SEO basics
What every PageFork site gets automatically for search engines, and how to ask for deeper SEO work.
Search engines need a few technical things to index a site properly. PageFork builds those in, so a published site is indexable without you asking for anything.
What you get automatically
Every site ships with:
- Title and meta description on each page, written for that page’s content.
- Open Graph and Twitter card tags, so links unfurl with a proper title, description, and image when shared.
- Canonical URLs, so the same page under different addresses isn’t treated as duplicate content.
- A sitemap, listing your real pages for search engines to crawl.
robots.txt, pointing crawlers at that sitemap.- Structured data (JSON-LD) where it applies — organisation or local business details, site information, FAQ markup when the page has an FAQ, and breadcrumbs.
- Sensible defaults for page speed: one clear
H1, a logical heading order, descriptive image alt text, sized images, and priority loading for the main hero image.
Thank-you and confirmation pages are marked noindex and excluded from the sitemap, so a page meant for people who already converted doesn’t show up in search results.
Structured data is only emitted where it’s truthful. PageFork won’t invent review stars or ratings — those need real data you supply, and fabricating them risks a manual penalty.
Getting more out of it
The baseline is technical correctness. Ranking depends on your content, so the biggest wins usually come from what you say and how you say it.
Ask for SEO work directly:
Rewrite the homepage title and meta description to target
"wedding photographer Bristol".Review the whole site for SEO and tell me what to improve.Add FAQ structured data using the questions in the FAQ section.When you ask for anything about SEO, keywords, schema, rankings, or competitors, PageFork switches into a dedicated SEO mode that goes deeper than the automatic baseline.
Things to set yourself
A few things PageFork can’t know:
- Your business details. Address, opening hours, and phone number make local business markup useful. Tell the editor and they’ll be wired in.
- Which page targets which term. One page per intent works better than one page trying to rank for everything.
- A custom domain. A connected domain is worth more than a subdomain for search, and moving later means redirects.
After you publish
SEO changes only reach search engines once a site is published — draft edits aren’t crawlable.
Then it’s a waiting game. Indexing takes days to weeks. To speed it up,
submit your sitemap in Google Search
Console — your sitemap lives
at /sitemap-index.xml on your domain.
Verify what’s live by viewing the page source and looking for your
<title>, <meta name="description">, and <script type="application/ld+json"> tags.