ClickHelp User Manual

SEO Settings for Online Documentation

SEO (search engine optimization) is a system of rules that helps increase the visibility of online resources on the web. It is vital to obey these rules to make your online documentation available for more readers as it will be placed higher in the results of the search engines. As online manuals usually contain precise terms, and their themes are quite specific, using your ClickHelp documentation portal as a SEO tool can give excellent results.

ClickHelp has several features to offer to increase the SEO effect. First, the Human-Readable URLs. You are allowed to change the topic URLs at any time, but the default URL will resemble the topic title. This helps the search engines to look for content relevant to search queries in the page URLs, as well as in the page content. Thus, your Portal is more likely to appear among the top search results.

Secondly, the usage of Index Keywords structures your online manual and makes it easier to handle by users. In addition, it creates the Keywords meta tag automatically when publishing a Project. This means that a number of search engines will be aware of your documentation's theme and will treat it in relevance to search queries.

Besides, you can explicitly specify your Meta Description and Meta Keywords in the topic properties. Go to Properties → Master Page, you'll see the following settings:

The Topic master page section in the topic properties

Meta Description is what users will see in Google/Bing/Yahoo/etc. search results below the link. If this tag is empty or missing, the search engines will auto-extract some content from the page. The content they extract may not be the best choice to show in the results. Therefore, technical writers should consider specifying some meaningful text for search engines to use.

Meta Keywords should be comma-separated. These are the words that present the content of the topic best to help search engines identify your documentation. Although now, only a few search engines take the meta keywords into account, the usage of this tag is still recommended.

Additional Tags are any other tags you might want to append to the <head> section of the topic. You can see the tags you can include in this section here.

Topic header HTML. Content that you can append to the beginning of all of your topics.

Topic footer HTML. Content that you can append to the end of all of your topics right before the closing </body> tag.

Learn more on Topic Properties

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