How HelpSite helps you create an SEO-friendly knowledge base

Any public knowledge base you create on HelpSite is automatically optimized for search engines. We provide features out-of-the-box that are important for search engine optimization. This makes your site rank higher on Google and other search engines, allowing you to serve your customers faster and reduce the number of support tickets you receive.

Note: It's also possible to make a private knowledge base that is hidden from search engines – but for sites like that, this article does not apply.

Speed

We've put a lot of care into site performance ensuring that HelpSite KBs load very quickly, which is an important factor in SEO.

Mobile-friendly responsive design

Our default layout/template is responsive and mobile friendly which is also an important factor in SEO, especially for visitors searching on mobile devices.

URL structure

We setup your support site URLs to be SEO-friendly.

• Our custom domain feature helps Google know that your support site and main website go together, since they share a domain name.
• Our article and category pages create SEO-friendly URL slugs from your title, automatically. For example, if you have an article called "How do I reset my username & password?" then the URL slug will automatically include how-do-i-reset-my-username-password.
• Our default layout includes <link rel="canonical" href="{{ canonical_url }}" /> which will automatically set the canonical to the best URL for each page, helping you avoid any duplicate page indexing.

Robots.txt

We automatically create an appropriate robots.txt file based on the privacy settings of your help docs site.

Semantic HTML Structure

Our default site layout uses semantic HTML which makes it easy for Google and other search engines to understand the hierarchy of content with your categories and articles. We have also taken care to follow best practices regarding accessibility.

Within individual articles, our WYSIWYG editor provides structured tags for various levels of Headings, which we recommend you use to help provide structure within your articles for both visitors and search engines.

Customize Page Title, Description, and Meta Tags

We also set good defaults for your home page, category pages, and article pages <title> tags.

Our default layout also automatically generates a unique per-article meta description tag, following best practices for length (it will choose enough first words from your article to end up with 160 characters). This is accomplished through the following Liquid tag that appears in our default layout: {% if meta_description %}<meta property="description" content="{{ meta_description | escape }}">{% endif %}

For advanced control, our custom HTML/Layout feature allows you to customize other meta tags such as description, keywords, or open graph tags, etc.

For example if you would like to add custom meta description tags to the homepage or search results, use a snippet like this:

{% if meta_description %}
  <meta property="description" content="{{ meta_description | escape }}">
{% elsif on_home_page %}
  <meta property="description" content="HOME PAGE DESCRIPTION HERE">
{% elsif on_search_page %}
  <meta property="description" content="SEARCH RESULTS DESCRIPTION HERE">
{% endif %}

301 Redirects

If you're migrating from an old support site to one powered by HelpSite, we can help you setup a custom mapping of 301 permanent redirects for each of your old articles & URLs to point to your new mapping of articles & URLs on HelpSite. Additionally, our custom redirects feature is useful if you're deleting a HelpSite article and want to redirect traffic from it to another specific article. Learn more.