Note: If you don't know anything about a 301 redirect
please read the grey box at the bottom of the article!

Redirecting a page using 301

In this tutorial we have 2 pages: a news list page and a news single page

http://www.your-website.com/old-news-page/

http://www.your-website.com/news/

Now, since both page 1 and 2 are well indexed in Google and there are several inbound links we don’t want to delete either of them. Yet the first news item had become obsolete and we want to redirect all these inbound links to another page.

If we delete the first page the visitor will end up with a 404 page. A 301 redirect could redirect the first pages to another page, and this is Google friendly too! So… how to do this?

1. In the backend, go the 'info' module in the left main menu.
2. Select the rootpage of your website.
3. Choose "Speaking Url Management" from the dropdown menu.
4. Choose "Error log" from the second dropdown menu.

You should now see a list of url errors:

Click to enlarge!

It seems the page ‘old-news-page’ has been requested by a visitor but could not be found. To make sure this won’t happen again we are going to redirect this page to our new page: ‘news’. As you can see, there’s a little button called ‘set as redirect’. Click this button to set the redirect for this url. You should now see the following screen:

Click to enlarge!

In the screenshot above I’m redirecting the page ‘old-news-page’ to the new page: ‘news’. As you can see I activate the ‘Send “301 Moved permanently” header’ checkbox. Now TYPO3 will make the redirect a 301 redirect!

1. Set the old url (this way it's set automatically)
2. Set the new page
3. Save the redirect
4. Go to http://www.your-website.com/old-news-page/
5. TYPO3 will redirect you to http://www.your-website.com/news/
6. Redirect succesful!

Now let’s see how we can make this work for tt_news!

Redirecting a tt_news record using 301

When you delete a news record and try to visit it you’ll end up with a ‘no news id’ error. The RealURL Management Error Log does not register this error! So, we need to manually set the redirect.

In this case we have 2 news records:

http://dev.emaux.nl/news/news-single/article/example-news-record/

http://dev.emaux.nl/news/news-single/article/new-news-record/

To redirect news record 1 to news record 2, please follow the following steps:

1. In the backend, go the 'info' module again.
2. Select the rootpage of your website.
3. Choose "Speaking Url Management" from the dropdown menu.
4. Choose "Redirects" from the second dropdown menu.

We're back at the second screenshot above!

5. Click '+ New entry'
6. Set the url which no longer exists
7. Set the new url to which you want to redirect
8. Check the 301 checkbox
9. Save and enjoy!

Click to enlarge!

That’s it, your done! Repeat this procedure for all news items you delete. Hope this tutorial was clear and helpful. If you have any questions don’t hesitate to ask.

What is a 301 redirect?

A 301 redirect is a redirect which uses a 301 http-header code.
This code tells search engines the page is no longer available
at the given location but is 'permanently moved' to another
location. The resource (e.g. search engine) should use the new
URL in the future instead of the old URL. In real life this would
mean the old page should be replaced by the new page upon
re-indexing.

This is a good thing! Now the search enige realizes the old page
doesn't contain the information which is being looked for. The
new page does, so your pageranking is preserved. A win-win
situation: We happy (pageranking preserved), seach engine happy
(page contains good information) and visitor happy (finds the
information it's looking for).

Basic no. 1: A clean source code.

A clean source code makes it easier for search engines to crawl your website. For that, you need to clean up the default HTML output done by TYPO3. Use this line of TypoScript a put it in your template Setup section:

# Clean up prefixes in source code
config.disablePrefixComment = 1

This will clean up the prefixes made with every content-element. This should be a relief! For a more complete cleanup please go to this post.

Basic no. 2: Make you headers better.

By default, every content-element header is a <h1> header in TYPO3. For your SEO it’s better to just have one <h1> tag per page. To convert all these <h1> tags into <h2> tags you need to put the following line in your template Constants section:

# Convert default H1 tags into H2 tags
content.defaultHeaderType = 2

You can now add a <h1> tag manually to the page, or generate one dynamically using TypoScript.

Basic no. 3: Images.

By default, images which are scaled, croped or in any other way modified by TYPO3 are given a random name. For example:

/typo3temp/pics/b3e43c4bb3.jpg.

By installing the extension: fl_realurl_image, your images will get a nicer name. Install the extension and you’re done. Images will now be named like:

/typo3temp/fl_realurl_image/your_image.jpg

Basic no. 4: Page title.

The pagetitle is important for your SEO ranking. This title needs to summerize the pagecontent as close as posible. I suggest you manually edit these to your needs. Someone (can’t rememer the name, sorry) once told me: Use an inverted breadcrumb path as a pagetitle. The theory behind this: People think about their page names, the lower in the pagetree the more specific. If you invert this you have a pretty close to content path and also the main keywords which people interested in this subject will search for.

Basic no. 5: URL’s.

The default URL’s of TYPO3 are not readable, the solution to this problem is RealURL. Since this extension is really popular I’m not going to explain it, this has been done more than enough times. Just search the web for a good tutorial. I can recommend the extension “danp_realurlconfigurator” though, which gives you a nice configurator.

Basic no. 6: Description and meta tags.

A really important SEO rule is to have unique page descriptions and meta tags. Since these fields have to match the page content as close as posible it’s only logical to have them in your page configuration. If you edit your page you’ll find the second tab is all about meta data. Here you can fill in the description and meta tags for your page. To actually use these field in the frontend source code you’ll need to following lines in your template Setup section:

# This will activate the page meta data
page.meta.keywords.field = keywords
page.meta.description.field = description

Basic no. 7: An XML sitemap for Google Webmaster Center.

If you want Google to track your page changes and crawl them accordingly you can submit a XML sitemap. If you do not know what a XML sitemap is please read this first. There are a couple of extensions to generate such a sitemap dynamically in TYPO3.

Basic no. 8: JavaScript at the bottom of your source.

Deprecated since version 4.3! Use page.includeJSFooter instead.

This might be more of a speed thing rather than SEO, but still… By default TYPO3 will put javascript includes in your header.

-- SNIP: Deprecated snippet --

TYPO3 also generates a default JavaScript which can be removed by putting this line in your template Setup section:

# Remove the default JS file in the header
config.removeDefaultJS = 1

Make sure you copy the content of this file to your custom one before removing it.

Tip: Extension seo_basics

Benjamin Mack has developed an extension (seo_basics) which is really useful. It not only generates the XML sitemap by default, but it also helps you to update the page descriptions and meta tags. Download and install the extension through the extension manager. Once installed, go to http://www.your-website.com/sitemap.xml, you’ll notice it works right out of the box. (If it doesn’t, please check you RealURL configuration). But this is just the beginning. Go to the “info” module and select your root website page. Now, in the drop-down box choose “SEO Management”.

(Update: 17-01-2010: Breaking change in extension update, include static template first!)

Click to enlarge!

Here you’ll see all pages with there url-path, title, description and metatags. Click on the “Edit SEO fields”. Now you’ll notice you can edit all fields of all pages within one screen! Once you start filling in the details you’ll notice the color changes while typing:

Yellow: To little text
Green: Just good!
Red: To much text

If you would like to add META Abstract & Author to seo_basics please look at this post of Michael Cannon: http://www.acqal.com/blog/a/article/add-meta-abstract-author-to-seo-basics/

Click to enlarge!

Hope you liked this post:)

These basics are far from a complete reference but I hope they will be of use. If you’ve got suggestions, please don’t hesitate to comment…