Meta descriptions and SEO

Good docs earn search traffic. Clayo handles the technical side of SEO automatically, and gives you one lever worth pulling deliberately: the meta description.

Meta descriptions

The meta description is the snippet shown under your page title in search results and link previews. Every article has one:

• Authored: you (or your agent) write it. Up to 300 characters; around 150 reads best in search results.
• Derived: if none is set, Clayo generates one from the article's opening content.

Derived descriptions are serviceable; authored ones are better, because they can lead with the reader's problem instead of your first sentence. A one-line request covers the whole project:

Write meta descriptions for every article that doesn't have one.

What Clayo does automatically

• Sitemap: your site serves sitemap.xml listing every published article with its last-modified date, so search engines find new content quickly.
• Robots: robots.txt allows crawling of everything published. Drafts are never crawlable; they are simply not on the site.
• Titles: each page's title tag is the article title plus your project name.
• Fast pages: docs pages are statically rendered and served from a CDN, which search engines reward.

One canonical address

If your docs are reachable in more than one way, duplicate content could split your search ranking. Clayo prevents this by enforcing a single canonical base for every site, in this order of precedence:

1. A subpath base URL such as yoursite.com/docs
2. An active custom domain
3. Your subdomain.clayo.site address

All other addresses permanently redirect (HTTP 308) to the canonical one, so search engines only ever index a single copy of each page.

Redirects protect your rankings

Changing an article's slug creates a permanent redirect from the old URL, and old slugs are preserved forever. Renames and reorganizations do not lose accumulated ranking. Details in Links, slugs, and redirects.

Search engines are not the only readers

AI assistants increasingly answer questions your customers would have typed into Google. Clayo publishes agent-readable versions of your docs automatically, including llms.txt and per-article markdown. See llms.txt and agent-readable docs.