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Feature Highlight: Attract More Visitors with TYPO3 SEO

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Making your content SEO-friendly is easy in TYPO3. The SEO Extension is part of TYPO3 Core and comes with lots of great features to help your website shine in targeted search results

Whether you’ve just launched your website or have maintained one for years, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) requires your constant attention. You’ll want a CMS that understands changes to SEO algorithms and responds accordingly. Improving your SEO is an ongoing process, but with the right tools—including the SEO core extension—it doesn’t have to take up too much of your time. With TYPO3, you can:

  • Improve how your page shows up in search results

  • Create custom URLs

  • Set metadata for content elements

  • Update and create readable URLs

  • Extend your TYPO3 project with SEO tools like Yoast

And if you need help improving your SEO even further, check out our Professional Service Listing for TYPO3 experts that understand marketing inside and out.

When editing a page, click on the SEO tab to adjust how your web page will show up in search results.

Improve how your page shows up in search results

Once you enable the TYPO3 Core SEO extension, you can set metadata at a page level. Set a unique title for search engines based on what your website visitors are searching for, along with a description detailing what’s contained by the page. 

Under the “Robot Instructions” section, you can enable and disable settings that instruct web crawlers how to behave: 

  • Index this page: Indexing a page allows a search engine to access your page. This should be set to “on” if you want your page to show up in search results.
  • Follow this page: Turning this on lets search engines know they should follow the links on this page.
Select the frequency and priority of your page for search engines.

TYPO3 also lets you set a “Canonical link” for a webpage. Canonical links help you distinguish between pages with duplicate or similar content. You’d want to set the canonical URL as the URL of the page that is the “most representative from a set of duplicate pages on your site,” according to Google.

Below, the “Sitemap” tells search engines how often they can expect the website content to be updated, and the relative priority of a given page on your website on a scale of 0-1, with .5 being the default for most pages.

 

Screenshot of “Metadata” tab in Page Editing UI.

Visit the Metadata tab to set Keywords for your page. These tell the search engine what kind of content can be found on your page. For more detailed instructions, visit our “SEO for editors” guide.

Screenshot of “URL Segment” editing UI.

Update and create readable URLs

With TYPO3, you can also create readable URLs. Click on the icon closest to the URL segment in the “General” tab in the page editing UI to edit the default URL provided by the TYPO3 page structure.

 

Hit refresh so the URL slug matches your new title.

When you update a page’s title, you can also click on the refresh icon under the URL segment to update the link accordingly. In the latest versions of TYPO3, slugs get updated and redirects are created automatically (including those of subpages).

A notification in the top right corner of your screen will alert you when slugs and redirects have been created.

When you save the new page title and slug, you should get a notification “Slugs updated and redirects created.” If for some reason you don’t want to update the slugs, you can revert the changes (though we would caution you against doing so, as it would alter the site’s URL patterns).

Search crawlers can read the titles you set for individual images.

Set metadata for content elements

You can also set metadata for certain content elements like images. This tells search engines what kind of images are included on your page. Learn more about setting the metadata for images in our Feature Highlight story on managing and editing images in TYPO3. 

 

Type in a title and description, then select “Create new relation” to select from images on your Filelist.
The image, title, and description you’ve set will pop up when you paste a link into Facebook.

Design cards for Twitter and Facebook

You can also set how your page will show up on Twitter and Facebook when their users post a link to their site. Visit the “Social media” tab in the Page Editing UI where you can set the following details for Facebook’s Open Graph (Facebook’s crawler) and Twitter Cards. Both platforms ask for the following:

  • Title: the main headline
  • Description: what someone who clicks on the link will find on the page
  • Image: a ‘header’ image that best represents the contents of the page
For a smaller image, like the one above, choose “summary card.”
Select “summary card” for a smaller image.

Twitter also gives you two options for displaying an image that are included in the “Type of card to show” menu. A “summary card” will show the image to the left of your message, while a “summary card with a large image” will feature a larger image, below your message.

Sample results from Yoast readability analysis.

Extend your TYPO3 project with SEO tools like Yoast

Once you’ve figured out your SEO basics, there are many powerful TYPO3 extensions for SEO available on the TYPO3 Extension Repository. We recommend integrating Yoast into your SEO workflow. Yoast analyzes your SEO settings and gives you “Readability” ratings on areas like paragraph length, sentence variety, and passive voice. It also lets you set a focus keyword for every page. For more instructions on using Yoast, check out this video on our YouTube channel.

Upgrade TYPO3 to get the best SEO features

Search engine algorithms are constantly evolving, so if SEO is a top priority, we recommend making sure you’re using the latest TYPO3 version. Many great features have recently moved into TYPO3 Core, so you shouldn’t need a lot of extensions.  And if you need help upgrading or optimizing your SEO, TYPO3 has a global network of experts and developers who would be happy to help you out.