Get your site ready for search engines

What you'll build

Pages with good titles, descriptions and share cards, a sitemap and robots.txt, links between the Thai and English versions, and structured data, then the site submitted to Google. Uses: SEO plugin, localization.

Add the plugin with real addresses

Set admin.siteUrl to the public address, and make generateURL return each page's real path, per locale. Everything below uses it.

import { seoPlugin } from '@easy-cms/plugin-seo'

export default defineConfig({
  admin: { siteUrl: 'https://example.com' },
  localization: { locales: ['th', 'en'], defaultLocale: 'th' },
  plugins: [
    seoPlugin({
      collections: ['posts'],
      globals: ['site'],
      generateTitle: ({ doc }) => (doc.title ? `${doc.title} | My Blog` : null),
      generateDescription: ({ doc }) => doc.excerpt ?? null,
      generateImage: ({ doc }) => doc.cover ?? null,
      generateURL: ({ doc, collection, locale }) =>
        collection === 'posts'
          ? doc.slug ? `/${locale}/posts/${doc.slug}` : null
          : `/${locale}`,
    }),
  ],
})

Create a migration for the new fields: npx easy-cms migrate:create seo.

Metadata on every page

In each page that shows a document, use seoMeta() with the same address. type: 'article' for posts adds the publish date and BlogPosting data. See On your pages for Nuxt and Next.js.

const seo = seoMeta(post, {
  config,
  locale,
  url: (p, l) => `/${l}/posts/${p.slug}`,
  type: 'article',
})

Put siteJsonLd({ name, url, logo }) in the layout once, so search engines know who publishes the site.

Sitemap and robots.txt

Add the two routes from Sitemap and robots.txt. Then check:

curl https://example.com/robots.txt
curl https://example.com/sitemap.xml

The sitemap should list your published posts in both languages, each with xhtml:link lines to the other. Drafts and pages marked Hide from search engines are not in it.

Check a page

1. Open a post and view its source: <title>, <meta name="description">, og:* tags, <link rel="canonical">, and <link rel="alternate" hreflang="…"> for each language.
2. Paste its address into Google's Rich Results Test to check the structured data.
3. Share it in a chat app to see the card with the share image.

Tell Google

1. Add the site in Google Search Console and verify it.
2. Under Sitemaps, submit https://example.com/sitemap.xml.
3. Use URL inspection on a new post to ask for it to be crawled.

Search Console then shows which pages are indexed, and why others are not.

Staging sites

A staging copy should stay out of search. Turn it off in robots.txt with your own variable (not NODE_ENV, which is production on staging too):

robotsTxt({ config, disallowAll: process.env.SITE_ENV !== 'production' })