SEO Settings for Cloud Exchanges

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is one of the most vital aspects of any website, successful SEO settings will result in better rankings, more views, and hopefully more users!

For Cloud Operators altering your exchange settings for SEO is as easy as filling out three fields.

This option available for Cloud Operators is the best way to work with your SEO, as the HTML code is embedded fully within the website. When using the console, these settings are injected on the website loading, so not as easy for search engines to pick up on.

Using Cloud SEO Settings

📺 Watch on YouTube: Getting Better Google Rankings with SEO

From your exchange's dashboard, access 'Hosting', the 'SEO' tab and you will see the screen below.

Each of these three boxes has its own purpose:

• Title Tag - This is the title as will be seen on search engine pages (the large clickable link), as well as in posts shared to social media.

• Meta Description - The meta description is the text underneath the title on the search engine page.

• Keywords - This is the vital part. Keywords are the vital aspects that search engine crawlers use to match up users' searches to useful results, these are not viewable to the user when they come across your site on search engines.

What I changed my top two fields to...

...and how they actually look in practice in my listing

Seo Settings — Best Practices

There are a few considerations here to achieve the most success with SEO. SEO settings are a huge area of research, so it is recommended to take advantage of the huge amount of resources dedicated solely to SEO recommendations.

Let's have a brief look at some of these best practices here

• Title Tag - Try to keep the number of characters here under 55, this will make sure that the entire title is visible on the search engine page, any more and the end of the title may get cut off.

• Meta Description - The meta description is the text underneath the title on the search engine page. These terms in here used to be taken into account on Google as keywords, but this is no longer the case. For this reason, it is best to keep this nice and human-readable, stuffing it with keywords won't give the actual boost you may expect. Better human readability will improve Click-through-rate (CTR), an important metric meaning that instead of skipping over your page, users will actually visit the exchange.

• Keywords - This is perhaps the most important, but likewise most difficult, aspect to make as efficient as possible. For this reason here will be linked to some outside resources that go in real depth on this topic.

Applying Your New SEO Settings

With the hopefully best possible tags now chosen, all that has to be done is hit the save button, my and let HollaEx apply these new changes to the exchange. This process will take around 30 mins.

Your exchange will need to be rebuilt, which could affect users' ability to access the exchange whilst the rebuild occurs.

It may be best to apply this change at low-traffic times and to let your users know before the rebuild occurs.

Once this process is complete, you may be excited to run off and check your new tags on Google and be dismayed to see that your link looks exactly the same as it did before. Unfortunately for this final step, there isn't anything we can do to speed up the process. Google's system will take a little while to update unfortunately with estimates being around 7-15 days.

Once Google has updated your tags, however, we should see what we used in our SEO settings for the title and meta description, and assuming we choose efficient keywords, be able to find our exchange via these as well.