearest live equivalent; the sitemap drops them on the next refresh; the search engines update over the following weeks.
A clean retirement pass keeps the SEO health score steady and prevents long broken-link tails.

Multi-site portfolio planning

For an agency or in-house team running many sites, the portfolio surface in SG-Dashboard is the right lens.
Open SG-Dashboard → Site Manager → SEO for a single roll-up of every site's SEO health score and the top issues per site.

Pick a portfolio cadence and write it down.
A typical agency cadence — monthly walk of the portfolio SEO surface to catch sites trending downward, quarterly deep-dive on each site in the portfolio, annual audit of the structured-data setup across the portfolio.

For sites under the same brand umbrella, share an SEO playbook — title patterns, description guidance, structured-data setup, internal linking patterns.
A playbook turns SEO tuning into a process rather than a per-site improvisation.

For an enterprise account with regulatory weight on its content, the SEO settings touch how regulated content appears in public search.
Pair the SEO module with the compliance review cycle so any change that affects regulated content has the right sign-off before the change lands.

A documented portfolio playbook for SEO — defaults, per-page guidance, structured-data setup, internal-link patterns — turns SEO from a slow accumulation of small issues into a maintained surface that contributes to discovery month over month.

Tracking SEO outcomes against the changes you make

The health report measures internal signals — meta completeness, structured-data validity, redirect chain health.
The external outcome — actual search rankings, organic traffic, click-through rate from search results — is measured in the search console and in the connected analytics surface.

Pair every meaningful SEO change with a small measurement plan.
Note the change in a running log — the date, the change, the affected pages.
Watch the search console for the affected pages over the next four to eight weeks.
Most SEO changes show their effect on that horizon; some take longer.

A simple log structure — date, change, affected URLs, expected effect, measured effect — turns a stream of small SEO tweaks into a record of what worked.
Over a year, the log becomes the team's institutional knowledge about which changes lift this particular site and which changes had no measurable effect.

For sites with editorial cadences, pair the SEO log with the content calendar.
A new piece of content that performs well in search is a candidate for additional internal linking and structured-data refinement; a piece that lands quietly is a candidate for review against the SEO health report to identify any technical gaps.

Watching for algorithm shifts

Search engines update their ranking algorithms on their own cadence.
A change in search performance that affects many of a site's pages at once is usually an algorithm signal rather than a site-specific issue.

Subscribe to a reliable industry source that reports algorithm changes.
When a major change is announced, run the SEO health report and confirm no new flags have appeared.
If the flags are clean and the traffic still drops, the issue is the algorithm's new weighting rather than a fixable site issue.

Algorithm shifts are not problems to fix in panic.
The right response is patience plus the steady work the health report drives anyway — clean meta, valid structured data, no redirect chains, sensible internal links, fresh sitemap.
Sites that do this work consistently weather algorithm shifts better than sites that lurch between tactics.

Related reading

• Manage redirects
• Set up a custom domain
• Connect Google Analytics
• Publishing Lifecycle