The titles on my item detail pages are apartment building names. They are very important to SEO, as people might search for an apartment name and I would want that page to show up in the search engine.
I found this link. Does this mean I should rename a bunch of columns in my airtable base? Should this be for the list table or the item detail page?
Hi @aar0n - you could rename columns, but I think it’s easier and more flexible to use a formula for the SEO:Title column - that lets you do things like include your site name in the window title.
As for handling in an automated way: I am guessing you mean that there should be default values for these fields if they are not present in the table? I agree that the default behavior should be really clear, and right now the documentation isn’t so clear about it.
SEO:Index does not say what the behavior will be if omitted from the table. One can hope that it will be indexed and that this field mainly exists to prevent certain pages from being indexed and that the default is true, but I don’t know for sure.
SEO:Slug does have a default value that is generated automatically if the field is omitted from the table.
SEO:Title does not seem to have a default behavior if omitted. In my testing I observed that the <title> element is only present in the page if this field is present in the table. I’m not sure what the reason for this is.
SEO:Description does not have a default, which to me seems reasonable until Softr adds AI functionality to summarize pages. (When is that coming?!)
I hope this is helpful, and if I have misunderstood what you were getting at by “in an automated way” then I apologize and welcome clarification!
Are you suggesting I create new columns? I suppose a new column is needed for description. But I am unsure how to align my existing set up, one that has many dependencies, to the suggested column headers with SEO:Prefix.
Can’t I just create new columns that are formulas that reference the original columns? Like @dcoletta suggests? I don’t understand the linking.
Do I need to create a new table somewhere? How does that fit into the the SEO Setting for the specific page? Why is this config not in the list block where I can assign columns?
@artur A guide or a video would be really helpful as the documentation could be more descriptive.
I do think there is an opportunity to make SEO really simple for your users since it is a complicated thing, but it isn’t there yet. See screenshot below, im quite confused between what is on the left and what the documentation says.
Yes, it can be as simple as adding some new formula columns called SEO:Index, SEO:Slug, SEO:Title, and SEO:Description. That is how I do it! Let me know if you need help with writing those formulas.
You don’t need to use the more sophisticated approach Artur is suggesting. No new tables.
And yes, a step by step video that explains and demonstrates all the SEO-related features is a great idea.
You don’t need to do anything with the page’s SEO settings, because for a page with a list details block on it, the database fields are going to override it anyway.
Your values look ok except I would recommend changing SEO:Slug to a formula such as this: REGEX_REPLACE(LOWER(SEO:Title), "[\\W_]", "-"). This will result in a slug that is all lower case and uses dashes between words.
I am paying for an SEO audit to get some advice and the individual said I only have 7 pages, which leads me to believe my 100s of item detail pages are not detected by Google. Why / How is this possible?