SEO, sitemaps and redirects

Headra produces everything search engines need: titles, descriptions, social cards, structured data, sitemaps and robots.txt.

Site-wide settings

Under SEO, set the site name, the title format (e.g. {title} | {site}), a default social image, and the web addresses of category and tag pages. You can also discourage search engines while a site is being built.

Per item

Every item's SEO card has a meta title and description, canonical URL, indexing (index/noindex), and Open Graph and Twitter titles, descriptions and images. Leave them empty to use sensible defaults:

  • the title, formatted by the site's title format;
  • the excerpt or the first text, for the description;
  • the first image, then the site default, for the social image.

Structured data (JSON-LD), such as BlogPosting, Event, Recipe, Product, FAQ or Person, is generated from each content type's settings.

Sitemaps and robots.txt

Headra serves sitemap.xml (with one sitemap per content type) and robots.txt itself, so the client's hosting doesn't need to. They update whenever content changes. To set this up:

  1. An account admin adds a domain to the website (Account → Websites → API domains), e.g. api.clientsite.com, and points its DNS at Headra.
  2. The website's site URL must be the real front-end address, because sitemap links are built from it.
  3. Submit https://api.clientsite.com/sitemap.xml to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. The SEO screen explains how, including for hosting that only accepts HTML, JS and CSS.

Only published, indexable items with a web address appear. A content type needs a URL pattern (e.g. /blog/{slug}) to be included.

Redirects

When a page moves, add a redirect under Redirects from the old path to the new one (301 for permanent). Import many at once by pasting lines of /old /new. The website's developer applies them from /api/redirects, because Headra doesn't host the website itself.

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