Contentful is a powerful CMS for many reasons. Namely, its ability to enforce consistency makes it easy to establish best practices and improve SEO for your website.
One of the problems of a website when it comes to SEO is figuring out how to enforce best practices.
So many SEO elements fall through the cracks when building with a traditional CMS or developer-managed website. This is one of the many challenges of trying to manage content across an entire site.
You need a way to see and manipulate all of your SEO content from a high level to see what's missing or what can be optimized.
This is something Contentful makes easy if implemented properly from a content modeling perspective.
Here are a few ways Contentful can improve SEO:
1. Enforce alt-text for all website images
One key point of the argument I make to SEO people for using Contentful is the granular level of control they can have over how SEO elements should exist on your site. For example, you can wrap all of the images on your site in a Contentful component that has a required alt text field.
That's a big win! You can then localize the alt text, get a birds-eye view of it for tone of voice, or make adjustments without coding.
The component would look something like this:
Media 🖼️ component
---- Fields ----
Image - Media field (one file)
Alt text - Text field (short text)
Field Options*
☑️ Enable localization of this field
Field Validation**
☑️ Required field
*You can find field options by hovering over a field and clicking Settings.
**You can add validation by hovering over a field, clicking Settings, then clicking the Validation tab.
2. Require page-specific SEO tags for each website page
If you've already created a basic Page 📝 component (you can find more context on how to set this up properly here), you can add a required field to this page to reference an SEO component:
Here's how to add an SEO field that references a SEO 🔎 component to your Page 📝 component:
Page 📝 component
---- Fields ----
SEO Component - Reference field (one reference)
Field Validation
☑️ Required field
☑️ Accept only specified entry type
☑️ SEO Component
Wondering how you should model this SEO component for your site pages? Check out the 6 fields that should be in every Contentful SEO component.
3. Semantic HTML
One of the most important features of a web page compliant with both SEO and accessibility best practices is semantic HTML.
As you create pages with Contentful and build out a library of reusable components to power your site, you can easily build rules into those components and your front end code to make your HTML semantic.
For example, you can add a field to your Page 📝 component for your page's H1, and only render an H1 title on the front end from that field. That way, you'll never run into problems like having multiple H1s on a page.
What if there was a process you could follow to make Contentful successful for your team specifically?
It's called the Waterfall method.
Teams I've worked with that follow this process were far more likely to set up a successful Contentful project than those who didn't.
Why? Because the process uses your current challenges to inform a vision their entire team can work towards, and make Contentful the tool to pull it all together.
Grab our free guide below on the step-by-step process successful Contentful users follow.
You'll also get sample questions to ask your content editors as you develop requirements with them.