SEO Guide

A SEO Guide for Symphony Content Editors

What this extension does

This extension allows you do a real-time SEO-check on the content you are editing. It counts the unique words, and shows which keywords and combinations occur the most in your text.

How does it work?

In your section editor, you can check which fields should be monitored for text input. This could be fields that are used for headers, descriptions, content, etc... For each field you can set a priority on how heavy this item should be counted in the whole equation. For example: a header which will be used for a title, page handle and a big bold text on top of the page is far more important than a small piece of text that is shown in the sidebar.

For richtext-editors CKEditor is supported.

Important notes

For Developers

This extension does absolutely nothing on the frontend to improve the SEO of your website. It's still the developers responsibility to craft the correct HTML that gets indexed by the different search engines out there.

For Content Editors

This extension gives absolutely no guarantee to higher search results. It only analyzes the content you are typing and shows which keywords (and combinations) on your site are most-used and will probably be detected as 'important keywords' for the different search engines out there.

Having said that, how any search engine exactly works is a bit of a mystery, since the search algorithms used by companies as Google, Yahoo and Microsoft are known to be one of the biggest secrets in the universe. However, this extensions gives you an insight on how the content of your website could be interpreted when analyzed by an automated process.

Implementation

Add the field to your section and select the fields in which the content will be stored to analyse. Also add a tag list field and give it the handle 'seo-keywords'. This field will be used to calculate the keyword usage.

The used algorithm

The algorithm that this extensions used is fairly simple. It works by the following rules:

• Count all unique words. Also count all unique word-combinations (of two and three words).
• Give the unique words a score based on how many times they occur in the text. The score is based on the priority given to the field. Priority 1 is +1, priority 5 is +5.
• Order these words and show the 5 words / combinations which occur the most.
• For CKEditor: words in h1 get a +3 bonus, words in h2 get a +2 bonus, words in h3 get a +1 bonus.
• Bold and italic texts get a +1 bonus
• Headers, Bold and italic texts are matched against the keywords and be given a bonus if used.
• The lack of use of headers, bold and italics or over-use of keywords will result in a penalty.
• The SEO strength is determined by the following:
  • First 25%: Check if all keywords are used at least once.
  • Next 45%: Check if all keywords occur in the top-5 of Words and Importance
  • Last 30%: Check if the saturation of keywords is not too high. Too much keywords could be seen as spam by some search engines. Also, it keeps the text human-readable. 3% is best. More than 6% results in a penalty.

You can help!

If you're a SEO expert and have some pointers on how the algorithm could be adjusted to be more helpfull, please let it know! Then we can make it a more accurate extension.