Built-in Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) features
The SEO tools built into your CMS will give you or an SEO consultant an enormous amount of control over elements of each page.
SEO Tools
You can locate your SEO tools in your back end navigation menu:
Please note we are not an SEO firm and do not offer any form of SEO work or consultancy as part of your website project.
There is no need to edit any of the source code of your website. The CMS itself makes extremely intelligent decisions internally to ensure great control over SEO.
If you want to make adjustments, you can edit a whole series of properties for ANY address (URL) on the site using the SEO tools available to you in the Artlogic CMS. It will be your responsibility to manage any input of data. Please refer to your contract's terms and conditions for more details.
Site Index (all)
The Site Index shows a list of all the URLs that exist on your website.
If you select the pencil 'edit' button for any of the pages in your Site Index, you'll be able to set SEO overrides for that particular page. More information below.
Site index (active SEO)
This section shows a filtered view of Site Index, displaying pages where you have activated SEO overrides.
XML Sitemap
This page contains a link to your XML sitemap.
A XML Sitemap is a list of URLs that we ask clients to submit to Google before going live. The list of URLs includes every unique URL on your website.
Edit page SEO / Set SEO overrides
You can edit your page for SEO purposes and set SEO overrides for all the pages on your website via SEO Tools > Site index > select the pencil 'edit' button for your chosen page.
You can also access this page by selecting SEO tools > Edit page SEO on the front end of your site when logged into the CMS.
SEO Focus Keyword
You can set an SEO Focus Keyword which may be used to analyse your page from an SEO standpoint. The 'SEO Focus Keyword' field in the SEO edit page will allow you to test the Focus Keyword before editing the content of the page for SEO purposes.
SEO Overrides
Selecting the 'Create SEO overrides' checkbox will display a full suite of SEO fields from where you will be able to work on the SEO of the page.
The section below describe what can be done from these fields.
Altering a page URL
Important: Changing the URL of a page on your website should be very carefully considered. Handled incorrectly this could negatively impact on your search engine ranking.
We highly recommend consulting a recommended SEO professional before making these changes.
Virtual URL
Virtual URLs allow you to change the URL of a page to make them more user-friendly and improve SEO.
For example, you can remove the ID number or other excessive numbers/letters from a URL to make it more cohesive and understandable. Take this URL for instance: if a page displaying prints by an artist called Judith Smith has a URL of /artists/24-judith-smith/category/2/ a virtual URL could be created to make it simplified and user friendly: /limited-edition-prints-by-artist-judith-smith/. As long as the URL is unique to the site, any text can be used for the URL. You can also use this tool to add keywords to the URL, which can help the page rank more highly for your desired search term.
Important: Making a change to a page more than once may result in broken links in cases where the previous virtual URL is linked-to from external websites - this may affect search engine performance.
When making a change to any URL, we highly recommend notifying partners and collaborators to update links on their own websites.
When you create a virtual URL, the old address to the page will still function as normal to maintain compatibility, we then instruct search engines that the definitive link is at the new virtual URL which you have set. This tells the search engine that there is a duplicate page, where to find the correct one and to merge the ranking for both pages.
Updating similar URLs
When you update the URL of a page, the website will automatically search for similar URLs which match a similar format to the one you are trying to change. This feature makes it much easier to update the URLs on pages which have multiple subsections.
For example, you may wish to change a page from /artists/25-firstname-lastname/ to /firstname-lastname/. Once you have entered a new Virtual URL, the website will search for all other pages starting with /artists/25-firstname-last/ and suggest a new URL for all matching pages.
If any matches are found these will show below the Virtual URL field. You can then review the matches and click 'Update URLs' to change the Virtual URLs for all pages in the current section in one process.
Title, Heading & Description
Use these fields to override the page Title, Heading, and Description.
The title and description field will appear within search engine results along with the page URL.
SEO Title or Title Tag
The SEO Title or Title Tag controls what appears in the browser tab on the top of your screen. It also controls the Search Result Title on Google. Ideally, your SEO Title will include the “SEO Focus Keyword” previously entered.
SEO <h1> heading
This field will modify your SEO <h1> tag. Contrary to other SEO Tags, the <h1> tag is visible to the user and will appear as the <h1> heading of the page, which is the most important heading on each page of your website.
Most pages already have an <h1> tag and you should not feel the need to put one in yourself. However, you can update it if you wish to target a specific keyword. As happens with the SEO title, your new <h1> heading should ideally include the “SEO Focus Keyword” previously entered.
If your page has a visible <h1> heading, overriding this field could change the title of said page, so it needs to be coherent with the content of the site.
SEO description
You can decide the text you would like Google to show as the description text underneath your Google Search result with the SEO description.
Google auto-fills this text with what it believes is the most relevant text on the page, and sometimes this will not coincide with the SEO description you set up.
This field is not used as a ranking factor anymore so adding your SEO keyword to your description field will not contribute to your mark-up.
Sharing and social media data
When sharing your website URL into a social media platform, you can control what images and text will display using your SEO override tools.
This section allows you to override the 'OG' or 'OpenGraph' metadata used by sharing and social media services such as Facebook or Whatsapp. The image in this section is also used within search results on your website where applicable.
For example, this is the image selected to display when sharing artlogic.net to Facebook.
How to set this up for your pages
- Go to Site index (all) menu
- Click on the pencil icon next to the page you'd like to edit to start. To set this up for your homepage URL, find the item at the top of the page listed as '/'.
- Select ‘Create SEO overrides’ and scroll to SHARING & SOCIAL MEDIA DATA
- Tick 'Add specific metadata for sharing and social media services', and upload your chosen image/title/description in the right fields.
XML Sitemap
You can set the priority and change the frequency of pages for the XML sitemap. You will also be able to remove a page from the sitemap from this section of the page.
Canonical URL
If you have a page that is accessible through multiple URLs or different pages with identical or similar content, Google will read these as duplicate versions of the same page. Google will choose one URL as the canonical version, and all other URLs will be considered duplicate URLs and crawled less often. The canonical page is the page that you want Google to prioritize and rank highly as the single point of truth. This is an important factor in Google's SEO ranking.
We try to streamline this process by adding canonical tags to your website and filtering down your sitemap so there are no duplicates.
If the URL of your page shows exactly the same content as another URL and you would like Google to consider the other URL as the canonical version, use the Canonical URL field to tell search engines what the 'authoritative' URL is.
Before adding a URL as a Canonical URL, make sure it is an existing page in your SEO index. Otherwise, Google could penalize you. Google has a great page explaining this, available here.
Self-referencing canonical
You do not need to add a canonical URL for all your pages. If your page is not a duplicate, adding the URL of your page as a canonical URL could get your site penalized, and negatively impact your mark-up.
Further information
Meta Keywords
Please refer to our guide on Meta Keywords for our advice on this matter.
Do you need further help?
If you have any very specific questions at all, please contact our Support team.