SEO

This section covers how to work with SEO in Bubble.

SEO, or Search Engine Optimization, is the effort you put into your website or app to improve its visibility in search engine results. This is a broad field encompassing a lot of different strategies both related to technical stuff (how your page is set up) and what the page offers (the content you have).

SEO is how you optimize your app to appear in search results, like in this example with the Bubble homepage.

Search engines do two things; they crawl the web, going through millions of websites to try to understand what they're about. Then, as a user searches for something, they try to offer the most relevant results first.

Optimizing for search engines is an on-going task that can be hard to predict the outcome of; while Bubble offers the tools to prepare your app for the technical side of SEO, getting search engine traffic still depends on many different factors, like:

• high-quality content

• relevant keywords

• the age of your domain

• the number and quality of inbound links

• ease of navigation

• accessibility

• responsiveness

This is not an exhaustive list, but serves to illustrate that SEO is a gradual process of continually improving a app's quality and relevance, and while checking off boxes in a list is a part of it, it's not the full picture.

All that being said, the road to a site that's well optimized for SEO starts with the technical details, and we'll cover that and some introductory guidelines in this article series.

Is this relevant for my app?

SEO is not relevant for all apps: only those that aim to get search engine traffic. In an app where it is relevant, it's not necessarily relevant for all your pages: only those that are public and again where you want to get search engine traffic.

Some of the settings in this guide also play a part in social media sharing. For example, you can add descriptions and images to pages that may appear in social media post where the link to the page is shared. If this is relevant for your app, you may want to read through these articles even if you are not counting on search engine visibility.

This guide will introduce you to the key SEO features available in Bubble and help you optimize your application.

SEO article series

We have separated this series into three articles:

Introduction to SEO

This article contains general platform-agnostic advice for your SEO strategy. While it's not directly related to how Bubble works, it contains useful tips that may help you use the settings in the later articles effectively.

SEO settings: App

The app section will cover the SEO features that you apply to your entire app. This includes:

• The app title, site name and description (used when sharing your app in social media)

• The default thumbnail image (also used for social media)

• Robots.txt

• Sitemaps

• Header/body tags

• 301 redirects

• Hosting files in the root directory

SEO: App

SEO settings: Page

The page section covers the SEO that you apply to each separate page. Each page is a potential listing in the search engines that you can optimize to deliver results for the topic that page covers, whether it's a static informational page or a dynamic page such as a blog post, product or social media post.

A page's SEO settings are contained with the element inspector on the page element itself, and consist of the following:

• Page main title (as visible in the browser tab)

• The page SEO title (as visible in search results)

• The page description (used by search engines to understand the content and sometimes shown in search results)

• A custom image for that page (used for social media sharing)

Additional on-page SEO tools can also be added in the HTML header of each page, or by placing a HTML element on the page.

SEO: Page