Suite Resources CMS SEO Bundle Released

Search Engine Optimization is an ongoing concern for every good web site. We generally want to accommodate Google and Bing and point them in the right direction for telling them where our content lives so they can include it in their index and search results.

We provide clean, human-readable URLs that contain words to tell search engines what the page is about. A URL of "https://mywebsite.com/page/6" isn't very helpful, but "https://mywebsite.com/seo-essential-features" is much, much better. Similarly, we want to have meta tags that help search engines display page title with a snippet of text that summarizes the content of a particular page, so we provide per-post meta title and description fields on the page and post editor forms for better control of the search engine output.

Canonical URLs are supported out of the box. Search engines are not keen on having duplicate content in their indexes. For example, the URL of a single post on a blog and the URL of the exact same post within an archive page (posts by tag or posts by month/year) should not be looked at as duplicate content. The canonical URL tells the search engine "The URL to a post in the archives can be ignored - the true origin of that post can be found in the original post's URL."

If three different tags are used for a single blog post, the same content could be displayed 4 different ways: once for each tag and once for the original, canonical post. If there are also archives by month/year, that adds a 5th way to display the same content. Telling the search engine where the "true" post lives is essential.

A sitemap file is auto-generated for each web site. Sitemaps (sitemap.xml) are files that lay out the location of the content of your web site in a way that is easily understood by the search engine. If you tell them "here is a map to every page on the site", the search engine will be happy it doesn't have to do all the work of figuring that out on its own.

There are a lot of other factors that play into where your site's content shows up in the Google and Bing search results, but tackling the ones we have control over is a prerequisite to better future results.