Page Titles

• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the page title tag to whatever you want (i.e., any combination of keywords to accurately describe the page)?
• Can you ensure that there is a different title for each page of your site?

Page URLs

• Are your URLs human-readable?
• Do your URLs simulate an easy to navigate directory structure?
• Are your URLs free from irrelevant server querystrings, special characters, question marks, numbers, etc?
• Do you separate keyword spaces in your URLs with hyphens?
• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the keywords in your URL to more accurately describe the page?
• Is the URL for your index page "/" (instead of "index.htm" or "index.php")?

Meta Tags

• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the entire content of your meta description and meta keyword tags?
• Can you ensure that these tags are different on each page of your site
• Do you have the ability to leave them blank if necessary?

H Tags

• Does each page of your site have an H1 heading?
• Does the main body content of each page follow immediately after the H1?
• For any given page, do you have subordinate header tags (H2, H3...) to further outline your body content?
• Do you have the ability to modify these tags to whatever you want?

Image Tags

• For any given image on your site, do you have the ability to customize the ALT tag and image title tag to whatever you want?
• Are your images properly optimized for the web?

Body Text

• For any given page, do you have the ability to easily modify the body content to whatever you want?
• For any given paragraph or content element, do you have the ability to easily re-locate its position on the page with respect to other content elements?

Links

• For any given internal or external link, do you have the ability to add custom keywords to the anchor text and title parameter?
• Do you have the ability to quickly validate all links to all pages on your site or external sites?
• When pages on your site are relocated, does your CMS "remember" internal link locations (so that internal links don't need to be manually updated)?

Page Structure

• Are you structuring your HTML page templates using CSS (instead of tables)?
• For any given page, do you have the ability to modify the content or organization of the CMS-generated HTML?

Site Organization

• Can search engines easily crawl your site?
• If your main navigation is Flash, javascript, image, frame, or AJAX based, do you serve up a simple text or CSS-based alternative for search engines? If not, do you have the ability to add text based footer navigation to every page of your site?
• Do you have the ability to easily modify and re-organize your site structure (to achieve clear organization and distributed link authority)?

Site Maps

• Do you have the ability to add a simple text-based sitemap page containing a link to every page on your site?
• Is it easy for you to publish a separate XML-based sitemap for submission to Google and Yahoo.

301 Redirects

• Are you using 301 redirects for any page which has been permanentely moved or deleted?
• For the non-www version of your site (domain.com), are you  301 redirecting to www.domain.com?

For a PDF version of the above SEO checklist, click here.

Initially, I had thought of TYPO3, particularly since I've been developing sites exclusively with TYPO3 for the past five years. But for a simple page/site? I had run into this issue many times in the past with other friends and family who wanted the same, and in each case, the problem was that offering them a TYPO3 solution was often much more than they needed - essentially for the same reason you don't exactly need a Ferrari to drop the kids off at school! Not that TYPO3 isn't capable of handling a simple page. It's just that TYPO3 was designed to be the most comprehensive solution imaginable, capable of serving small sites and large enterprises alike. Yet the truth is: sometimes the grand vision of extensibility and configurability can interpreted by some as being "overdeveloped" - especially when all you want is a blog or a simple site.

According to Google Trends, Wordpress (after starting in 2003) quickly surpassed TYPO3 in overall popularity: http://www.google.com/trends?q=wordpress%2C+typo3. I suspect this is due to the specialization that Wordpress offers as a blogging platform. And I'm also guessing that many are choosing Wordpress for its quick and dirty ability to "get the job done" with respect to simple site development. But would also anticipate that Wordpress will start to encounter many of the challenges that TYPO3 currently faces the more that Wordpress diversifies its plugin base, as noted by Michael Keukert, here: http://www.technozid.de/2005/05/20/wordpress-and-typo3/.

TYPO3 is a broad-based CMS framework that wants to become specialized. Wordpress is a specialized CMS framework that wants to become more broad-based. In this sense, TYPO3 and Wordpress are moving toward one another. Each have their strengths. And each have their challenges. Yet both can and should learn from one another. Perhaps some form of partnership is in order?

With respect to TYPO3 (since this has been my primary area of investment), I do hope that TYPO3 will draw significant insights from the many factors that (I suspect) have contributed to Wordpress' explosive growth:

1. their apparent overwhelming and sustained commitment toward the enduser as layperson (not necessarily as developer);
2. their "attitude" towards simplicity and user-friendliness;
3. their focus on rapid deployment of the core software;
4. an extremely lightweight codebase (1MB zip file);
5. a high-degree of specialization of their core product (i.e., blogging platform);
6. a low-to-minimal learning curve for the end user;

As the TYPO3 core team works diligently to refine the TYPO3 architecture with the long-awaited v5.0 release (http://typo3.org/teams/50-development/), many of the above goals are already on their radar. And I believe that a commitment to these core principles will uniquely position TYPO3 to again set the next CMS standard.

Now after three years with Web Hosting Buzz as my exclusive web hosting vendor, I'm happy to report that my initial assessment was dead wrong. Since 2004, Web Hosting Buzz has defied my expectations many times over by providing a host of products with generous features, unbelievable prices, and outstanding customer service. In short, they've never given me a reason to look elsewhere. Sure, I've had the occasional or routine server outages that got my heart racing - but in every case, there has always been a speedy resolution and good communication along the way.

Web Hosting Buzz continues to offer a great selection of web hosting packages with exceptional value, 99.99% uptime guarantee, 24/7 customer service, live chat support and phone support. Each package comes equipped with a feature-rich control panel, extensive scripting support (including TYPO3 hosting), and multi-language support. And all for $4-10/month for 300-750 GB of disk space and 2000-5000 GB/month bandwidth. Amazing value indeed!

If you're looking for a quality and affordable web hosting provider, look no further. Web Hosting Buzz defies the old adage that "you get what you pay for" by offering quality products and services at prices that'll make you think you're stealing!

Well, finally, we've come to part ten: site maps with Typo3. I feel that I could just keep going because there are still a lot of search engine factors to consider. Although I think I'll stop for now - because if I haven't made my point by now, then I probably never will! I hope I've demonstrated that Typo3 is your CMS of choice when it comes to SEO - because it's capable of easily accomodating any SEO requirement - unlike most CMS's today.

The final SEO factor that I'd like to consider in this final article is how to generate textual and XML sitemaps with Typo3 - quickly and efficiently. Here's how.

Generating Textual Sitemaps with Typo3

Textual sitemaps are important when it comes to SEO because you want to make sure that search engine robots have a clear understanding of your site architecture. And they're a built-in part of Typo3. You should link to your sitemap from your homepage at least, because your homepage is the first page to be indexed. Here's how with Typo3:

1. Create a new page, and call it "sitemap"
2. On this page, create a new content element, with the content type: "sitemap"
3. Under menu type, select "sitemap"
4. For starting point, select the root of your website.

That's it! The built-in content element will generate a simple text-based sitemap, corresponding to the non-hidden pages on your site, found here.

Simple.

Generating XML Sitemaps with Typo3

Next, for SEO purposes, you'll want to publish an XML version of your sitemap to http://www.google.com/webmaster or to https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites. For this, you'll want to download and install the mc_googlesitemap extension, which you can install in seconds:

Once installed, do the following:

1. Create a new page, and call it "Google Sitemap" (or whatever) and make sure that the page is hidden from the menu (under page properties)
2. On this page, create a new content element, with the content type: "sitemap"
3. Under menu type, select "Google Sitemap for Pages"
4. For starting point, select the root of your website.

That's it. The Google Sitemap extension will generate a Google/Yahoo compliant XML sitemap, which, in my case, is published (and always updated) here:

www.dawsoninteractive.com/google-sitemap

The above link, BTW, is what I would submit to Google or Yahoo or whatever search engine.

And here's a sample of the XML output:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<urlset xmlns="http://www.sitemaps.org/schemas/sitemap/0.9">
 <url>
  <loc>http://www.dawsoninteractive.com/</loc>
  <lastmod>2007-07-11</lastmod>
 </url>
</urlset>

Again, too simple.

According to SEO expert, Aaron Wall (posting on SEOMOZ.org): "Clear organization not only helps search engines understand how documents relate to each other, but also effectivley distributes your link authority." Makes sense, really. Why? Because quality information architecture has everything to do with content. The place of your page in its local community can tell users (including search engines) a lot about who it is and who it belongs to.

Yet information architecture is one of the most overlooked strategies of SEO because keeping up with a site's linking structure is hard to do - especially when you're dealing with a massive amount of pages. Well, never fear, Typo3 is here. With Typo3, achieving quality site organization is really a piece of cake!

Here's how. Take a look at what I'm looking at right now as I type. On the left column, I'm looking at my page tree - which is simply a visual representation of every page in my site - which level their on, whether they're hidden or not, whether they are redirects or simply normal pages, whether they're external redirects, etc. I've seen a lot of CMS's in my time, yet have not come across a single one that comes close to this:

Simply brilliant! With Typo3 CMS, at any time, if I want to re-organize massive sections of my site, I can do this in a matter of seconds - simply by drag and drop. And Typo3 handles updating all the links, and making sure that all the redirects are working properly (if you're using RealURL). I can add/edit/delete/rename any time with the click of the mouse - always knowing that any updates will be reflected on the front-end interface. Nice, huh?

Honestly, there's not much more to say about this SEO ranking factor, since Typo3 handles it with such ease. Typo3 takes care of the complex technical work, and leaves the more important information architecture to you.

Final article in this series:

Site Maps: Generating textual and XML sitemaps with Typo3

Requirements

• PHP 5.0.x (needed because I'm using the simplexml_loadfile() function to parse the XML generated by the ISBNdb API. Since I don't have PHP5 up and running on this site, I don't have a working demo. Sorry.)
• ISBNdb Access Key (500 server requests/day free with any account. Sign up for a free account at: https://isbndb.com/account/create.html)
• Barcode Scanner (Optional, but nice to have. I found one off of eBay for $.01 (+$10 shipping), MODEL NUMBER: LS1006-1000, SERIAL NUMBER SZ497, and it works like a charm!

Application Description

With this script, you simily enter a 10 or 13 digit ISBN number into the single form field and click submit. (with the barcode scanner I got, you just scan and a CR is automatically entered, so you don't have to type anything). The tool will retrieve and parse an XML file from the ISBNdb.com site, and print the results in a nicely formatted table, showing title, long title, authors, Dewey decimal number, LCC number, average new price, average used price, and estimated value (based on the condition of the book, which you can optionally enter as an A, B, C, D, or F "flag" prior to the ISBN number. In addition, the script will write the data to a text file, called "books.txt" in a very simple pipe "|" deliniated format.

That's pretty much it. You can easily configure it to your own uses, or use it to develop your own intereface to ISBNdb.com's API - which is really the meat of this tool.

Screenshots

Here's a screenshot. Sorry I don't have a working demo up and running:

Source Code

The source code is available here. I've commented most of the sections, although if you have a question, feel free to contact me.

Good luck and have fun!

According to most SEO experts, your outbound links are essentially as important as your inbound links, because your outbound links tell humans and search engines alike the place of your site in the larger topical community. Search engines tend to attribute value to pages which link to pages with value. For instance, if I were a speaker who continually sited authoritative sources in my speech, most people would at least give credibility to my subject matter. The same is true when it comes to generating credibility through quality external linking.

Again, with Typo3, this is easy. And as you probably guessed, it is accomplished the same way as internal links, through the "Insert Web Link" tool:

Simply highlight your anchor text and click on the "Insert Link" tool. Then select the External URL tab, and insert your outbound URL, Title text, and any other parameters, and you're all set.

So for example, if I wanted to add value to the credibility of this particular article on external linking, I might intentionally develop an external link to SEOMOZ.org, with the following description:

Do links on the page point to high quality, topically-related pages?
For more information, see: Quality/Relevance of Links to External
Sites/Pages at SEOMOZ.org.

Not a problem with Typo3. Good luck!

Next article in this series:

Site Organization: Achieving better information architecture with Typo3

Search engine optimization is ultimately all about linking - that is, how good is the quality of links that point to your page - those that come from outside your site, and those that come from inside your site. While it's much harder and time consuming to generate quality inbound links (IBLs), one thing that you can easily control (and should control) is your internal link structure.

Your internal link structure is your way of telling humans and search engine spiders alike how valuable each of your pages is relative to one another. It's also a great way to communicate informative content about the subject matter and purpose of each page, simply by adding relevant anchor text and titles. Fortunately, with Typo3, it's simple to do. Here's how:

Built in to the Rich Text Editor is an automated "Insert Web Link" tool which allows you to specify key parameters about your internal links, such a target, window size, style, and title. Additionally, once you select your internal link, Typo3 remembers the location, so that if you ever move or rename your target page, your link remains linked and not broken:

So, for example, if I wanted to pass along internal page referral value to my content management services page, I might generate the following link to do so:

Typo3 CMS is a powerful tool for generating quality search engine
friendly content. Dawson Interactive specializes in SEO CMS with
Typo3 content management services.

Remember, internal link building requires a good amount of organization and intentionality, but with Typo3, it can be fun - and the results gratifying!

Next article in this series:

External Links: Increasing outbound link quality with Typo3

It's what you put in your body that matters. The same is true for search engines. In the real world and in the world of the internet, you are what you eat. And nothing more increases your likelihood of high rankings than your body content. Quality body content will not only get you found, it will keep your visitors coming back.

Fortunately, Typo3 makes it extremely easy to add quality content to your site. Actually, since Typo3 is an advanced content management framework, this is essentially its primary purpose. And unlike many content management systems which limit content generation to only a few select entry points - Typo3 instead allows for virtually any combination of content elements - from simple text fields (like this one), to complex web applications (like the news engine that runs the article archive). 

Built-in Typo3 Content Elements

Typo3 comes built in with the following content elements:

Regular text element
A regular text element with header and bodytext fields.
Text with image
Any number of images wrapped right around a regular text element.
Images only
Any number of images aligned in columns and rows with a caption.
Bullet list
A single bullet list.
Table
A simple table with up to 8 columns.
Filelinks
Makes a list of files for download.
Multimedia
Inserts a media element like a Flash animation, audio file or video clip.
Sitemap
Creates a sitemap of the website.
Plain HTML
With this element you can insert raw HTML code on the page.
Mail form
A mail form allowing website users to submit responses.
Search form
Draws a search form and the searchresult if a search is performed.
Login form
Login/logout form used to password protect pages allowing only authorised website users and groups access.
General Plugin
Select this element type to insert a plugin which cannot be found amongst the options below.

Adding Quality Body Content with Typo3 Extensions

For a list of many of Typo3's freely available extensions to increase the quality of your site, click here.

Next article in this series:

Internal Links: Increasing internal link popularity with Typo3

As the old adage goes, a picture is worth a thousand words. Unfortunately, to a search engine robot, a picture is worthless. Well, that is, unless you give it worth by tagging it with words. Here's where ALT tags and image titles come in handy.

Using targeted keywords inside ALT text and TITLE text parameters in your IMG tags is a widely recognized SEO best practice for increasing page/link relevancy. Plus, it's a great way to improve usability for the visually impaired.

Fortunately, Typo3 CMS makes it extremely easy to customize your own ALT text and TITLES however you want them. Here's how...

I'll just use the Typo3 "Insert/Modify Image" tool (which comes packaged with the built-in Rich Text Editor which I'm using to write this article). Once I've inserted the image I want, I simply click on the "Insert/Modify Image" icon (or right click on the image and select "Image Properties"), which displays the "Current Image" tab:

Then, as I have done, simply fill out the Title and Alternate Text form fields, and click the Update button, and you're all set.

Adding ALT text and title parameters to template images

Here's how to add the same image as a content object to your Typo3 template setup:

10 = IMAGE
10.file = fileadmin/dawsoninteractive.com/images/articles/SNAG-0003.png
10.border = 1
10.altText = Image Properties Window
10.titleText = Image Properties Window

Next article in this series:

Body Text: Using content elements to improve body quality with Typo3

Then, the above Rich Text Editor automatically writes the tags that you specify.

<h1>Online Marketing</h1>
<h2>Search Engine Marketing</h2>
<h3>Search Engine Optimization</h3>
<h4>Keyword Analysis</h4>
<h4>On-page Ranking Factors</h4>
<h4>Inbound Link Development</h4>
<h3>Pay-Per Click Management</h3>
<h3>Paid Inclusion</h3>
<h2>Email Marketing</h2>
<h3>List Management</h3>

Simple as that! And, with the use of custom stylesheets, you can easily generate nice looking headers throughout your site too.

Generating a Custom Content Header Based on Page Title

Although it may not be the best practice to have your H tags too closely aligned to your page titles, there may be cases where this technique comes in handy. For instance, say you wanted to include a header at the top of your content which displays your page title. Here’s how:

In your HTML template, decide on the location of the PAGEHEADER object, and insert the following template tag:

### PAGEHEADER START ###
### PAGEHEADER STOP ###

Then, in your setup, enter the following Typoscript:

# Setup Page
page = PAGE
page.typeNum = 0
page.1 = TEMPLATE
page.1.template = FILE
page.1.template.file = main_template.html
page.1.workOnSubpart = DOCUMENT_BODY
page.1.subparts {

### PAGEHEADER ###
PAGEHEADER = TEXT
PAGEHEADER.insertData = 1
PAGEHEADER.value = {page:title}
PAGEHEADER.wrap = 

}

Next article in this series:

Image Tags: Customizing ALT tags and image titles with Typo3

As search engines were getting started, the <meta name = “keywords”…> tag was used as a primary source of data to determine relevancy. However, today, search engines are much better at determining relevancy based on site content. Many SEO experts argue that meta keywords and descriptions are rarely used by search engines. However, most will tell you that at least providing unique meta descriptions for each page is a good thing to do – especially since the description could help compel users to click through to your site:

Either way, I’ll leave that to you to decide – and show you how the Typo3 CMS framework easily handles this metadata any way you want.

Enabling Meta Keyword and Meta Description Tags with Typo3

Out of the box, meta keywords and meta descriptions are easy to add to any page. For any page, select “Page Properties” and choose “Advanced” under type. Then fill in the keywords and description fields. Note: if you leave the field blank, the metatag will not be generated.

Then, simply drop this code in your setup to “activate” the META object:

page.meta.keywords.field = keywords
page.meta.description.field = description

So, for the above page, and with the above setup, Typo3 uses a built-in META object generate the following HTML:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”web design, web development, content
management, search engine marketing, web hosting.” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Our services include: web design,
web development, content management, search engine marketing, web 
hosting.” />

Setting Global Metatags – with Page-Specific Metatags

From an SEO perspective, it is better to have unique metatags to help search engines tell one page from another. However, if you wanted to specify a default setting for all pages, and also leave yourself the option of overriding the default, use this setup instead:

page.meta.keywords = keyword 1, keyword 2...
page.meta.keywords.override.field = keywords

page.meta.description = your description here...
page.meta.description.override.field = description

Further Customizing Metatags with the headerData Object

Instead of using page.meta.[tag] to generate your tags, Typo3 also allows you to insert custom content (such as Javascript, meta-tags, CSS, etc) into the header section of the page with the headerData object. Here’s another setup example:

# Meta Keywords
page.headerData.10 = TEXT
page.headerData.10.insertData=1
page.headerData.10.case=lower
page.headerData.10.wrap = <meta name ="keywords" content ="|">
page.headerData.10.value = Keyword 1, keyword 2

# Meta Description
page.headerData.20 = TEXT
page.headerData.20.insertData=1
page.headerData.20.wrap = <meta name ="description" content ="|">
page.headerData.20.value = Your description goes here…

# Meta Copyright
page.headerData.30 = TEXT
page.headerData.30.insertData=1
page.headerData.30.wrap = <meta name ="copyright" content ="|">
page.headerData.30.value = © 2007 Company Name

The above setup will produce:

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here…” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”© 2007 Company Name” />

Next article in this series:

H Tags: Customizing your H1, H2, H(x) tags with Typo3

Another widely-held SEO best-practice involves the task of including targeted keywords in the webpage URL to make sure that each URL accurately describes your page. The goal here is simply to make each URL as easy-to-read as possible, so that search engine spiders (and humans) have an easier time understanding your site structure. Again, not so hard with smaller sites with only a few static pages. However, with larger, dynamically-generated CMS sites, the results can be undesirable.

For instance, the following URL (and complicated query-string parameters) communicates to users no information regarding the subject matter of the page, or it’s relative hierarchy in the site structure:

www.dawsoninteractive.com/index.php?id=270&type=0&L=1

However, notice how much can be communicated by simply re-writing the above URL in the following format:

www.dawsoninteractive.com/services/web-design

Now, by the URL alone, we’ve told the user (and search engines in particular) about our subject matter and how to categorize this information relative to the rest of the site. Not bad!

So, with Typo3, how do you arrive at clean URLs with no question marks, query strings, special characters, and dashes? Good question! Here’s how:

Typo3 and the RealURL Extension

In order to achieve these so-called “speaking URLs”, you’ll simply need to install the RealURL (realurl) extension. This beautifully written application provides a way to translate between page-IDs and (virtual) URLs that are easy to read and remember. The extension uses the Apache module “mod_rewrite” to rewrite the virtual URLs of the site to the TYPO3 frontend engine.

Here are just a few of the cool features available with the RealURL extension:

• Supports programmatic or user-defined schemes for coding the page path
• Page titles can contain spaces and characters like /.,&@ etc, the URL with no problem
• URLs are generated as nice-looking lowercase paths
• If a page is renamed, the old URL can still be used, so if the page was indexed by e.g. Google, it can still be found.
• Offers advanced translation of almost any set of GET parameters to/from virtual URL
• URLs are cached, so translating between URLs and IDs is very fast.
• URLs are multilingual: if you're browsing in Dutch, you'll see Dutch URLs
• Once configured the systems works fully automatic, creating new and updating existing URLs
• You can easily see where shortcuts are pointing to, as the 'target' URL is generated, instead of the URL to the shortcut itself.

The RealURL installation only takes a few minutes to set up. (I’ve included my default configuration below). Once you get it configured, your URL translation will begin on the next page load.

In addition to any installation of the RealURL extension, I would also recommend adding the RealURL Management and RealURL Configurator backend modules.

RealURL Management

RealURL Management is a backend module that allows you to to delete and change the URLs created by RealURL. It is useful after site-renaming, if RealURL create a URL that you don’t like or if you are done with testing and you want to insert real data. RealURL Management is also very useful for managing aliases, error pages, and page redirects – such as the ability to create 301 permanent redirects in the event that URLs need to be moved:

One of the coolest things about RealURL Management is its ability to change your URLs to whatever you want them to be. So, for example, suppose your keyword analysis told you that “SEM” is a better keyword than “search engine marketing”, and you decided to rename the URL for the Search Engine Marketing page. Simply select the RealURL Management module, and click the pencil icon to edit the page path:

Now, www.dawsoninteractive.com/services/search-engine-marketing has just become www.dawsoninteractive.com/services/sem. Too simple!

RealURL Configurator Backend Module

RealURL Configurator is a tool that allows you to easily edit your RealURL configuration, with syntax check, help, and a few other useful tools:

Dawson Interactive RealURL Configuration

Typoscript template setup:

# RealURL Setup
config.simulateStaticDocuments = 0
config.baseURL = www.dawsoninteractive.com
config.tx_realurl_enable = 1
config.uniqueLinkVars = 1
config.linkVars = L
config.defaultToHTMLsuffixOnPrev = 1

.htaccess setup:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule ^typo3$ - [L]
RewriteRule ^typo3/.*$ - [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteRule .* index.php

RealURL configuration:

$TYPO3_CONF_VARS['EXTCONF']['realurl'] = array(
    '_DEFAULT' => array(
        'init' => array(
            'enableCHashCache' => 1,
            'appendMissingSlash' => 'ifNotFile',
            'enableUrlDecodeCache' => 1,
            'enableUrlEncodeCache' => 1,
        ),
        'redirects' => array(),
        'preVars' => array(
            array(
                'GETvar' => 'no_cache',
                'valueMap' => array(
                    'nc' => 1,
                ),
                'noMatch' => 'bypass',
            ),
            array(
                'GETvar' => 'L',
                'valueMap' => array(
                    'dk' => '2',
                    'de' => '1',
                ),
                'noMatch' => 'bypass',
            ),
        ),
        'pagePath' => array(
            'type' => 'user',
            'userFunc' =>
'EXT:realurl/class.tx_realurl_advanced.php:&tx_realurl_advanced->main',
            'spaceCharacter' => '-',
            'languageGetVar' => 'L',
            'expireDays' => 7,
###### include your rootpage id here
            'rootpage_id' => 1,
        ),
        'fixedPostVars' => array(),
        'postVarSets' => array(
            '_DEFAULT' => array(
                // news archive parameters
                'archive' => array(
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[year]' ,
                        ),
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[month]' ,
                        'valueMap' => array(
                            'january' => '01',
                            'february' => '02',
                            'march' => '03',
                            'april' => '04',
                            'may' => '05',
                            'june' => '06',
                            'july' => '07',
                            'august' => '08',
                            'september' => '09',
                            'october' => '10',
                            'november' => '11',
                            'december' => '12',
                            )
                        ),
                    ),
                // news pagebrowser
                'browse' => array(
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[pointer]',
                        ),
                    ),
                // news categories
                'select_category' => array (
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[cat]',
                        ),
                    ),
                // news articles and searchwords
                'article' => array(
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[tt_news]',
                        'lookUpTable' => array(
                            'table' => 'tt_news',
                            'id_field' => 'uid',
                            'alias_field' => 'title',
                            'addWhereClause' => ' AND NOT deleted',
                            'useUniqueCache' => 1,
                            'useUniqueCache_conf' => array(
                                'strtolower' => 1,
                                'spaceCharacter' => '-',
                                ),
                            ),
                        ),
                    array(
                        'GETvar' => 'tx_ttnews[swords]',
                        ),
                    ),
                ),
            ),
        // configure filenames for different pagetypes
        'fileName' => array(
            'index' => array(
                'rss.xml' => array(
                    'keyValues' => array(
                        'type' => 100,
                    ),
                ),
                'rss091.xml' => array(
                    'keyValues' => array(
                        'type' => 101,
                    ),
                ),
                'rdf.xml' => array(
                    'keyValues' => array(
                        'type' => 102,
                    ),
                ),
                'atom.xml' => array(
                    'keyValues' => array(
                        'type' => 103,
                    ),
                ),
            ),
        ),
    ),
);

Next article in this series:

Meta Tags: Creating keyword targeted meta tags with Typo3

Perhaps the single most important search engine optimization (SEO) best practice is making sure that each page in your site has unique, keyword-targeted search terms in the title tag of the web page’s HTML header. There’s even evidence to suggest that having duplicate titles on many pages severely limits a search engine spider’s ability to rank your pages – since at first glance, all the pages appear similar. On smaller sites, customizing your title tag is not hard to do. However, on a larger site that requires a content management system (CMS), with hundreds or even thousands of pages, this task could prove challenging. Yet, not so with Typo3. Here are a few simple options:

OPTION 1: Use Typo3’s Default Page Titles

With Typo3, the default page titles are automatically configured to be relevant and unique, according to the following format:

[SITETITLE] : [PAGETITLE]

The only thing you’ll need to do is specify the SITETITLE field, found in the main template information record of your site:

Then, each time you create a page, you’ll be required to specify a PAGETITLE under Edit Page Properties, as such:

Based on the above input, Typo3 will generate the following title tag:

<title>Dawson Interactive: Services</title>

And if I were to add an additional page, with the page title, “About”, Typo3 will generate the following title tag:

<title>Dawson Interactive: About</title>

OPTION 2: Add Some Customization to Typo3’s Default Page Titles

However, what if on occasion we needed to make the page title more keyword specific without changing the navigational title? Well, one way to do this is to tell Typo3 to use the SUBTITLE field instead. For instance, for our “Services” page above, suppose we preferred the title tag to read “Services and Solutions”. Here’s how to accomplish this:

First, just add the following Typoscript code to your Setup:

### CUSTOM PAGE TITLE
# suppress default title tag
config.noPageTitle = 2
# declare a page header text object
page.headerData.10 = TEXT
# use page subtitle field first; otherwise use page title field
page.headerData.10.field = subtitle // title
# wrap the field with the following
page.headerData.10.wrap = <title>Dawson Interactive: |</title> 

Then, customize the “Services” page by modifying the SUBTITLE field under Page Properties:

As a result, Typo3 will generate the following title tag:

<title>Dawson Interactive: Services and Solutions</title>

Also notice that changing the last line of the above Typoscript setup, you can achieve all sorts of custom title tag options. In this case, special characters:

page.headerData.10.wrap = <title>Dawson Interactive &#187; |</title>

Renders:

<title>Dawson Interactive » Services and Solutions</title>

Or, consider changing the order of things:

page.headerData.10.wrap = <title>| at Dawson Interactive</title>

Renders:

<title>Services and Solutions at Dawson Interactive</title>

OPTION 3: Getting Even More Fancy by Installing the Browser Page Title Extension

If you require even greater dynamic customization (with multi-lingual capability), I would recommend trying out the Browser Page Title (browser_page_title) extension. The purpose of this extension is to give you even greater flexibility to control the output of the title tag. You can easily specify a default title with dynamic fields, or use the BROWSER PAGE TITLE field to manually override your default setting. Very handy indeed. Here’s my current setup:

# Title Tags - EXT:browserpagetitle
includeLibs.tx_browserpagetitle = 
typo3conf/ext/browser_page_title/class.tx_browserpagetitle.php
config.titleTagFunction = tx_browserpagetitle->getTitle
plugin.browser_page_title {
   defaultTitle = Dawson Interactive | {title}
   currentTitle = Dawson Interactive | 
   {tx_browserpagetitle_browser_title}
}

So, for my “Services” page, the default output is:

<title>Dawson Interactive | Services</title>

Yet to customize this as before, in Edit Page Properties, with the Browser Page Title extension installed, you’ll see a new field opened up in the backend, called “Browser Title”. Here, I simply specify what I want the browser title to be. In this case, “Services and Solutions”:

And the output is instead:

<title>Dawson Interactive | Services and Solutions</title>

Very simple. And with just a few small tweaks to the defaultTitle and currentTitle values above, you can achieve many different custom combinations:

static string 1
static string 1 - {dynamic field}
static string 1 - {dynamic field} - static string 2
{dynamic field}
{dynamic field} - static string 2
etc...

OPTION 4: Customizing the Page Title Based on the Navigation Level

The Typo3 framework is so flexible, the possibilities are limitless. So I’ll offer one more. Here’s a handy modification to option 2 (above) which allows you to specify custom page titles based on the level of navigation.

For example, suppose you had a directory site (like www.homeinsurancesites.com), with pages for major cities and states, with the following site structure:

www.homeinsurancesites.com
    Alabama
        Birmingham
        Mobile
        Montgomery
    Alaska
        Anchorage
        Fairbanks
        Juneau
    Etc…

Now suppose you needed to include the city and state name in the title of the respective page. No problem with Typo3. By combining a few conditional statements with the custom header option, we get the following configuration:

### CUSTOM PAGE TITLE
# suppress default title tag 
config.noPageTitle = 2
# declare a page header text object
page.headerData.10 = TEXT
# declare that we’ll be inserting custom data
page.headerData.10.insertData=1
# wrap the custom data with the following
page.headerData.10.wrap = <title>|</title>
# if homepage is selected
[treeLevel = 0]
page.headerData.10.value = Home Insurance Sites – Welcome!
# if state level is selected
[treeLevel = 1]
page.headerData.10.value = Homeowners Insurance Sites 
in {leveltitle:1}
# if city level is selected
[treeLevel = 2]
page.headerData.10.value = Homeowners Insurance Sites 
in {leveltitle:2}, {leveltitle:1}
# ending all conditionals
[END]

This configuration results in the following output:

www.homeinsurancesites.com  -> <title>Home Insurance Sites – Welcome!</title>

www.homeinsurancesites.com/alabama  -> <title>Home Insurance Sites in Alabama</title>

www.homeinsurancesites.com/alabama/montgomery -> <title> Home Insurance Sites in Montgomery, Alabama</title>

Next article in this series:

Page URLs - Generating simple, keyword specific URLs with Typo3

SEO: Web Design for Robots

I tell my clients: “With Typo3, if you can dream it, then you can build it.” Usually, I’m referring to human interface design – meaning it is very easy to drop ANY visual interface on top of Typo3’s powerful and flexible backend framework. Well, the same is true for SEO – since SEO after all is ultimately the process of making the visual interface (that search engines see) more user-friendly. Good design, after all, must first consider who the target user is going to be – and then design for that. So, SEO is nothing more than good web design for robots. And since Typo3 can easily accommodate any design, with Typo3, SEO is a piece of cake.

For you programmer types out there, the logic is straightforward:

A) SEO is UI design for search-engine spiders
B) Typo3 can support any UI design
C) Therefore, Typo3 can support any SEO requirement

First, Which SEO Factors Should I Consider? 

Good question. However, for the purposes of this series, I’m assuming that you’ve already come to some conclusions regarding the set of SEO ranking-factors to consider. If you haven’t done this already, the following two resources will give you all the information you need to get started:

1. SEOmoz.org. One of the most authoritative, comprehensive, and freely-available SEO resources available today. According to their own description, SEOmoz “represents the collective wisdom of 37 leaders in the world of organic search engine optimization. Together, they have voted on the various factors that are estimated to comprise Google's ranking algorithm (the method by which the search engine orders results). The result is a resource of incredible value.” I would agree with their assessment.
2. SEObook.com. The number one ranked and most authoritative SEO e-book available today which dispels the myth that SEO is a hard practice. Instead, the author, Aaron Wall, a widely-recognized and respective expert in the field of search engine optimization, demonstrates how increasing traffic to your website is easier than you think. Not only is this book the definitive source in the SEO industry, it also comes with free lifetime updates; as SE algorithms change, so does SEO Book. A must read for any business or SEO professional.

Top Ten SEO Tricks with Typo3 CMS

In this ten-part series, I will show you how you can use Typo3 to implement ten of the most common on-page search engine ranking factors. And to keep things easier to digest, I’ll submit a separate article for each SE factor. The factors I have chosen are the following:

1. Title Tags - Customizing your <title> tags with Typo3
2. Page URLs - Generating simple, keyword specific URLs with Typo3
3. Meta Tags: Creating keyword targeted meta tags with Typo3
4. H Tags: Customizing your H1, H2, H(x) tags with Typo3
5. Image Tags: Customizing ALT tags and image titles with Typo3
6. Body Text: Using content elements to improve body quality with Typo3
7. Internal Links: Increasing internal link popularity with Typo3
8. External Links: Increasing outbound link quality with Typo3
9. Site Organization: Achieving better information architecture with Typo3
10. Site Maps: Generating textual and XML sitemaps with Typo3

Enjoy!

The formula is simple: CMS+SEO = ROI
(QUALITY CONTENT + OPTIMIZED SEARCH = CONVERSION TRAFFIC)

Web Marketing 101: Humans care about quality content. Search engine spiders care about relevant keywords. Both are essential to a site that delivers.

First you want to be found. Then you want to be bookmarked. For the former, it helps to have effective search engine optimization (SEO). For the latter, it helps to have a powerful content management system (CMS).

Remember:  You are the sum of your content!

Your website is only as good as its content. Period. You can have eye-popping effects and fancy navigation – but don’t forget that at the end of the day, what people care about the most is your content. Whether you’re offering words or ideas or art or music – your content is the substance of your site and the sum of who you are. So don’t underestimate the power of good content. And also don’t underestimate the power of people to see through poor content! To manage your content well, you’ll need a good content management system.

Also remember: Robots are people too!

Search engine robots are key users. They see your site before anyone else. So you’ll want to take care of them so they’ll give frequent and accurate referrals to your (human) users. As intelligent as we think they are, search engine robots still speak a more primitive language than humans do. So it’s important that you speak in their language too by supplying them the clear instructions they need to find your site among the millions of others like it. To speak the language of the robots, you’ll need to practice good search engine optimization.

CMS and SEO: A Happy Pair

For too long, the CMS developers and SEO technicians have worked in separate silos – each side specializing in their core competency. Yet unfortunately, this has produced content management systems without the ability to properly fine tune search engine meta-data.

Even the best sites can be hard to find. Of course – not such a bad thing if we’re talking about getting away to a quiet beach. Yet on the web, being lost in the crowd is next to tragic. As the web continues to explode with ever-expanding-and-impossible-to-remember-domain-names! – the demand for search will only continue to grow in prominence. And as it does, you need to ensure that you’ve included SEO at the top of your list of CMS requirements.

An Excellent Choice: Typo3 CMS

The good news is, Typo3 content management system is a great solution that combines excellence in content management with the proven ability to optimize even the most granular search engine ranking factors – all in one package. Click here for more information about Typo3 and its feature set.

Search Engine Friendly CMS Examples

For examples of how Typo3 is a search engine friendly CMS, we've written a ten-part series: "Typo3 SEO" exploring how you can easily optimize your website with this robust content management system.