Applying SEO to your SharePoint Online website

In this document we will describe how to provide better SEO (Search Engine Optimization) for your Office 365 SharePoint Online website.

How to do this?

First, it's good to create a Bing webmaster account, aswell as a Google Webmaster account.

For Google, follow this link.
For Bing, follow this link.

With these tools you can enable Google and Bing to crawl your Office 365 website. You'll need to change certain metatags so that Google and Bing know that you are the owner of the specific website.

1. To do this, logon to your Office 365 tenant with administrative credentials.
Then, go to Site Settings --> Site Collection Administration --> Search Engine Optimization Settings.

2. Now, you can fill out the tags you have gotten from Google / Bing (you get these when you create the webmaster accounts).


3. Verify on your Google and Bing webmaster account that the adding of the tags has succeeded.

It's also possible to give the sitemap.xml to Google or Bing. This will be created automatically by SharePoint (for mobile sites this is a different one). You can find it in the root of the site. The sitemap.xml gives each URL of your site to Google or Bing.

Additionally, it's possible to change the SEO settings per page (metadata / keywords).

1. Again, logon with administrative credentials to your Office 365 tenant.
2. Now, follow the steps as stated in the screenshot:

3. You will go to the SEO properties screen, where you can fill out all the information about your page.

 

Hopefully this information has been useful for you!