SEO in Craft CMS is easy and quick. Craft CMS offers several SEO options depending on the approach you choose. You can either optimize with plugins or manually. SEO for Craft can significantly improve your website’s traffic, CTR, and performance without having to shell out a hefty amount on paid promotions on a regular basis. Let’s start with plugin approach first, it’s easier of the two. Seomatic plugin for Craft Image source: nystudio107 Seomatic is a powerful and fully integrated optimization tool which handles your Craft website’s SEO. It provides insights and analysis on your content with the help of SEOmetrics to help you rank faster. Sprout plugin for Craft Image source: barrelstrengthdesign.com Sprout is a user-friendly content optimization extension for Craft. It focuses on the relationships between the metadata. You can manage metadata like Search, Social Sharing, Structured Data, Sitemaps, and Redirects with three levels of priority. These levels of separation allow you to make custom optimizations exclusively for sections or globally. Webtexttool plugin for Craft Image source:Webtexttool Webtexttool is a modern SEO plugin for Craft CMS. It makes website content optimization easy by providing important information in a sidebar. Webtexttool offers real time optimization suggestions. You can also have an easier keyword analysis and research with the real time suggestions that the plugin offers. ‘SEO’ plugin for Craft Image source: ethercreative SEO by ethercreative is a minimal and powerful plugin with only the essential SEO features. It allows you to optimize your content in field types with an optimization checklist. It automatically generates XML sitemaps for the crawlers and also manages redirects for when you’re migrating from an old website. Installation How to install SEO plugins with Craft Control Panel Go to settings>control panel Search for plugin in the Plugin store and just press install. With Composer package manager Open your terminal and go to your Craft project: cd /path/to/project Then tell Composer to load the plugin: composer require (desired developer’s name/plugin name) Manual Optimization with SEO fields If you’re willing to code a little then you can also go for this Manual optimization method by a github user Johan Strömqvist who goes by the alias naboovalley. This manual optimization can be achieved by creating specific fields for SEO. All you need to do is, create three fields named seoTitle, seoKeywords, and seoDescription in a group called globalSeo. You can call these fields in the layout with Twig. Use an ‘if’ loop to define the content from the SEO fields in case if it’s not defined in their respective fields. You can also use these SEO fields for Facebook open graph and Twitter tags. Besides the optimization facilitated by the Plugins, you have to keep some best practices in mind if you want the best results from your optimization efforts. Optimize heavy images for a leaner load time One way is to rely on the inbuilt image transform of the Craft CMS and another is to use tiny image Craft plugin to optimize images for a faster load time. It uses the TinyPNG API for the image compression. It allows you to set a threshold for maximum image size and enable automatic optimization. You’ll see how this little change affects your page’s performance big time. The compression will not only reduce the load time drastically but also take up less space on the server. Compress & minify files to optimize website’s performance Optimization of the website’s performance is an important part of the SEO because users don’t favour the slow loading and poor performing sites. Which in turn affects the site’s visibility and rank. These changes might help- Enable GZip compression for files Use Cloudflare CDN Minify (Eliminating redundant and unnecessary data) & Concatenate(Link) CSS & Javascript files Internal linking for increased user engagement Internal linking helps in increasing user engagement and it also helps Google’s bots to determine what all content on your site is related. Internal links are the pieces with which it determines the hierarchy and architecture of your website. So it is crucial for you to link your content with every other relevant content on your site. Linking to external sources for improving the credibility Linking to other valuable websites with popular and reliable content will improve your website’s credibility. Whereas linking to the sites with poor domain authority, will do exactly the opposite. Generate XML Sitemaps for Crawlers, discover important content Your content is useless if the crawlers cannot see it, an XML sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. It helps the crawlers to discover the important content on your website. Create readable URLs to improve the CTR People are more likely to click on a URL which is readable and shows what’s inside.If your URL is short and concise, then you might see a significant rise in the click through rates. SEO is the key to better search visibility, website performance and reader engagement. One thing you have to realize is that SEO is a long term procedure. Doing your SEO with the help of Craft plugins make it easier for you to optimize your content for better search visibility. But apart from feeding the search engine friendly keywords and descriptions in the fields, you have to make the constant effort of maintaining the website’s performance and the quality of content. Plugins can only do so much. Need assistance with anything & everything Craft? Connect with us here! You can always count on us.