Sense and purpose
The TYPO3 system extension seo supports editors and developers in optimising websites for search engines.. The primary aim is to give the search engine robots a better understanding when interpreting the pages. The settings are therefore usually not visible or irrelevant for visitors.
In summary, this core extension offers the following possibilities:
- Maintenance of page title (<title> tag) and description (<meta> tag name="description"), which form the snippet in the search result.
- Support for the social media tags Opengraph and TwitterCard
- Instructions for the dynamic creation of an XML sitemap
- Instructions for unique language differentiation ("hreflang" tag) or default language specification with "x-default".
- Instructions for unambiguous source citation ("canonical" tag)
- Instructions for indexing
Page settings for editors
After installing the extension, editors receive two new tabs in the page properties:
The page title and page description can be entered in the SEO tab. They play a very important role for search engines and are displayed in the search results as title (blue clickable heading) and teaser text:
Other parameters in this tab are:
Instructions for search robots: Should the page be indexed? Should the links on the page be followed? By default, both fields are activated.
The canonical tag gives the unique URL address to be assigned to this page content. The background to this is that the same pages are sometimes accessible under different domains (e.g. "www.abc.de/fgh", "abc.de/fgh", etc.). Without the canonical tag, this could be considered "duplicate content" and result in losses in search engine rankings.
The canonical tag is set automatically based on the site settings. The field can therefore usually be left empty.
Instructions for creating sitemaps: With the seo extension, sitemaps can be created automatically (see below). The parameters Change Frequency and Priority are supposed to give search engines information about the importance of a single page. In practice, however, the parameters are hardly ever used, as most search engines decide for themselves when they read pages and what relevance they are given.
Creation of XML Sitemap
With the seo extension, it is also possible to generate an XML sitemap, which is then automatically read in by the google search console and is always up-to-date. You can find more information on setting up an XML sitemap in TYPO3 here
Control
Using the Info module, you can display the following under PageTree:
- "SEO": Title and description of each individual page.
- "Social Media": OpenGraph and Twitter tags.
To do this, it is best to go to the top node in the page tree and select "Infinite" so that all pages below it are also taken into account.
This method is very good for identifying missing or duplicate titles & descriptions.
