Here, we'll take a look at the general SEO Settings menu in Infigo. This page provides high level control over the SEO behaviour of your Storefront, along with giving you the ability to define SEO specific information for Storefront pages such as the Homepage or Basket pages.
We will begin on the General tab, which controls the high level SEO settings for your Storefront.
The subsequent tabs each give an identical set of inputs allowing for SEO configuration on the named page. So, for example, Homepage or Basket.
Let's take a look at some of the settings available on the General tab. Later in this tutorial, we'll take a look at how these are utilised on the Storefront.
Firstly, we'll cover the metadata settings. Metadata is data (information) that provides information about other data.
Note: Although sometimes visible by users, Metadata is primary present to assist machines. They can be used by browsers, search engines or other web services to understand more about the page they are displaying.
Default title will appear as the page title on ALL your website pages, so think carefully before adding text here.
Note: Title tags are still the single most important piece of metadata on the page. The best title tags begin with the most relevant keywords, product name, or article name and end with the name of the site
Page title separator is, as the name suggests, the the character (or series of characters) that you wish to use to separate your page titles.
Default meta description will get appended as the meta description on ALL your website pages, with the exception of those where page specific settings override these (shown later).
Note: Descriptions are sometimes used by search engines as the descriptive black text in the search result listing, meta descriptions can help increase the customer click through in search results but will not necessarily impact rankings directly.
Default meta keywords will get appended as the keyword meta data your ALL your website pages, with the exception of those where page specific settings override these (shown later).
Note: Although Meta keywords ceased to impact rankings in 2009, people still use them, albeit with caution.
Looking at the second half of the settings in the General tab, these move away from Metadata, focusing more on general SEO.
Convert non-western chars will remove accents from characters where necessary.
Enable system generated canonical URLs will allow the system to dynamically generate canonical URLs and insert relevant tags onto pages, where you have not specifically defined these in the page's respective SEO settings.
Note: A canonical URL is a specific HTML element that helps prevent duplicate content issues by specifying the preferred version of a web page when multiple versions exist.
Enable Sitemap will allow the generation of a sitemap for use with search engines. A sitemap is a file or page on a website that provides a structured list of URLs, helping search engines understand the site's layout and facilitating efficient indexing of its content.
Enabling this option reveals subsequent options, giving the admin control over which site pages are included in the sitemap.
Next, let's navigate to the SEO settings for some of the specific site pages. The settings seen on these tabs are identical to each of the other tabs.
These are fields similar to those seen on the General tab, however they relate specifically to the page mentioned. The majority of these settings (excluding the title) will override the equivalent setting in the General tab.
We'll see how this looks on the Storefront in a later step.
Open Graph is a protocol originally developed by Facebook to enable websites to integrate rich social media content when shared on social platforms like Facebook. It allows developers to define meta tags in the HTML of their web pages, providing structured information about the content, such as the title, description, image, and other metadata. Social media platforms then use this data to generate more visually appealing and informative previews when users share links.
While Open Graph is still widely used and supported by major social platforms, we would consider this to be a legacy group of settings applicable only to users already using Open Graph data. If you are just starting to integrate SEO into your Storefronts, we recommend using the Meta Data sections.
You can input tracking scripts on the highlighted page, and specify where they appear in the page's code.
If we inspect the homepage on the front end, we'll see how some of the defined Metadata is used.
Remember, we completed the separate settings on the Homepage tab, meaning many of the general settings are overriden.
Title - The resulting title is a combination of the general title and the specified home page title.
Description - the Homepage description is used
Keywords - The Homepage keywords are used.
This is just for reference, to show that nothing has been configured for the My Account page.
We will now take a look at this on the front end to see how the Metadata is utilised.
We can see in this case that many of the General Metadata has been utilised by default.
The title also shows a general name for the page appended onto the General title, rather than a custom title.