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.
Where are my SEO tools?
You can locate your SEO tools here, in your back end navigation:
If your SEO tools haven't been activated, please contact our Support team so we can assist you.
Please note that 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 a full suite of SEO tools available to you in the Artlogic CMS but it is your responsibility to manage any input of data. Please refer to your contract's terms and conditions for more details.
Drop-down menu contents
Site Index (all)
Once you have generated the site index, you will have a list of all of the URLs that exist on your website. If you add new pages/URLs, you will have to regenerate the site index or a user logged into the CMS needs to visit the new page(s).
If you select the pencil 'edit' button for any of the pages in your Site Index, you'll be able to set overrides for that particular page. More information below.
Site index (active SEO)
This page will list pages where you've activated overrides.
Generate site index
This page will list all actual pages on your website. Generating the site index will trigger a bot to crawl your site in order to find and load every link, starting from the homepage.
When the bot has loaded each link’s data, it then saves this list into your SEO site index. It is important that you generate your site index before launching because not only will this process allow you to see all of the pages that exist within your site, it will also populate your XML sitemap. The XML sitemap is what you will submit to Google Search Console.
If your site has been live for some time and you have added a significant amount of new content, we recommend that you regenerate your site index which will update your XML sitemap to be more current, which will help Google prioritize relevant pages.
XML Sitemap
This page will allow you to generate a sitemap.
XML Sitemap is a list of URLs that we ask clients to submit to Google before going live. To access your XML Sitemap, go to www.YourAccountID.com/sitemap.xml. The list of URLs includes every unique URL on your website. If two pages have the same URL (e.g. an artwork detail page), only one, the canonical page will be listed.
The canonical page is the page that you want Google to prioritize and rank highly as the single point of truth for an artwork record. 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.
Edit page SEO
You can edit pages via Site index > select the pencil 'edit' button for your chosen page, or by selecting SEO tools > Edit page SEO on the front end of your site when logged in:
SEO Focus Keyword
Test and set an SEO Focus Keyword which may be used to analyse your page from an SEO standpoint.
SEO overrides
CMS > SEO Tools > Site index (all)
Select this checkbox to activate all the tools mentioned below.
Title, Heading & Description
Use these fields to override the page Title, Heading, and Description as they'll display within search engine results.
SEO Title or Title Tag
The SEO Title or Title Tag controls what appears in the browser tab on the top of your screen. 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 heading title, 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 keywords to your description field will not contribute to your mark-up.
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.
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.
How to set this up
You can also use this tool to add keywords to the URL, which can help the page rank more highly for your desired search terms. To set up Virtual URLs, go to SEO Tools > Site index (all) > Choose the page you would like to override using the ‘pencil edit’ icon > Scroll to SEO overrides and tick ‘Create SEO overrides’ > add your new URL to the field labeled ‘Virtual URL’).
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/24-judith-smith/overview/ to /judith-smith/overview/. Once you have entered a new Virtual URL, the website will search for all other pages starting with /artists/24-judith-smith/ 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.
Sharing and social media data
This section allows you to override the 'OG' or 'OpenGraph' metadata used by sharing and social media services such as Facebook. The image in this section is also used within search results on your website where applicable.
For instance, when sharing your website URL into a social media platform like Facebook, Twitter or LinkedIn in order to share it, you can control what images and text will display using your SEO override tools.
For example, this is the image selected to display when sharing artlogic.net to Facebook.
How to set this up for your main URL
SEO Tools > Site index (all) > Edit the homepage URL (this can be found at the top of the list as '/') > Select ‘Create SEO overrides’ > scroll to SHARING & SOCIAL MEDIA DATA > Tick 'Add specific metadata for sharing and social media services?' > Upload your chosen image/title/description > Save.
How to set this up for a specific URL
SEO Tools > Site index (all) > Search for the specific URL and Edit > follow the same steps as above.
Sitemap
Set the priority and change the frequency of pages for the XML sitemap.
Canonical URL
If you have a single page that is accessible through multiple URLs or different pages with 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.
If the URL of your page shows exactly the same page 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.