The settings that decide how your site appears in Google, and the few that matter most.
The three that matter most
- A homepage title that says what you do. With nothing set, your title is just your site name — which tells a searcher nothing. Fill in the tagline in General Settings → Basic Settings ("Handmade oak furniture, made in Cork"), or set a meta title on the home page.
- A meta description per page. Each page's SEO tab has one. Where you leave it empty, the site writes a description from that page's own text — better than nothing, and worse than the sentence you would write to win the click.
- Image alt text. Describe the image. If you set nothing, the file name is used, which is why naming files properly before upload is worth the second it takes.
Per-page SEO
Every page, post and product has an SEO tab: meta title, meta description, canonical URL, social share title/description/image, and a noindex switch for pages you do not want in search (thank-you pages, internal landing pages).
Site-wide SEO
General Settings → SEO Settings holds the defaults: site name, title separator, default meta description and default share image. These fill in wherever a page has nothing of its own.
Sitemap and robots
Your sitemap is generated automatically at /sitemap.xml and lists your published pages, posts
and products. robots.txt is generated too. Submit the sitemap URL once in Google Search Console
and Google will re-read it on its own afterwards.
Indexing and your plan
Search-engine indexing is a paid feature. On a free plan your site is deliberately marked
noindex, which means Google will not list it — everything else works normally. Upgrading turns
indexing on; you can also keep a specific site hidden on purpose from your dashboard while you
build it.
What not to bother with
Keyword stuffing, hidden text and buying links all do more harm than good. Clear titles, real descriptions, fast pages and content that answers a question are what actually move rankings.