Durable automatically equips every website with essential Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features, ensuring your business is discoverable by potential customers. These built-in optimizations work behind the scenes to help your site rank higher in search results on platforms like Google and Bing, and improve visibility with AI-powered search tools, all without requiring any manual setup from you.
How it works
Durable integrates foundational SEO elements directly into your website from the moment it's published. This means your site is optimized for search engines and AI tools without you needing to configure complex settings. Here's how Durable automatically enhances your website's discoverability:
Automatic Meta Tags: Every page on your website, including your homepage, service pages, and blog posts, automatically receives a title and meta description. These are intelligently generated from your business profile and page content, providing search engines with a clear summary of your page.
Open Graph (OG) Tags: For enhanced social media sharing, Durable automatically generates Open Graph tags. These tags control how your content appears when shared on platforms like Facebook, LinkedIn, or in messaging apps, ensuring a rich preview with an image, title, and description.
AI-Written Image Alt Text: All images uploaded to your Durable website are automatically given descriptive alt text using AI. This improves accessibility for users with screen readers and helps search engines understand the content of your images, boosting your site's image search performance.
Optimized Heading Structure: Your website's content is structured with proper H1, H2, and H3 headings. This hierarchical organization makes your content easier for search engine crawlers to understand and index.
Internal Linking: Durable automatically creates internal links through your website's navigation menus, footers, and section links. This ensures that all pages are easily reachable by search engine crawlers, helping them discover and index your entire site.
Structured Data (JSON-LD): Every published page on your Durable website automatically includes structured data in JSON-LD format. This standardized code helps search engines and AI assistants understand specific details about your business, services, and content. It enables your site to appear with rich results in search (such as star ratings, author bylines, or FAQ boxes) and provides accurate information for AI assistant citations. This structured data is generated from your business profile and page content and is not directly editable in the dashboard.
Sitemaps and Robots.txt: Your Durable website automatically serves a
sitemap.xmlfile, which lists all public pages on your site along with their last-updated timestamps. This helps search engine crawlers efficiently discover and index your content. Alongside this, arobots.txtfile is automatically provided, guiding crawlers on which parts of your site they can or cannot access.
Key concepts
Meta Tags: HTML elements that provide metadata about your webpage, such as the title and description, which appear in search engine results.
Open Graph (OG) Tags: Specific meta tags that control how your web page content is displayed when shared on social media platforms.
Image Alt Text: A text description of an image, crucial for accessibility and for search engines to understand the image's content.
Structured Data (JSON-LD): A standardized format for providing information about a webpage, helping search engines categorize and display content more effectively, often leading to rich results.
Sitemap: An XML file that lists all the URLs on your website that you want search engines to crawl, helping them navigate and index your site more efficiently.
Robots.txt: A text file that tells search engine crawlers which URLs on your site they can access or should ignore.
What this means for your website
Durable's foundational SEO features are active by default, providing a strong base for your online presence. While many aspects are automatic, you also have control over key elements to fine-tune your site's visibility.
Editing Page SEO Metadata
You can customize the SEO title, meta description, and Open Graph image for individual pages on your website:
From your Durable dashboard, navigate to the page you wish to edit.
Access the page settings.
Locate the fields for Title, Meta Description, and OG Image.
Edit these fields with your desired content.
You can also use the AI generate SEO action to have Durable's AI rewrite the SEO metadata for a page based on its content.
Initial SEO values are generated when your page is first published. If you make significant changes to a page's content, you can manually regenerate its SEO metadata using the AI generate SEO option to ensure it remains optimized.
Controlling Page Indexing
If you need to prevent a specific page from being indexed by search engines or included in your sitemap, you can use the noIndex setting within that page's settings in the website builder. This also removes the page from the llms.txt file, which guides AI models.
While Durable automatically manages your sitemap, you can optionally submit your sitemap.xml file to Google Search Console to potentially speed up the indexing of your website.
Frequently Asked Questions about Foundational SEO
Do I need to enable SEO features? No, Durable's foundational SEO features are automatic and active for every published website.
Can I edit SEO titles and descriptions? Yes, you can customize these via the page settings in your dashboard or by using the AI generate SEO action.
Are SEO settings updated automatically when I change my page? Initial values are generated upon publishing. You can manually regenerate them after major page edits using the AI generate SEO option.
Do I need to write any of this SEO content myself? No, Durable automatically generates initial SEO content for your pages, though you have the option to edit or regenerate it.