[TYPO3] <- Prev | Next -> Article Navigation and SEO

Morten Kjems mortenkjems at gmail.com
Tue May 29 01:15:54 CEST 2007


Hi. I am looking for an extension that will allow me to create a basic 
article navigation for my pages.

Something like: << Prev |2|3|4|5| Next >> would be fine but a dropdown 
menu with "table of contents" between "Prev" and "Next" would be nice 
(as seen here http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2996).

There are several extensions that does something like that but many of 
them are limited in many ways and they all lack one important factor. 
None of them takes SEO (Search engine optimization) into consideration.

Here a list of extensions that provides article navigation without 
considering SEO:
1. "Articles", is limited in a number of ways.
2. "Article pages", limited - have not been updated in four years.
3. "Content Navigation", No documentation.
4. "Page Navigation", from 2004 does not seem to work with Templa Voila.
5. "Content Browsing" Works fine, but for some reason it does not work 
with "page comments" (the comments just dosn't show up when the page is 
build with "Content Browsing")

The first thing you learn when working with SEO is that the page title 
is the most important factor when search engines are indexing a site.

The problem with with the extensions above is that the page title will 
remain the same for all pages in the article. So will the meta tags 
"keywords" and "description" Especially "description" is important here 
since it will be the appetizer describing the content of your article 
right beneath the page title in Google.

If you for example have a long article on how to install TYPO3 on a server.

The page title would properly be something like this: "Installing TYPO3 
on a server". And that would be the page title of all sections.

But if you divide the article into sections one of the sections might be 
about how to find a prober host. So all the content is about finding a 
host but the page title will indicate that it is about installation. 
This will confuse Google and the site will not rank well. If an 
individual page title could be set For example "finding a host for 
TYPO3" Google would have no problem in understanding the meaning of the 
section/page. Therefor it would rank higher and more people would find 
the relevant information.

There are two extensions that makes this possible.

1. "Page browser". An individual page title can be set since it creates 
navigation between pages and not content elements. The downside is that 
  it is build around an index page that I will have no need for. Also 
the navigation is dead simple: <- Prev | Next -> with no options to 
access the pages in between.

2. "Relational link elements". I am not sure about this one. It is new 
and I find the documentation hard to understand. Please enlighten me if 
this is what I need.

So what is the question? Is there an extension that provides article 
navigation with a bit more options than just <- Prev | Next -> and also 
addresses SEO.

So far the best option is the extension "Page browser" since it allows 
individual page titles. But the navigation part is almost to simple.

All suggestions and comments are most welcome

/Morten








More information about the TYPO3-english mailing list