Introduction
This section describes the SEO features included within the CMS, and how to use them most effectively to create a website with good SEO.
| Created by: | michael | Date: | 07/14/2020 |
This section describes the SEO features included within the CMS, and how to use them most effectively to create a website with good SEO.
The SEO part can be found on each Content Item within the CMS. This part allows you to change the Page Title <Title></Title>, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords tags on each content item.
The SEO Part should be populated on all visible pages to provide the best possible content to users and search engines, so that the page is indexed as highly as possible.
Setting Canonical Urls - Canonical URLs are used to tell search engines "This is the most important URL that uses this content". Where possible set the canonical URL to either a relative or absolute url. This is especially important if several different pages use the same content (for example on websites that use white-label content).
Heading tags can be added using the PageTitle part (for H1 tags) or within any Body (WYSIWYG) editors.
To add heading tags using WYSIWYG editors - simply highlight the text - click the 'Formats' button - select 'Headings' - choose H1, H2, H3 etc. as appropriate.
If you add headings to body text be careful not to create multiple H1 tags on the page. Each page should only have 1 H1 tag. Multiple H2, H3, H4 etc. is fine.
The sitemap.xml and robots.txt file can be easily edited within the CMS. To find them go to CMS - Content Items and choose 'Sitemap' or 'Robots' in the 'Show all types' select menu. From here you can click into any of the files and easily edit them using the PageHtml section.
This allows for any quick edits to the sitemap.xml and robots.txt instead of uploading a new file to the server every time a change is required.
Note that the Sitemap and Robots Content Types should be configured to use special Content Types (i.e. text/xml and text/plain) within the Template section of the Content Type - this will ensure the data returned uses the correct response type when a search engine/browser makes a request to return the item.
The HTML used when creating Content Types is also important for SEO. If the HTML used in either the Part Settings or Template is malformed or includes broken tags it may not be possible for Search Engines to correctly crawl and index any of the pages created using that Content Type.
The best way to ensure the HTML structure of the Content Type is correct is to validate the page using an online checked such as Google Search Console, or GTMetrix. Tools such as this will highlight any potential problems with the website structure.
Similar to HTML structure, it is also important to ensure there are NO javascript errors being thrown within the website, this could prevent pages from loading and being indexed correctly.
The best way to check for this is to view the javascript console using your preferred browsers development tools - e.g. Chrome's Dev Tools.
Image alt text can be added to any image on the website using the Image or Image Collection Parts within each Content Item.
Go to CMS - Content Items and find the page in the list which contains the image you want to add additional alt text to.
Look for the Image or ImageCollection part which contains the image and use the 'Alt' (for Image) or 'Caption' (for ImageCollection) and enter the image alt text there.
Images used within the website should be appropriately sized. Their dimensions should be optimized for the size they are displayed at.
Some images will be displayed in multiple sizes depending on the device type and browser window dimensions. As a general rule size images for the largest size shown.
Image file size is also important. Images with a large file size take significantly longer to load (especially on Mobile devices or in areas with a poor internet connection) than smaller images. We recommend using images with a max file size no larger than 200kb - 300kb as this will help improve the website load speed which is an important part of good SEO.
Schema Markup is a semantic vocabulary of tags (or microdata) that you can add to your HTML to improve the way search engines read and represent your page in search engine results pages.
Schema Markup tags/code can be added to pages on your site by modifying the Layout HTML or zones, within Content Types Part Settings or Templates and/or within the PageHtml components on Content Items. Schema markup is not required, but search engines do look for it and use it to enhance their organic search results.
See https://schema.org/ for more information on what markup can be used.
Test the schema markup added to your pages using https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-tool/u/0/.