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Six checks that decide whether an organizer ever finds your site · Speaker Hub
Six checks that decide whether an organizer ever finds your site
Two of these take thirty seconds and can be silently costing you everything. One is the 60 character rule that Google never actually published.
•5 min read
Most speaker websites are not losing to competitors. They are losing to a configuration line nobody ever looked at.
These six checks are ordered by how much damage they do when they are wrong. The first two are the ones that make everything else pointless.
1. Confirm you are not blocking the whole site
Open yourdomain.com/robots.txt. If it contains this, stop and fix it before reading further:
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
That is an instruction to skip your entire site, and site builders ship it routinely while a site is still in staging. Nobody remembers to remove it on launch day. Google's introduction to robots.txt covers what the file is for and how the rules are read.
Thirty seconds. Occasionally it is the whole answer.
2. Check that your homepage is actually indexed
Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back you are not in the index, and no amount of writing will change that until you find out why.
While you are there, set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. Having a sitemap.xml is not the same as Google knowing it exists. Search Console also shows which queries already bring people to you, which is usually more interesting than anything you would have guessed.
3. Write a title tag that says what you speak about
Your homepage title is the line that shows in results. Home | Jane Doe wastes it entirely. Your name plus your subject does not: Jane Doe: Keynote Speaker on Burnout in Healthcare.
Now the myth. You have read that titles must stay under 60 characters. Google does not say that. The title link documentation says:
While there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width.
Truncation happens by pixel width on the reader's device, not by a character count. So the useful version of the advice is not "stay under 60 characters." It is "put the words that matter at the front," because you cannot know where any given phone will cut.
4. Treat the meta description as advertising copy
The meta description is not a ranking factor. Google's snippet documentation says snippets are "primarily created from the page content itself," and that Google uses the meta description only when it "might give users a more accurate description of the page."
You may write a description and never see it used. Write one anyway, because when it is used it is two sentences of pitch aimed at an organizer deciding between you and four other tabs. Say who you speak to and what changes for the audience.
5. Use exactly one H1
Search engines read the H1 as the page's subject. Speaker sites tend to have either none, because the headline is a styled div, or five, because every section got one.
Pick one, make it the actual subject of the page, and demote the rest to H2. The W3C guidance on headings is worth reading, because the structure that helps a crawler is the same structure a screen reader uses to navigate.
6. Set a canonical URL
If your site answers on both www.yoursite.com and yoursite.com, engines can treat those as two separate sites with duplicate content and split your ranking between them. A rel="canonical" tag on every page naming the one true URL resolves it. Google's guide to consolidating duplicate URLs covers the options.
What to do with an afternoon
Work down the list and stop when you run out of time. It is sequenced so the cheap catastrophic problems get caught before you spend an hour rewriting copy on a site that robots.txt has been hiding since 2023.
Google states there is no limit on the length of a title element, and that the title link is truncated in search results as needed, typically to fit the device width. The widely repeated 60 character figure is a practical rule of thumb, not a Google rule. Put the important words first and the truncation point stops mattering.
Does the meta description affect my ranking?
Google does not list it as a ranking factor. Its snippet documentation says snippets are primarily created from the page content itself, and that Google sometimes uses the meta description when it would describe the page more accurately. Treat the description as copy that wins the click, not as something that wins the position.
How do I know if robots.txt is blocking me?
Visit yourdomain.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow followed by a single slash, you are asking search engines to skip the entire site. That line is a common leftover from a staging setup, and nothing else you do to the site matters until it is gone.
The bio that impresses a programme chair and the bio a search engine can use are not the same paragraph. You need both, and most speakers write neither.
