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Make Sure Your Article Is SEO-Friendly

RebelMouse's Entry Editor features a rich SEO toolset that guides writers and editors to think about the right search phrase behind every story, as well as how to focus on small but meaningful modifications designed to improve organic search performance. Adding an SEO headline, a relevant URL slug, and a meta description to your article makes it easier for search engines to crawl, index, and understand your content.

SEO Headline

Your SEO headline should tell both users and search engines (e.g., Google) what the topic of your article is. If headline phrases appear in a user's search query, Google will consider your article more relevant and reward it. Creating and maintaining an SEO headline is your first opportunity to think about key search phrases you'd like to organically win.

For example, you may be interested in optimizing an interior design article for the search keywords "brownstone" and "apartment." To begin, you should update the SEO Headline field in Entry Editor with those keywords:


Note: Updating your SEO Headline will not change the main headline of your post.

Search Phrase (URL Keywords)

This field allows you to change the URL slug of your post. If your URL contains relevant words, this provides users and Google with more contextual information about your article page:

Here's what the default URL slug looks like before you make any changes to the "Search Phrase (URL Slug)" field. By default, we use the main headline of your post:

And here's how the URL slug appears after an update based on our example target keywords:

SEO Description

Your SEO description (or meta description) for your article gives Google a summary of what the article is about. And, once again, if key phrases align with a user's search query, your content will be rewarded. Unlike your SEO headline, your SEO description can be a quick sentence or a short paragraph. Write a description that'll both inform and interest users to click if they see your description in a search result.

Here's how our example updates appear in a Google search result. Keywords in the URL slug and description are bolded by Google if they match a user's search query. This helps give users clues about whether or not the content being surfaced is what they're actually looking for:

SEO Description + Metadata Best Practices

When writing an SEO description, look at it as an opportunity to describe to both readers and Google what each piece of content is about. It's best to keep these descriptions to 160 characters or less, and it's especially important to focus on relevancy. Avoid the clickbait and think about what your readers might search for that would lead them to a particular piece of content. Google can choose to not use the meta description you provide if it considers it to be irrelevant.

Meta descriptions are also handy ways to eloquently describe any page on your site, including sections. Keep in mind that social sites such as Facebook will use metadata content to preview articles in its News Feed, too. So don't be afraid to spend a little extra time on crafting a killer description.

Search Discovery (Search Phrase You Want to Win)

Search Discovery lets you define a search phrase you want to win, and then returns results from Google's first page for that search term. A checkbox option is provided so you can select like-minded articles that you'd like to include at the end of your post:

Your post will link to the selected articles in the Related Articles Around the Web module shown below your content. This is a proven SEO practice that's rewarded by Google. Click here for more on SEO strategy.

Google Search Console

Google Search Console is a free tool that helps you to understand and optimize your site's performance in Google's search results. When Google visits your website for tracking purposes, it performs what's called crawling and indexing — a process of adding web pages into its search results.

Search Console will allow you to add or remove specific content from Google's search results. The tool will also help you learn which keywords trigger your site to appear in Google's rankings, and which third-party sites are linking to yours. It also allows you to monitor your site's performance on search, including locating any errors on your pages.

  • Click here to set up your Google Search Console.
  • Click here to submit a site map in Google Search Console.
  • Click here to learn more about our SEO Keyword Win feature, which shows you what keywords you've won in the search engines so you can adjust your URL slug and related articles to improve SEO even further.

Particle Assembler: Ads in Slideshows Now Supported

You can now insert ads between slides in a slideshow!

Monetizing users' engagement and page views is pivotal to most digital businesses, and our Particle Assembler has been an invaluable tool in helping RebelMouse clients to insert native ads seamlessly into their content. Now we've taken this functionality one step further by introducing support for ads between slides in Assembler's slideshow layout.

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Inside RebelMouse’s Quality Assurance Operations

How We've Perfected Stress-Free Publishing

At RebelMouse, we like to refer to our enterprise publishing platform as "lean tech." Most publishers have a natural inclination to start doubling down on teams of developers who try to build unique experiences to help stand out above the noise. But they should actually be doing the opposite: Lean tech is the preferred way to cut through content saturation. By allowing RebelMouse to obsess over your product, content producers, editors, managers, and everyone in between can focus on creating quality content and taking advantage of opportunities to leverage distributive publishing strategies that create real revenue growth.

One of the major reasons we're able to maintain a lean tech environment is thanks to our approach to quality assurance (QA). We make updates to our platform daily to ensure our clients always have access to the most robust, high-performing, and secure version of our platform. Behind the scenes, this means having a solid QA structure that's efficient, creates less bugs, and catches the ones that do pop up before they go live. It's a system of checks and balances that's hard and costly to replicate on a custom CMS. Here's a glimpse into how it works.

Our Tech Stack Toolbox

  • Cucumber
  • Java
  • Junit
  • Maven
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • TeamCity
  • Zalenium (Selenium Grid)

Our Checks and Balances Workflow

Automated Regression Testing Cycle

The Lifecycle of a Product Update

When an update is first made to RebelMouse, TeamCity immediately triggers the start of automated tests to review integrity.

TeamCity Build

TeamCity Agent

The tests run in parallel on TeamCity's Build Agent. Next, Zalenium creates docker containers with browsers that matches the count of parallel threads. An Allure report is then generated from the test results, which shows the state of the application after the update.

Allure Report Pass

If a test doesn't complete successfully, the testing framework receives a video with a failed test and attaches it to the Allure report.

Allure Report Issue

Based on the report analysis, a QA specialist will create a "bug" ticket in our product management software to address the issue if needed. Then, information about the bug is immediately sent to the project manager and we begin the process of correcting the problem.

The media powerhouses we power can publish with confidence knowing that any product issues that arise are met with a tried-and-true process to fix the problem with little-to-no disturbance to their workflow. If you have any questions about this process, please email support@rebelmouse.com.

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The Difference Between Subdomains and Subfolders

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder.

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder. This is a choice your team will have to make as you replatform and optimize your content, so it's important to understand the distinction between the two.

Subdomains

A subdomain is a subdivision of an existing domain: For example, apis.rebelmouse.com (subdomain of rebelmouse.com) and hub.united.com (subdomain of united.com) are both examples of subdomain structures. Launching a subdomain on RebelMouse is simple and straightforward for your tech team, and usually doesn't entail much extra work.

Subfolders

Creating a subfolder is a bit different. A subfolder is a URL structure such as FSAStore.com/learn. It's easier to think of subfolders as subsections of your site. This work generally takes about 10 service hours for our team to configure for you.

To launch a new property using a subfolder setup, RebelMouse provides you with technical strategy, direction, and advice on how to configure it properly. For search engine optimization purposes (SEO), using subfolders is the most optimal setup, but the SEO improvement can be minor. As long as the content on the main domain and subdomain interlink, there's not much to worry about if you need to use a subdomain setup. We accomplish the correct connections between both through JSON and feed integrations.

If you have any questions about the difference between subdomains and subfolders, email support@rebelmouse.com.

Related Posts vs. Posts in Assembler

Here's the difference between Related Posts and Posts in Assembler.

By using Related Posts and Posts in Assembler, you can help your audience stay engaged with your site's content and generate more traffic. Both of these features can be added to any post through Entry Editor.

When creating or editing a post, you can add a Related Posts section to the bottom of it that consists of a selection of existing posts on your site that you choose to surface. Only the main image and content headline are pulled, along with a link to the original post. This is similar to the Around the Web section that also shows up at the end of your post when you enable it from the SEO tab of Entry Editor.

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