DXP and SEO

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the art of understanding your website visitors and optimizing your site to the needs of those visitors, including things like site speed, image optimization, and well-structured navigation. If you succeed, your website will rank higher on search engines like Google or Bing

SEO is an enormous area that employs many people, and its details are not included in the scope of this developer guide. However, this topic contains a checklist with the most important things a developer can do in Optimizely to improve your site's attractiveness and ranking in search engines. For SEO tips oriented toward the editors, see Search options and tipsSearch options and tips.

One of the most important site optimization tasks for developers is setting up the site templates to let the editors consistently configure SEO metadata on pages, such as title, keywords, page descriptions, and so on. This is an example from the Alloy sample site, where SEO-related properties are gathered on an SEO tab:

The following metadata tags can be useful to have:

You can also extend the metadata with:

Schema.org differs from OpenGraph in purpose: OpenGraph is for the relation and typing of content, while schema.org is for the structured representation of content. Schema.org information (as JSON+LD or data-attributes) is what drives the internal site search box on Google, and accurate breadcrumbs. Read more on Schema.org Markup.

Search engines, such as Google, favor websites that have a responsive design and are optimized for mobile phones and tablets; it is important to have a mobile-first approach to the design of your website. (Assuming your site is not one of the few sites accessed only from desktops.) Responsive design sites also load quickly, which is another reason for using them.

For responsive designs, you can use the "Viewport Meta Element." Using this element, you can control the layout of web pages on mobile browsers. It is included in the head section of your web page. Syntax:

<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width,initial-scale=1">

Another important aspect of good SEO is optimizing the site loading times. A faster website is rewarded in SEO rankings compared to a slower site. Some things to take into consideration are:

Ideally, you want to serve your visitors top-notch images in high resolution. Still, unfortunately, high-resolution images can increase your website's loading time, especially for users on smaller devices, which negatively affects their user experience and decreases your SEO ranking. Set up your site to use different preconfigured image sizes so that the visitor is served whatever image quality is appropriate for their screen size while getting a fast loading time. Automate this so your editors do not spend time thinking of image sizes.

The CDN’s image resizing feature for CMS 12 and CMS (SaaS) lets you optimize and transform images on the fly by appending parameters to the image's URL. You can resize, crop, rotate, adjust quality, and apply filters to images without having to store multiple versions of the same image on your server.

Another way of achieving different image sizes easily on an Optimizely website is by using the ImageResizer add-on, which lets you define a srcset in the image tags for breakpoint optimization.

Another way to optimize your image handling is using the free-for-use ImageProcessor add-on.

Images, just like other assets on your website, need to be cached to give good performance. Generally, the expiry timeout on assets can be longer than on content, as these are probably not updated as often. It is important to balance short cache times when the cached content expires too quickly, and the performance might be affected, and long cache times when the cached content is not updated, so site visitors are served old content.

To avoid this problem where visitors are served outdated content from their local cache, you can add a version number or file hash to the URL and set cache lifetime to a minimum of a month, known as cache busting. See How To Add Cache Busting On Your Optimizely Website Easily by Jon D Jones.

A URL is a human-readable text that replaces the IP addresses computers use to communicate with servers. The URLs also tell users and search engines about the file structure on the website.

There are some benefits to making sure you are using good SEO-optimized URLs. A good URL improves the user experience, and the search engines and the visitors reward a good user experience. A clear and concise URL increases the click-through rate.

Things to consider when optimizing URLs:

For more technical information on rewriting URLs to a more friendly format, see RoutingRouting in the Optimizely Content Management System (CMS) developer guide.

Sitemaps and robots.txt are two types of text files placed in the website's root folder that are important to ensure that proper content is indexed and duplicated content is excluded.

A sitemap is an XML file following a defined format for sitemaps. The sitemap lists the URLs on your site and their internal priority and is used by search engines to crawl and index your site correctly. The sitemap does not affect your site's ranking in search engines, but a properly organized sitemap can indirectly influence your site's ranking. This is especially true for websites containing many pages in a deep structure below the start page.

The sitemap should not be a static file but dynamically generated, preferably at least once daily. To automate this, see the add-ons found under SEO automation add-ons: Sitemaps and robots files.

The robots.txt is a simple text file at the root of your domain. The search engines check this file for instructions on how to crawl your site. You should have a robots.txt file, even if it is empty because most search engines will look for it, and if you do not have one, search engines can crawl and index your entire site.

Crawling and indexing are not the same; URLs reached through internal or external links may be indexed even though they are not crawled. Crawling is when search engines look through each URL's content. Indexing is when the search engines store and organize the information they find when crawling the internet.

You should not use robots.txt to stop indexing, as search engines and malicious bots, such as harvesting bots, may disregard robots.txt.

To stop indexing, you should instead consider:

An "Automatic landing page" is content (for example, a page type instance) that renders differently depending on user input. It is a form of a personalized content type. A Google hit can, for example, point to an automatic landing page, which shows content related to the Google search.

Optimizely Content RecommendationsOptimizely Content Recommendations is part of the Optimizely Digital Experience Platform (DXP) and is a great feature for analyzing website visitors' behavior and personalizing content to match their interests. Personalizing content can increase the site's attractiveness and improve the SEO ranking. It can also be used to fine-tune your Google Ads campaign by providing AI insights into specific KPIs.

SEO automation tools increase your ROI with three main features:

Here are some useful add-ons for analytics and automating SEO tasks.

Install the Optimizely Google AnalyticsOptimizely Google Analytics add-on to get a Google Analytics dashboard directly in the Optimizely user interface.

The third-party tool ContentKing uses real-time auditing and content tracking to monitor your website and define an SEO score for each page in a website.

Using the ContentKing CMS API, you can trigger priority auditing of a page through an API, tell ContentKing that a page has changed, and request a re-evaluation of the SEO score. See this blog post, Integrate ContentKing in Optimizely, by Mark Prins.

The SiteImprove Website Optimizer is another add-on found on the Optimizely Marketplace.

It streamlines workflows for your web teams and lets them fix errors and optimize content directly within the Optimizely editing environment. The Siteimprove add-on also has the following features:

The 404 handler is a free add-on on the Optimizely NuGet feed. It gives you better control over your 404 pages and allows redirects for old URLs that no longer work.

See the GitHub repository documentation.