Webigniter has some SEO tools included in the core. Meaning you don't need to add any plugins in order to have dynamic SEO options.
There are various places within the CMS you can setup your SEO settings. Three to be exact...
You can have basic settings which can be found in the navigation option SEO in the left menu in the CMS. These settings act as the global SEO settings of the entire website. This, however, is the only place where you can set the Sitename.
The other place where you can have SEO settings, is in the edit pane of a category. This is where you can have category specific settings, these settings (if set) override the basic settings, which are setup under the navigation option SEO.
The final place where you can setup SEO settings is when you are editing a page. When editing a page, you can switch to the SEO tab to enter page specific SEO settings, which will override basic SEO settings and the SEO settings of the parent category. If no category specific or page specific settings are set, the basic SEO settings apply to all pages. When you open the SEO tab in a page, you can see which settings are effective, even the inherited ones.
All three places offer exactly the same configuration options, except for the sitename, this can only be set in the global SEO settings pane.
The title option is the title of the page.
This is the value that is shown in the title of the browser tag and between the <title> </title> tags in the <head> section of the HTML.
If you want to, you can use the variable name {pagename} to display the current pagename in the title. This only makes sense if you use this variable within the SEO settings of a category or the sites default values.
When you would like to show the sitename and a custom title to be combined in the <title>, this is what separates the sitename and the title.
So if your title is: My awesome blog
And your sitename is: MySite.com
And your separation character is: |
The complete <title> of your page could be: My awesome blog | MySite.com
The separation character is not limited to 1 character only, you can enter whatever you like.
Title options determines the placement of the title and sitename in the <title>.
There are three options:
Sitename - Title:
This will display the sitename, then the separations character and then the title, example: MySite.com | My awesome blog
Title - Sitename:
This will display the title, then the separations character and then the sitename, example: My awesome blog | MySite.com
Title:
This will only display the title, it will leave out the sitename and seperation character, example: My awesome blog
This is where you can enter the Meta description. This is the value that will be shown in search engine results and can be up to 160 characters.
If you don't specify a META description, there won't be a meta description tag.
More information about the META description can be found here.
In the canoncal URL you can specify the location of the original content (in case of duplicate content).
If no value is provided, there won't be any canonical tag present.
More information on canonical links can be found here
Robots settings define how website crawlers should behave on your pages.
We have 3 preset values added to the CMS.
You can set the robot.txt settings to:
None
No-index
No-follow
No-index & No-follow
If you need more information about the robots.txt file, this is where you can find more information on this subject.
A sitemap.xml file is there to inform search crawlers about the different pages on a website, last modification date, revisit info, etc.
In the CMS you can set 2 different values, priority and update frequency. The other values like the location and last updated value are calculated automatically.
All published pages are present in the sitemap.xml, unpublished pages are not.
More information about the sitemap.xml file can be found here.
In order to actually use the SEO in your pages, you need to add a tiny code snippet in the HEAD section of your page(s). This adds all the right SEO data on the right pages.
<HEAD>
<?=$webigniter->getSeoSnippet();?>
<!-- The rest of your HEAD content -->
</HEAD>