The short verdict
- Generated sites often ship with one title and one description for every page, or none at all.
- Each page needs its own title, description, share image and canonical URL.
- None of this is advanced. It just has to be done, page by page.
01What we usually find
Open a generated site, look at the browser tab, and click around. On many of them, the tab says the same thing on every page, often the project name the builder was given, sometimes something like “Vite + React”. Share the link in Slack or LinkedIn and the preview is blank, or it shows the homepage’s details for a blog post.
That happens because the tool focused on what the page looks like, and these settings live in the page head, which nobody sees in the preview.
02What every page needs
A unique title
The title is what Google shows as the blue link and what appears in the browser tab. Aim for about 50 to 60 characters, put the main topic first and your brand last. “Bookkeeping for Freelancers in Leeds | Ledgerly” tells someone what they will find. “Home | Ledgerly” does not.
A meta description
Google does not use it for ranking, but it often shows it under the title. Around 140 to 160 characters, written to make someone click. If you leave it empty, Google picks a sentence from the page, sometimes a cookie banner.
Open Graph and share tags
og:title, og:description and og:image control the preview card when someone shares the page. A share image of 1200 by 630 pixels works across most platforms. Without them, your link looks like spam in a group chat.
A canonical URL
Tells search engines which address is the real one when the same page is reachable several ways: with and without www, with tracking parameters, with a trailing slash.
One H1 that matches the page
The main heading should say what the page is about, in words people search for. One per page.
03Site-wide basics
- sitemap.xml. A list of every page you want indexed. Submit it in Google Search Console.
- robots.txt. Check it is not blocking the whole site. Some builders ship a staging setting that does.
- A real 404 page. Missing pages should return a 404 status, not a 200 with “not found” text.
- Clean URLs. /pricing, not /#/pricing or /page-3.
- Image alt text. Useful for accessibility and for image search.
“The page head is the part of the site nobody looks at, and the part search engines read first.”
04A five-minute check
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. Read the titles and descriptions that come up. Then paste a few of your URLs into the LinkedIn Post Inspector or opengraph.xyz to see the share previews. If titles repeat or previews are blank, you have found the job.
On a site built as a single-page app, there is a further catch: share preview tools do not run JavaScript, so they only ever see the one set of tags in the base HTML. We cover that in the post on rendering.
05Questions people ask
Do meta keywords still matter?
No. Google has ignored the meta keywords tag for well over a decade. Skip it.
How long until fixed titles show up in Google?
Usually days to a few weeks, depending on how often Google crawls the site. Requesting indexing in Search Console can speed up important pages.
Can I set these in my AI builder?
Some builders have a settings panel for the homepage. Per-page settings are often missing or need code changes, especially on single-page apps.
Will fixing metadata get me more traffic?
It will not make a weak page rank, but it stops a good page losing clicks. Send us the link and we will tell you which pages need it most.
