One of Craft’s ways of working is that you start with a clean slate. You have no built-in forced ways of working, like pages and posts. On a Craft site, you start from scratch, and when dealing with SEO, you can maximise your site and put it in such a good state that it gives your site the best possible chance to rank highly through on-page factors.
Control over HTML tags
In SEO, the H1 tag has a significant impact, and you should use only one H1 per page. Craft allows you full control of every tag output on your whole website. So naturally Craft can handle H1s exactly how you want. Generally, what happens on a Craft site, you would use the only already there for your custom field - the title tag. In most of the sites I have built, that’s how you set it up. On a recent build, though, the client wanted extra fine control over the H1 tag. I created a new custom field, which I named “H1 override”,created some markup in the Craft content, tested it, and live on the site in under an hour. It’s not just the H1 tag that you can create and control like this; every single tag on your whole website can be tweaked.
The perfect formatting for SEO
Generally, with a page built for SEO in Craft, you would have a single H1 tag, followed by multiple H2s, broken up with H3s. In Craft, you would have a single field for the article's main body, giving the author access to the WYSIWYG (What you see is what you get). This used to be done with RedActor, which worked well. In Craft 5, this is done with CK Editor, which is a brilliant option. You can set it up with access to the whole range of heading tags - H2, H3, H4, H5, H6 if you want. As with everything in Craft, you decide which heading tags you want inserted. Generally, the builds I do use h2 and h3, sometimes h4. This keeps the UI clean and simple while still delivering a good bang for your buck in SEO.
CK Editor
Within CK Editor, you can of course add images, lists, links, etc. You get bold and italic formatting too. All of which you can control. Let's say you just wanted paragraphs, bold and italic, not a problem, you get up your CK editor fields and buttons as you like. You could have 10 different CK editors within an editing page if you wanted, every single field with very different formatting buttons and config. The choice is yours! For SEO, this is brilliant because if you only use the fields you want, it makes the UI very easy to use and understand. With minimal training, your authors within Craft can edit the content, knowing the important parts for SEO.
Web Performance
Web Hosting
As Craft is a solution you host yourself, you have full access to the core files and all the server config. We host our sites on Digital Ocean, with it being set up via Laravel Forge. This allows for full server config as needed and gives very speedy sites out of the box.
Caching
Caching is another big part of web performance, and as you guessed it, Craft gives you options. We generally set up a CloudFlare-hosted domain with caching on the Craft side with Blitz or a FastCGI caching facility. This gives blazingly quick websites. We pride ourselves on the speed and performance of our sites, but Craft makes it easy.
Craft CMS SEO plugins?
Since you are starting with a clean slate in Craft and not shoehorning in any content, you can quite easily build your own underlying features for each page, including title, meta description, canonical, and tags. Schema can be set up with little work, too. To save ourselves some time, we usually set up our sites with SEOMatic, a highly popular Craft plugin. It saves a good bit of work, and Andrew, the developer, naturally knows his SEO. Whilst you could quite easily do all this yourself, this plugin saves a good bit of time. I will review SEOMATIC in a separate blog.
Stability & Security
As all Craft sites(excluding Craft Cloud) are self-hosted and with a reliable host such as Digital Ocean, many of our sites see 100% uptime. We are not relying on a third-party hosting solution like Squarespace, WebFlow, etc, which can go down from time to time. So search engines are not going to penalise you for downtime, and as the web performance of our Craft sites is so good, the search engines love it.
Craft is the real deal
Craft CMS really is the real deal when it comes to SEO. Everything is customisable, and you control it all. With the fine-tuning you can do with the tags, the freeform options you have with custom fields make it an incredibly flexible CMS. As you control everything from the content to the HTML to the web performance, Craft will not hold you back when it comes to SEO.
Written by John Macpherson