Optimizing your SEO with Spark

What is SEO?

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the process of increasing the quality and quantity of your website traffic from Search Engines (ex.  Google, Bing, Yahoo!) using strategies and tools.  

How can I implement SEO on my Saffire site?

SEO tools are available on all dynamic, event and business pages in the TOOLS bar under Settings.

Under MORE OPTIONS you will find three sections:

It is important to have unique SEO titles and descriptions for pages so individual events, businesses and relevant information can be discovered easily.

1. SEO Title- This is the title of the page that will appear on the search. 

    In this case it is Saffire: Websites & Ticketing. Titles are best if they are concise and to the point.

2. SEO Description - This is the 140 character summary of the page which appears under the title in the search.

    The description uses the words in the title and clearly states what can be found on the page.

3. SEO Keywords

Like most platforms Saffire and the internet are constantly adapting and changing. Keywords used to matter. But then Google changed the way they crawl for keywords and it became less about having keywords in this section and more about writing your page content with awareness to the keywords you would like to highlight.

This happens naturally but here is a handy strategy that we suggest for making that google crawl WORTH IT!

Think about your event, venue, or destination – if you knew almost nothing about those things what are the three or four words you would use to google it?

Let’s say I’m googling Saffire I might enter –

Website ticketing software

OR

Fair ticketing software

OR 

Web design for events

These are all words that I would make sure to have in the content of my page – even better if they are repeated in the title!

SEO should also be set for your site in general -

Go to TOOLS > SITE SETTINGS > SITE INFO

Fill in the Title, Description, & Keywords for your general site. This applies to your homepage.

Friendly URLs & Redirects

Friendly URLs

The Spark software will auto-assign a URL that is pretty generic and sometimes not very search-friendly. 

You can change this by creating a URL ending for the page.

For example – www.saffire.com/layouts the /layouts is the friendly URL.

We assume that anyone looking for layouts on Saffire.com would back slash “layouts” and so does the search engine.

Friendly URLs can be accessed from under TOOLS > SITE SETTINGS > FRIENDLY URLs to create mass updates to page URLs.

Regardless, renaming the the page URL to something identifiable makes it more search engine friendly. 

Redirects

Can be accessed under TOOLS > SITE SETTINGS > REDIRECTS

Redirects are vital to making sure that previous URLs or links are being sent to the most recent version of a page.

A good example is if you combine two pages of information into one page, the links to the separate pages could now be redirected to the new page.

This can also be handy when giving out a public facing URL that redirects to a new year of the event, copy of the page, or relocation of important frequently searched for information.   

To make a redirect:

1. Determine the URL ending of the new link/ old link
2. Add the Destination URL – aka the page this new link will redirect to
3. Save & Close

If you want to look further into how to do better with Search Engine Optimization contact your coach!