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Help / WEBDEV Tutorial / Tutorial - Multi-criteria search and printing
  • Lesson 6 - Search engine optimization
  • Overview
  • Reminder: AWP mode
  • The available methods
  • SEO wizard
  • Page properties
  • Update frequency
  • Priority in the site
  • Navigation map
  • Physical page names

Tutorial - Multi-criteria search and printing

Lesson 6 - Search engine optimization
We will cover the following topics:
  • SEO wizard.
  • Page properties.
  • Navigation map.
  • Physical page names.
Durée de la leçon 20 mn
Overview
This lesson presents some guidelines to improve your website's ranking in search engines. Follow these guidelines to help users easily find your website.
This lesson is for web developers only. SEO is not essential if you are developing an Intranet site.
Open the project you worked on in the previous lesson.
  1. Go to the WEBDEV home page (Ctrl + <).
  2. On the home page, click "Tutorial", then in "Parts 3 to 6", double-click "Full WEBDEV Site - Exercise".
  3. A dialogue box prompts you to open the project you worked on in the previous lesson. You can open the local copy or the original project. Select "Open the local copy".

Corrigé

A completed project is available. You can use this project to complete the different exercises of this lesson. To open the completed project, go to the home page and click "Tutorial", then in "Parts 3 to 6", double-click "Full WEBDEV Site - Answers".

Reminder: AWP mode

At the beginning of this tutorial, we presented the differences between a WEBDEV site in Session mode and a WEBDEV site in AWP mode.
Only the AWP mode allows you to have page URLs that are independent, fixed and directly addressable.
To be optimized, the website must be in AWP mode.

The available methods

WEBDEV includes multiple tools to improve the ranking of Active WEBDEV Pages in search engines:
  • An SEO wizard.
  • The page properties.
  • The navigation map.
We will present these different methods in detail.
SEO wizard
WEBDEV includes an SEO wizard.

To start this wizard, go to the "Project" tab, "Web" group, expand "SEO" and select "SEO wizard".
SEO wizard
The wizard shows some tips to improve SEO. The most important tips are as follows:
  • Page titles: The page titles must reflect the content and contain important keywords. The page title is defined in the page description window, for each language.
  • Page keywords: It is recommended to associate keywords with pages. To define these keywords:
    • Open the description window of "PAGE_List_of_new_products": open the context menu and select "Description".
    • Go to the "Details" tab.
    • In the "SEO" section, click "Edit expressions and keywords".
      Page description
      The window that appears allows you to enter the desired keywords. Close the different description windows.
  • Alternative text: Alternative texts replace images when they are not displayed (e.g., when the user explicitly asks not to display the images, if they have not been loaded yet, or when the user uses a browser in text mode or a screen reader).
    Alternative texts describe the image and are indexed by search engines. Therefore, they must be chosen with great attention.
    The alternative text of an image is defined in the Image control description window, in the "Help" tab.
    Help tab (Image control)
If necessary, close the description windows and the SEO wizard.
Page properties
As we have already seen, the SEO wizard shows the changes that can be made to the page description window:
  • Page title,
  • Page keywords, etc.
Other properties that influence SEO can be defined in the page description window:
  • Update frequency,
  • Priority in the site.

Update frequency

The update frequency tells the search engine how often the page should be reindexed.
Page description - Details tab
Try to indicate the most precise update frequency:
  • If the page changes more often that what is specified, some versions may not be indexed.
  • If the page changes less often, the search engine will overload the server, which may affect indexing.

Priority in the site

This criterion lets the search engine know which page to offer first to the user when several pages of the site match a search.
Navigation map
The navigation map defines the structure of your site. In SEO, it can be used to:
  • display the Site Map control to guide the users within the site.
  • generate the sitemap.xml file.
To define the navigation map:
  1. In the ribbon, go to the "Project" tab, "Web" group and select "Navigation map".
  2. A window opens, allowing you to build the tree structure of your site. You can create a tree structure with the automatic build mode, which automatically detects the links between pages. The navigation map can be configured later.
WEBDEV automatically builds the site map file from the navigation map. It is generated in the _WEB directory of the site and is named _sitemap.xml.
The sitemap.xml file must be submitted to search engines so that they can index the content of your site.
Physical page names
To improve SEO even more, you can define the physical name of Active WEBDEV Pages so that it is different in every language (and different from the logical name as well).
For example, a page displaying a sales dashboard whose logical name (i.e., the name used in the code) is PAGE_SalesDASH can be generated in French in the 'tableau-de-bord-ventes.awp' file and in English in the 'sales-dashboard.awp' file.
To define the page generation name:
  1. Open the description window of "PAGE_List_of_new_products".
  2. In the "General" tab, click the "Language" button (Multilingual) to the right of the "Generated file" option.
  3. A window to configure the name of the generated pages appears:
    Configuration of the generated pages
  4. You change the name of the page and validate.
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Last update: 11/16/2023

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