Optimize the searchability of your Canva website

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimisation. It refers to the process of improving a website’s ranking in search engine results (e.g., Google).

This means that the better your SEO, the easier it'll be to find your website by searching for it on the internet, or when searching for related topics or products.

Use these steps to improve how easily people find your Canva website in search engines.

Getting your website to the top of search engine results takes a lot of work and each search engine has its own set of guidelines.

At Canva, we do the following:

• Redirecting visitors from the domain with a www. prefix (e.g., visitors typing in www.mysite.com will automatically go to mysite.com).
• Auto-generating a “sitemap” for your site, which helps search engines index all subpages of the website; this can be viewed by visiting [your-domain]/sitemap.xml. For example, if you published your website to mysite.com, you can find it at mysite.com/sitemap.xml.
• Using the design title (shown in the “Browser tab preview”) as the Title shown in search results.
• Using the “Page description” as the Description shown in search results.

Canva offers Magic SEO, an AI-powered tool that helps you:

• Automatically generate SEO titles, descriptions, and URL paths
• Keep SEO consistent across all pages
• Base your metadata on real content from your site

Learn how to generate SEO for your website with Magic SEO

For better results, here are the things that you might consider doing:

• Adding alt text to your images.
• Researching and using relevant keywords on your website and in the website description.
• Keeping each of your websites reasonably small – more content means longer loading times for your audience, which leads to a lower SEO ranking. You can spread out your content over multiple websites to help.
• Creating numerous websites with “backlinks”, such as blog posts that link to each other.
• Referring traffic to your website from other platforms, such as social media.
• Publish the website to a custom domain with no subpath. (Example: http://example.com).
• When sharing your website, share it without the “www.” prefix.
• Disable password protection on your page. Search engines can’t index pages with passwords, as they wouldn’t meet Google's content requirements.

When a site is published, it's immediately available for search engines like Google to “crawl” and “index”. This basically lets search engines be aware of your new website, or of recent changes, and allows it to appear in search results.

Note that all the text on your website will be indexed. There’s no need to submit “keywords” anywhere. This includes metadata on your website.

You may ask Google to crawl your website if you'd like this process to be sped up.

Since there are so many websites published on the internet, search engines like Google can take some time to index your website, maybe as long as weeks. You might be able to speed this up with tools like Google Search Console.

Google Search Console is a free service that helps website owners optimise the visibility of their websites.

Here’s what you can do with this service:

• Monitor how the site is performing
• View search analytics data
• Request Google to re-index (i.e., reprocess) your website
• Find subpages, such as example.com/about-me
• Find an outdated view of your website

If you receive an email from Google Search Console stating that there’s an issue with indexing the website and it's excluded by the “no index” tag, check the settings of the domain in Canva.

Make sure the site isn't hidden from search engines. To do so, select the Advanced settings

If the Canva domain isn't set as hidden, go to Google Search Console and follow these steps:

1. Go to Page Indexing.
2. Select Excluded by “noindex” tag.
3. Choose Validation details.
4. Check the URL link after the domain.

Indexing refers to the process by which search engines collect, organise, and process data on the Internet. When a new page is found, the search engine indexes it so that users can find the information when they search for a relevant keyword.

To see if search engines have indexed your site, enter "site:" followed by the URL of your domain. By default, your homepage is indexed without the part after the "/" (known as the slug).

For example, if you typed in “site:example.com” in Google, it'll return a list of indexed results for the domain https://example.com. This is useful to determine if your site has been indexed or not.

The results show all of your site's pages that have been indexed and the current Meta Tags saved in the search engine's index.

If none of your pages appear, it means that your site has yet to be indexed.