Unique Titles and Descriptions

Implementing unique titles and meta descriptions is simple in WebGUI.

<title>

The "Title" field, available on the "Properties" tab, is used by default to construct the page title (in conjunction with your company name).

<meta name="description" content=""/>

The "Summary" field, available for all assets on the "Metadata" tab, will populate the meta description field of a page if it exists. Search engines do not use meta description as a ranking factor, but it is still important to write unique meta descriptions for each page on your site because the meta description does appear on the SERP. A well-written, relevant and compelling meta description will often get the click even if the listing is not #1. So, make sure your titles and meta descriptions read logically to a human.

<meta name="keywords" content="" />

Keywords are placed in the keywords field found at the top of the "metadata" tab on the properties of a pagelayout. Include keywords, but don't stuff them.

Human-readable URLs

All pages are generated with real human readable URLs based on the title/menuTitle of the asset: /products/t-shirts rather than /products.php?id=123

Note that in practice, this is mainly helpful in the context of inbound links. If a user pastes a link into a system that creates a live link with the URL as the anchor text, the keywords in the URL will show Google that your page is relevant for those keywords. There is not currently inherent SEO value to having a human-readable URL, but it will help a bit.

Header Tags

WebGUI's text editor supports semantic header tags out of the box, and you have full control over which header tags are used in your templates. Use headers instead of bold and increased font size to delineate content.

Clean Markup

You have (almost) complete control over everything WebGUI outputs through it's templating system, which ensures you can optimize the markup on your site for SEO.

Page Volume

The number of pages on your site matters, and the reason is simple: the more pages on your site, the more opportunities for crawlers to index you. Assets like the Collaboration System, Story Archive, and Wiki make this easy.

Sitemap

WebGUI automatically generates a valid XML sitemap located at sitemap.xml on your domain. This can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools, Yahoo Site Explorer and Bing Webmaster Central for inclusion in the search index.

You can also roll your own Sitemap using a Navigation object if you want to have more granular control over things like priority, update frequency, etc.

Syndication (RSS)

Many assets support syndication out of the box. These feed URLs can be submitted to Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo Site Explorer for indexing, just like a sitemap.