MotoCMS 3 templates allow you to create SEO-friendly websites easily, without having any special knowledge. In MotoCMS3 SEO Optimization guide we will review the main areas of improving the optimization of your site for search engines. Below are 11 points that we recommend you check step by step:
1.Title and Description
2. URL Structure
3. Heading Tag
4. Content
5. Image Alt Attributes
6. Keywords
7. Indexing
8. Sitemap
9. Robots.txt
10. Redirects
11. Analytics
Title and Description SEO Optimization
A web page title or title tag is intended for a brief description of what this page is about, very similar to the contents of the book. This element is one of the most important elements of a web page for search engine optimization.
Each page of the site should have a unique title up to 70 characters because longer headers will be disabled in the search results.
Meta description or meta description tag is HTML attribute that provides explanations of the contents of web pages. Search engines use them in search results to display preview snippets for a definite page.
The optimal length of description should be between 150-160 characters. Add a unique meta description to each page of your website.
The corresponding fields under the Page Properties - SEO Settings section allows you to set page Title and Description.
Optimization URL Structure
Next step of SEO Optimization guide is URL structure, which is important for users and search engines. One of the basic optimization steps is the use SEO-friendly URL structures. Try to create shorter URLs for pages, up to 100 characters.
Keep in mind if you change a URL, you should enable 301 redirect to the new one in order to avoid loss of ranking and your click-through-rate (CTR).
Also under the Settings - SEO section you can enable permalinks and .html suffix.
Heading Tag Configuration
Heading elements implement six levels of document headings, H1 is the most important and H6 is the least. A heading element briefly describes the topic of the section it introduces. This allows you to achieve well-organized content and positively affects the indexing of the site
You can add headings for each page of your website within the admin panel by adding widget Text and choose appropriate heading from the "Format" list:
Set on each page a unique tag reflecting the topic of the specific page. And don't forget to use the main keywords in it.
Content SEO Optimization Tips
Also one of the important points of SEO optimization is the website content. You should provide useful and unique content to visitors to your website.
We recommend you to follow a couple basic rules to ensure a well-organized content for users and search engines.
The texts should be well written and adapted. Moreover, the texts should be impeccable in style, grammar, and spelling. Otherwise, non-professional text may adversely affect user perception and experience.
The texts should also be unique. Search engines don't like duplicated content because it leads to content quality issues.
We recommend having 400-600 words of unique text per page, the safe minimum is 300 words.
Image Alt Attributes Optimization Tutorial
The image alt attribute or alt tag should be specified for all images on the website to describe their content.
Keep the alt text is simple and understandable, be sure to use keywords and make sure that they are in harmony with the rest of the page content.
You can set the alt and title tags for your images within the admin panel under the
Media Library section:
Keywords SEO Useful Tips
It is critical to a website’s ranking success to perform SEO-centric keyword research and to establish a core, site-wide keyword focus. The website content should be created based on targeted keyword search. This will allow the site to be competitive in the SERP.
We recommend to carry out keyword research at the initial stage of the website development.
To achieve this, you should assign one relevant keyword to each page. The next step is to create the content of these pages, using the relevant keywords. To ensure perfect results in search engines, the total number of keywords should not exceed 3-4%.
SEO Optimization guide - Indexing
NoFollow Tags
Google evaluates how various pages link together, and assigns a weight to those links based on traffic, relevancy, size, age, content, and lots of other components. When pages that Google finds relevant link to other pages, some of that “Link Juice” flows through that link to the website being linked to.
NoFollow tags should be used on comments, site-wide external links, and on any internal links pointing to low quality or user worthless pages. You can enable NoFollow tags for pages of your website under the Page Properties - SEO settings section:
Hide Canonical
It's important to exclude duplicate pages from the search engines' index. You can use canonical URLs to improve link and ranking signals for content available through multiple URL structures or via syndication. To solve possible issues with duplicate pages for your website, you can use self-canonical for each page.
Sitemap Configuration for SEO
A sitemap is a file where you can list the pages of your site to tell search engines about the structure of your site content.
You can generate the sitemap file directly in the admin panel, under Settings - SEO section:
Sitemap Settings allows you to change the priority tag (signal the importance of individual pages in the website to Google and other search engines) and frequency (describe how often a URL is likely to be updated).
External Sitemaps allows you to add URL pages that are created outside of the MotoCMS template control panel. For example one of your menu item links with a page which was created using another site builder.
Recommended Robots.txt File for SEO Optimization
One of the most important values is the root robots.txt file located on the server. The search robots first scan this file, it’s like an instruction for them. First, robots.txt may not allow crawling the website at all and the site will remain unindexed. Secondly, robots.txt can close the bot access to the specific pages and files.
You can create a robots.txt file with any text editor on your computer and upload into the root of your domain name.
Here is the recommended robots.txt file for MotoCMS 3 templates:
User-Agent: *
Allow: /
Disallow: /password-protected/
Disallow: /under-construction/
Sitemap: https://hostname/sitemap.xml
Host: https://hostname
For MotoCMS 3 template with eStore plugin:
User-Agent: *
Allow:
Disallow: /password-protected/
Disallow: /under-construction/
Disallow: /store/login/
Disallow: /store/forgot/
Disallow: /store/registration/
Disallow: /store/cart/
Disallow: /store/checkout/
Sitemap: https://hostname/sitemap.xml
Host: https://hostname
Note: you need to replace hostname with a link to your website, and http:// with https:// if you have ssl certificate installed.
Redirects Setup for SEO
A redirect allows you to send search engines and users to a different URL from the one originally requested. For SEO it’s recommended to use 301 redirects "Moved Permanently", as the best method for implementing redirects on a website.
The search engines will transfer the weight of links from the original URL to a new one.
You can configure redirect under the Settings - Redirects section:
For more details please check our article and video tutorial.
SEO Optimization guide - Analytics
Under the Settings - Analytics section you can easily connect Google Analytics and Google Webmaster Tools.
Google Analytics is an important tool for digital marketing. It allows you to define the results of individual campaigns in real-time, compare the data, and so much more.
Google Analytics field require's "Tracking ID" from your Google Analytics account. If you haven't created your Google Analytics account - please use the following link.
Google Webmaster Tools allows you to know if your website is infected with malware, store data about all SEO aspects such as keywords, crawl errors, etc.
Google Webmaster field require's "HTML Tag" from your Google Webmaster account. If you haven't created your Google Webmaster account yet - please use the following link.
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