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New SEO tools have arrived!

 Search Engine Optimization is vital as long as you want your website to be easily found on the web. It’s no secret that most user experiences nowadays start with a search engine. Need a product, service, or information? Google it! That’s how most people go about it, right?

But Google search algorithms are constantly changing, and you need to keep up if you want your NING network to appear in the top search results. You need to optimize your content and the website itself to be more “search-engine-friendly.”

That is why we have added a couple of new handy SEO tools to help you along the way.

 

Sitemap

 

In simple words, a sitemap is an XML file that contains information useful for search engines. Before indexing your pages, Google spiders will check out your sitemap to identify the directory of each page, their relevance to the entire website, the time of the latest update, the frequency of updates, and other aspects. This allows the search engine to index your pages more accurately. 

And although using a sitemap doesn’t guarantee an immediate boost to your Google rankings, it is still considered to be a very useful tool that helps search robots crawl your site with better results. 

The Sitemap functionality is now available in the Social Site Manager tab of your user dashboard.

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Leaving the checkbox checked ensures that your sitemap will always be up to date. If you uncheck the checkbox, the sitemap will not update automatically, but you will be able to edit it manually. 

Please note: Pages that appear in the UNLINKED PAGES block of the Site & Pages section will also be automatically added to the sitemap. 

The sitemap.xml file is located in the root directory of your network and is available for viewing at yournetwork.ning.com/sitemap.xml.

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If you have a Members only parameter specified in the Privacy settings, then viewing sitemap.xml will be available to authorized users only.

 

Meta description

 

A meta description is an HTML tag that contains information about a web page’s content. It is an effective tool used to influence the presentation of a website in search engine results pages (SERPs). Once Google indexes your page, the text snippet that you use as a meta description will appear right beneath the link to your page in the search results. 

The ability to edit this text snippet is very important as it allows you to ensure that the page description which users see when searching for content is informative and attractive. The more appealing it is, the more people will likely click on your link. 

What’s more, you can (and you should) introduce relevant keywords in your meta description to help Google understand what your page is about and, consequently, offer more accurate search results to users. This, in turn, will eventually boost your Google rankings. 

Please note: It is advisable to limit your meta description to 160 characters. Otherwise, Google will cut it short, and it won’t be able to deliver your message properly. 

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To add a custom meta description to a specific page, follow these instructions:

  • Go to Social Site Manager > Site & Pages and select the required page; 
  • Check the “Apply unique page description” checkbox in the SEO section; 
  • Enter the text in the Page Description field;
  • Save the settings.

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SEO is crucial for your website’s online visibility, so make sure to use our new tools to optimize your network and its content. 

 

Sincerely,

NING team

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Replies

  • NC for Hire

    2 Questions:

    1) Is it possible to ask the engineers to add a place in the backend of a page to specify a Image URL to show up with the page is shared?  I mean, we really can't inject it into the Page Description and it doesn't get recognized when added to Below Header section...

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    2) Is there anyway to make a Group Image show up ias the image inside a preview of link when shared socially?

  • Once again for Ning 3 only?

  • NC for Hire

    Great work guys!   Love it!

  • We've been waiting for years.  Thank you for finally providing these

  • Woww. This is amazing!!! We was wating so long for the  sitemap. 

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