Understanding SEO capabilities

Classic General
1

I’m about to start building a new website in Rapidweaver 6 using Nick Cates’ Writer template - https://nickcatesdesign.com/preview/rapidweaver/writer/

I’m working with an SEO specialist who wants some clarity on what we can achieve in Rapidweaver, I’ve not really paid very good attention to SEO in previous sites, but want to get this one right/better! She has asked me many questions, some of which I have been able to answer, but the ones below I’d like some help/expertise from the Rapidweaver Community please:

  1. Good internal link structure/hierachy with optimised anchor text through navigation.
  2. Activate breadcrumbs if possible
  3. Customisable H1 tag, so with automated page title switched off
  4. Image files are re-sized prior to upload, file names contain keywords, all images have optimised descriptions
  5. Create external style sheets and unblock any blocked resources in robots.txt
  6. Add xml sitemap which auto-generates when content updated - add ‘no follow’ to blog category pages and tag pages
  7. Test site through Google mobile-friendly Test tool prior to going live to ensure you haven’t added any plugins which are draining resources.

Then I’m just wondering how a schema markup works in Rapidweaver? Does Rapidweaver strip it out or not? Wondering how others have got on applying it to their sites?

Thanks a lot one and all, always really appreciate your support when I need it!!

3
  1. Rapidweaver’s pretty well-behaved so far as I understand it.
  2. Yes, in Edit mode, go into Settings (click the spanner icon) and choose Advanced and there’s an option to ‘Display breadcrumb trail’
  3. Some themes ‘steal’ the H1 tag for their site title. I think if you then use an H2 header for your individual page heading that maintains the SEO integrity of the page.
  4. I would always manually re-size images to suit the project using some thing like JPEG Mini, PhotoBulk or ImageOptim; as @caffeineinjection said, the current version of Stacks will give your images daft names unless you warehouse them (manually upload them to your site via FTP and then ‘point’ to them).
  5. Pass
  6. I’m sure RW can do this
  7. Pass

A couple of useful resources.

  1. http://blog.realmacsoftware.com/article/rapidweaver-seo-how-to-optimize-your-rapidweaver-website-for-google
  2. http://www.willwoodgate.com/index_files/ten-steps-towards-improving-rapidweaver-seo.html
  3. https://www.chillidogsoftware.com/chillidog-software-rapidweaver-stacks/seo-rx/ - it’s a new stack which will give your pages an SEO check

Broadly speaking my understanding is that although it may do things differently to what your specialist is used to, RW is fine for producing SEO-optimised sites.

HTH

Rob

1 Like
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Hi @adsta

Aside from building SEO-Rx, I am also developing articles that cover SEO over here

Greg

6

Just as a side note, I wanted to point out to @adsta, re:

Create external style sheets and unblock any blocked resources in robots.txt

If you unblock images in resources (in robots.txt file), you are effectively giving permission to image harvesting bots to include your images in sites like ‘Google Images’. Is that what you want?