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Extension Key: seo_basics
Copyright 2007, Benjamin Mack, <www.mediales.com>
This document is published under the Open Content License
available from http://www.opencontent.org/opl.shtml
The content of this document is related to TYPO3
- a GNU/GPL CMS/Framework available from www.typo3.com
This extension bundles all SEO features needed for getting a simple website going with search engine optimizations. Well – so what does it do?
It adds an extra field to every page for manipulating the <title>-tag of the page. Since this is – next to the content – the most important data for a search engine of a webpage, it deserves an extra field. If the field is left blank for a page, the page title will be used. Also, the fields keywords and description are now available for the page type “standard”.
Also, keywords and description for a page as well as the last time a page was changed will be added to the output automatically. It does not add DC tags since we believe that search engines don't care about it that much.
A new submodule under “Web” => “Info” is added to have an overview over all <title>-tags, all keywords and all descriptions. It is possible to edit all fields at once, which is nice for comparing. When in editing mode this page shows where there are enough (or maybe too many) keywords, and colors the background of every field depending on the length of the content.
It also relies heavily on the realurl extension, adding a new page type that is redirected automatically. Right after the installation of the SEO extension there is a new page type available that is mapped to “sitemap.xml” which means that if you enter www.your-typo3-page.com/sitemap.xml that you'll get the google sitemap / XML sitemap for all your pages.
One last nice thing is the formatting of the XHTML output. The extension takes care of the correct indention so the XHTML is nice to read. It removes all empty lines and indents almost correctly. We don't think that this feature is quite important for the search engines, but it helps to understand the generated HTML better.
There is no need for an extra “google sitemap” extension, no need for an extra “metatags” extension or the source optimizer.
Well, first of all... we did quite some research and did some tests with pages to see how manipulating e.g. the page title or the description affects the ranking and also the output on the search result pages. We then found out what is important for the search engines and what they care about. Then we tried out several extensions but we found that they are not quite usable e.g. several googlesitemap extensions weren't working as expected and not out of the box. We also wanted one extension that does almost most of the things out of the box, so there's not a lot to configure.
We wanted to have an extension to get new installations up and running with SEO pretty fast, without a lot of configuration and without dozens of not-quite-perfect extensions.
Actually, you only need to install the extension and make sure that you have RealURL installed. We recommend to see if your mod_rewrite understands the rewriting of .xml endings. Also, make sure to uninstall metatags and any googlesitemap extension.
