Page Title 

The page title field is used for several purposes. From a SEO perspective it is mainly used to define the default URL segment and as a fallback title, if you don't set a specific SEO title. More information about the usage of the title fields can be found at Title for search engines.

URL Segment (slug) 

The URL segment is the part of the URL the user enters to access your page. Depending on your use case URLs have to fulfill certain criteria.

By default the URL segment is based on the page tree and page title, but you can override this and set it yourself.

If you want to optimize your page for search engines, it is recommended to have at least the keyword you want to be found on in your URL segment. Please make sure to check other best practices with your SEO specialist.

Title for search engines 

The Title for search engines field is used for the <title>...</title> tag of your web page. This title is used in the search results of search engines. There are some best practices for the value of this field.

• Use a speaking title, which targets your audience
• If possible, use the keywords you want to be found on in the title
• Please make sure your title fits in a Google Snippet. You can use 3rd party extensions to help you with this.

When no value for the Title for search engines field is defined, it will have a fallback to the field Page title. It will show the page title in the search results in that case.

The title can have the name of the site as a prefix or suffix. The behaviour of this can be defined by an integrator. By default the title will have the name of the site as a suffix, separated by a dash.

Description 

The description field is important for SEO purposes. This field is used to instruct search engines to use this text to show as a teaser of your page in the search result snippets. With this description, you can give the user a clear overview of the topic of this page.

Index this page 

Defines whether the page should be indexed by a search engine or not. Disabling indexing also removes the page from the XML sitemap.

Follow this page 

Defines whether search engines should follow the links on this page.

Canonical link 

You want to avoid duplicate content because your ranking can suffer from this. If you have duplicate content, you have to link to the origin of the content. This can be an internal page or an external page. You can use the default link wizard of TYPO3 to select the destination. If you don't set a canonical link yourself, TYPO3 will generate a link to the current page.

Change frequency 

This field is used in the XML sitemap and will give search engines a hint how often the content of your page is likely to change. For example: News in an archive are “never” updated, while your home page might get “weekly” updates.

Priority 

The priority is also used in the XML sitemap. Priority allows you to define how important the page is compared to other pages on your site. The priority is stated in a value from 0 to 1. Your most important pages can get an higher priority as other pages. This value does not affect how important your pages are compared to pages of other websites. All pages and records get a priority of 0.5 by default.

Title 

This title can be specified to be shown as the title of the snippet preview when your page is shared on the social network. You only have to fill this field when you want a different title as in the search results.

Description 

Used to adjust the description of the preview snippet when your page is shared at a social network. You only have to fill this field when you want a different description as the description in the search results.

Image 

You can specify the image that should be shown when your page is shared on a social network. Please be aware that the different social networks need specific dimensions for an image. TYPO3 ships with the most used dimension. If you want to have more dimensions, please let your integrator add more dimensions.

Adding the "Missing Meta Description" widget to your personal Dashboard 

If you have the access rights to the Dashboard module and are granted access to the "Missing Meta Description" widget you can add it yourself to your Dashboard:

1. Open the Dashboard module
2. Click on the plus button to add a widget
3. Go to category "SEO"
4. Choose widget "Pages missing Meta Description"

Using the "Missing Meta Description" widget to improve SEO results 

Therefore this widget lists pages without a description in their meta data:

You can now click on the pencil icon to add a description to the page:

Entry Point 

Please ensure, that you have configured your sites so that they all have an entry point. This is used for properly generating the canonical tags, for example.

Languages 

Ensure, that you setup the site languages correctly. All languages should have the right information in the Locale and other language-dependant input fields. When set correctly, TYPO3 will automatically connect your page in the different languages so that search engines understand their relations. This it to ensure that the search engine knows which page to show when someone is searching in a specific language.

See Adding Languages for more details.

Error Handling 

Although TYPO3 will respond with a HTTP status code 404 (Not found) when a page is not found, it is best practice to have a proper content telling the user that the page they requested is not available. This can guide them to another page or for example to a search function of your website.

See Error handling for more details.

robots.txt 

The robots.txt file is a powerful feature and should be used with care. It will deny or allow search engines to access your pages. By blocking access to your pages, search engines won't crawl these pages. You should make sure that this will not prevent the search engines from finding important pages.

It is best practice to keep your robots.txt as clean as possible. An example of a minimal version of your robots.txt:

# This space intentionally left blank. Only add entries when you know how powerful the robots.txt is.
User-agent: *

On Static routes you can find more details on how to create a static route that will show this information when visiting https://www.example.com/robots.txt.

When you want to disallow specific URLs, you can use the Index this page option in the backend or set the robot HTTP header X-Robots-tag manually.

Static Routes and redirects 

Having correct redirects and choosing the appropriate status code is a very important part of SEO.

It is possible to manage redirects via the TYPO3 redirects extension, but it is not the only option and from a performance perspective it may not be the best solution. Please also see Performance in the EXT:redirects documentation.

Hreflang link-tags 

The generation of the <link rel="alternate" hreflang="" href="" /> tags is done automatically if the page is available in other languages. This feature should work correctly in almost all cases.

TYPO3 is using PSR-14 events to handle the generation of those hreflang link-tags. If, for some reason, you would like to alter or remove the automatically generated tags, you can register your own EventListener. This EventListener should listen to the \TYPO3\CMS\Frontend\Event\ModifyHrefLangTagsEvent event. Just make sure your EventListener is ordered after the \TYPO3\CMS\Seo\HrefLang\HrefLangGenerator listener.

More information how to work with EventListeners can be found in the documentation of Event dispatcher (PSR-14 events)

Canonical Tag 

Just like the hreflang link-tags, the <link rel="canonical" href="" /> link-tag is also generated automatically. If you have a specific edge case, and you don't want TYPO3 to render the tag, you can disable rendering completely. You can put this line in the ext_localconf.php of an extension and also make sure your extension is loaded after EXT:seo:

unset($GLOBALS['TYPO3_CONF_VARS']['SC_OPTIONS']['TYPO3\CMS\Frontend\Page\PageGenerator']['generateMetaTags']['canonical']);

Setting missing OpenGraph meta tags 

Most of the OpenGraph meta tags are rendered automatically when EXT:seo is installed. If you want to add meta tags properties such as og:title, og:description and og:image, you can use TypoScript code like this:

page {
  meta {
    og:site_name = YOUR_SITE_NAME
    og:site_name.attribute = property

    og:locale = en_US
    og:locale.attribute = property
    og:locale:alternate {
      attribute = property
      value {
         1 = de_DE
      }
    }
  }
}

Setting fallbacks for meta tags 

As you can see on TypoScript and PHP the tags are first set by PHP and after that the TypoScript config is handled. As EXT:seo is only adding the meta tags for the SEO and Social media fields (if they are filled in the page properties), you have some possibilities to add fallbacks.

Because EXT:seo is handling the tags in PHP-scope, you are able to add those fallbacks using TypoScript. You can add those tags with TypoScript and those will only be rendered when EXT:seo has not rendered them.

An example to set a fallback description and og:description:

page {
  meta {
    description = Your fallback description tag
    og:description = Your fallback OG:description tag
  }
}

Setting fallbacks for og:image and twitter:image 

If you want to have a fallback og:image or twitter:image, you can use this little snippet.

page {
  meta {
    og:image.stdWrap.cObject = TEXT
    og:image.stdWrap.cObject {
      if.isFalse.field = og_image
      stdWrap.typolink {
        parameter.stdWrap.cObject = IMG_RESOURCE
        parameter.stdWrap.cObject.file = EXT:your_extension/Resources/Public/Backend/OgImage.svg
        returnLast = url
        forceAbsoluteUrl = 1
      }
    }
    twitter:image.stdWrap.cObject = TEXT
    twitter:image.stdWrap.cObject {
      if.isFalse.field = twitter_image
      stdWrap.typolink {
        parameter.stdWrap.cObject = IMG_RESOURCE
        parameter.stdWrap.cObject.file = EXT:your_extension/Resources/Public/Backend/TwitterCardImage.svg
        returnLast = url
        forceAbsoluteUrl = 1
      }
    }
  }
}

More information about the Meta Tag API can be found on:

• PHP MetaTag API
• TypoScript Properties

Setting defaults for the author on meta tags 

This example shows how to set a default author based on the TypoScript constant {$my.default.author}:

page {
  meta {
    author = {$my.default.author}
  }
}