Leveraging Liferay Platform for SEO
Avakash Dekavadiya
In digital era, Search Engine Optimization (SEO) plays an important role in optimizing specific web pages or complete website. This makes the website pages and its content search engine friendly and scores higher in search results.
Meta tags, page title and sitemap are important aspects of SEO that can be configured for web pages of Liferay sites from control panel. In Liferay, administrator can configure meta tags, title tag in different languages for public and/or private pages.
SEO panel for web pages for Liferay 6.2 and 7 are shown below respectively:
Liferay 7.0.1 SEO section
Configuration of SEO fields like title of page, meta tags are shown in images below:
Liferay 6.2.2 Html title
Liferay 7.0.2 Html title
Liferay 6.2.3 Meta tags
Liferay 7.0.3 Meta tags
We can customize sitemap related things like whether we want to include a particular public page in the sitemap or not, Priority of public page and change frequency of public page. Fields related to sitemap are shown in below image Liferay 6.2.4 Site Map and Liferay 7.0.4 Site Map for Liferay 6.2 and Liferay 7 respectively.
Liferay 6.2.4 Site Map
Liferay 7.0.4 Site Map
As sitemap properties can be customized, sitemap can be submitted to google and yahoo for indexing of pages of website. Liferay uses Sitemap protocol to notify google or yahoo about sitemap. Administrator can see and submit sitemap to search engines under Site Settings for Liferay site as shown below:
Liferay 6.2.5 sitemap submit
Liferay 7.0.5 sitemap submit
To prevent search engine crawler to access certain website parts, administrator can use robots.txt files at the root of the site.For example http:// www.example.com/robots.txt. In Liferay, configure values for robots.txt file in Robots section of Site Settings. Screenshot below shows the Robot section of Site Settings: .
Liferay 6.2.6 robot txt
Liferay 7.0.6 SEO section
Liferay content Management for SEO
WYSIWYG is a HTML editor that allows you to modify fonts, add color, insert images and much more. For SEO and user-friendliness, formatting content is important like using proper header, alt and title attribute of images etc. Structured data also plays vital role towards rich snippets in the search result. You can find attributes to add in HTML elements at https://schema.org for structured data.Liferay provides WYSIWYG as default editor UI for web content and blog portlet.
WYSIWYG is a rich editor that allows to format content. Administrator can add different headers like h1 to h6, attributes like alt and title for images and more. Administrator can also view source and add html elements with all important attribute for structured data.
Liferay 6.2.7 WYSIWYG editor
Displaying same web content on more than one page with two different URL is not favorable for SEO. In such case, one default display page can be used. Here, a visitor from the different page with the same content will be redirected to default display page. In this case, one canonical URL is created that will refer same content.
There are two ways to create display page:
Use content display page template while creating page of liferay site.
Create display page manually by adding asset publisher portlet on page and checking the checkbox labeled Set as the Default Asset Publisher for this page and select View in Context for Asset link ehavior under Display Setting tab while configuring asset publisher portlet.
To see how it works,
When user clicks on View More it will redirect user to canonical url created by Liferay for same web content .
Liferay takes abstract/description as meta description and tags as meta keywords. It adds this description and keywords along with configured meta description and keywords for specific page. To add meta description and keywords to the content (web content, blog, contract etc) just provide description/abstracts and tag for categorization as shown in image below:
Liferay 6.2.8 Web content abstract
Liferay 6.2.9 Web content categorization
Liferay 6.2.10 Meta tags in HTML
Liferay uses portlet URLs that contains many request parameters and we can also add more request parameters. So URL becomes too long and it is not good for SEO.
Liferay provides the way to shorten URLs and these URLs are called friendly URLs.
http://localhost:8080/web/guest/<page
?p_p_id=<Portlet ID>
&p_p_lifecycle=<Lifecycle>
&p_p_state=<State>
&p_p_mode=<View>
&p_p_col_id=column-1&p_p_col_count=1
p_p_id: current portlet id
p_p_state: window state (normal, maximized, minimized)
p_p_mode: portlet mode (view, edit and help)
p_p_lifecycle: this is life cycle of portlet 0/1/2
0: render phase or render URL
1: action phase or action URL
2: server resource URL
Steps to create friendly URL
Configure URL routes in xml file
Friendly URL Implementation Java class, we generally use Liferay’s implementation class DefaultFriendlyURLMapper
Configure the Friendly URL information in liferay-portlet.xml file.
With digitization, businesses are focusing on SEO to build up their online footprints. Liferay offers the benefit of being SEO-ready platform for websites. With an easy-to-use GUI, website teams can accelerate their execution pace. Marketing teams with little hands-on-training can also independently work on SEO activities for the website.
AIMDek with its Liferay expertise, offers an array of services for Liferay ranging from strategy consulting, execution, maintenance, et al. To know more about our Liferay capabilities, mail us on sales@aimdek.com
