SEO - basics issues

[oliverlutz1]

Hi 

We've recently launched our community: community.upc-cablecom.ch. We're happy with the platform overall, but not with the SEO features. I was wondering if there are other customers around which are not happy regarding SEO? Or what are your experiences?

I'll have a call with Lithium's responsible team next week and hope, that some of the (basic) SEO points below are on the road map. 

Some SEO points: 

• URLs: The subcategory is always named twice: https://forum.vodafone.co.uk/t5/TV-Sport/bd-p/tvsport (should only be there once), furthermore no uppercase letters
• Heading structure (landing pages, categories and threads): it's not possible to change the structure: page.head.structure & the H1 etc. tags
• Heading structure (blog posts). Can't be changed. Furthermore it's not possible to set h2 subtitles
• Meta description (blog): it's not possible to set meta titles & description (WordPress for example provides this feature & more) for free

[NickWilsdon]

Thanks @oliverlutz1 - I've asked support for some help on my permissions. 

I noticed on the Lithium home page (http://www.lithium.com/products-solutions/online-communities/forums) that "SEO optimization" is highlighted as one of the features of the platform, so I'd like to get as much background information as possible on that point. I would be happy to use this thread to discuss these features and what development would help us in further optimising Lithium.

Thanks,

Nick

[oliverlutz1]

+1 for this statement. 🙂

[PaoloT]

Perhaps @JeffSp can chime in on this area to share the latest news?

[JeffSp]

Hi Everyone,

We've recently run a few SEO audits and we've received audit results from a handful of customers -- thanks! We found that we're pretty solid on common best practices and, generally, our SEO practices look ok. However, we did find areas in need of improvement. This is such an important area, we're working on updates to the platform behavior around the following:

• Handle “thin content” pages (intelligent noindex, nofollow)
• Update and optimize our use of canonical
• Redirect code hygiene 
• User-agent directives
• Update and optimize heading tags, title tag, metatags, and microformat usage
• Re-implement sitemap
• Audit and improve SEO controls in Admin
• Add backend instrumentation and monitoring
• Produce SEO technical documentation

Updates in these areas will start to roll out over the next few releases and we'll be monitoring for improved pagerank and referral traffic. 

  -- Jeff

[oliverlutz1]

Thanks for the update @JeffSp!

Looking forward to hear about the details. 🙂 

[PaoloT]

Update: the latest details are available in the 15.10 Release Notes  . Hope this helps!

[NickWilsdon]

Hi Paolo,

Many thanks for the update. and really appreciate your help on these SEO issues. 

I'm unable to view that link, seems I don't have the right permissions. I signed up to this community directly. Would you be able to point me in the right direction to get this fixed?

Thanks,

Nick

[PaoloT]

Hi @NickWilsdon

you can send an email to our community team ( communityhelp@lithium.com ) to gain access to the customer release notes.

Thanks,

[oliverlutz1]

Well, "not necessarily" doesn't mean, that Google doesn't care at all. 😉 But I agree with you, that the URL structure is more important.