Website Promotion and Social Sharing Links

This section explains how to use IndieMade's tools to improve your website's search engine visibility, how to link your site to other social sharing sites, and how to make it easy for your readers to tweet, post, and like your content.

Click on website and then on promote to get to the website promotion section.

Social Web

If you have other "homes" on the web -- a Facebook page, a Twitter account, and so on -- you can automatically have links to these services added to your IndieMade site. Fill out the form and the links will be placed on every page of your IndieMade site.

Social Sharing Buttons

An important part of driving traffic to your site is making it easy for people to share links back to your site. By checking the boxes for the social sharing sites you want to support, IndieMade will automatically create sharing buttons next to your blog posts, products, image galleries, and events, by integrating with the popular and powerful ShareThis service.

Check the boxes of those services you want to support -- but think twice before checking them all. A long list of sharing buttons can be intimidating and counter-productive. The More checkbox enables a green ShareThis icon, which can lead your readers to any of the dozens and dozens of services that share this supports.

Finally, if you have a ShareThis publisher key, you can optionally enter it into the box. This will enable you to access any of ShareThis's reports on how people are sharing your content. 

Submit to Search Engines

Obviously, the easier it is for people to find your site on search engines like Google or Bing, the better it is for you. Contrary to popular belief, the world's search engines do not instantly know about every page on every website on the internet -- instead, they regularly spider sites to discover what pages are available. Huge sites get spidered throughout the day, but it may take weeks or months for small, new websites to get noticed.

Your IndieMade site can automatically create a sitemap of your site, and submit it nightly to Google and Bing. It's up to the search engines to decide when and how often they spider your site, but you can stack the deck in your favor just by checking the box:

If you have properly set up a custom URL for your IndieMade site, you'll want to use that URL in the sitemap.

Search Engine Optimization

Finally, you may be able to improve your ranking in search engines by providing meta keywords and a meta description for your home page. The description is what most search engines will display when they show your site on the search engine results page.

Meta Tags for Social Sharing

The following will show you how to control what photo and text appears when you share your website link to facebook or other social media.

In dashboard>website>promote, scroll to "Social Store Meta Tags".

Here is where you can add a title, additional description, as well as a photo that will be displayed when you share your website link.

Don't forget to click on Save configuration to save your changes.