Magic HTTP response codes
SEO Toolbox automatically responds with a Page Moved Permanently (301) when pages are moved or renamed, or a Page Deleted (410) when pages are deleted
A vital factor for good page ranking is incoming links. High ranking in search results means more visitors and better exposure of website content and your organization's trademark(s). A broken link Page Not Found (404), signals that your website is not relevant and updated, which quickly leads to worse page ranking.
SEO Toolbox automatically creates redirects (301) when an editor moves or renames a page, and Page Deleted (410) when a page is deleted, which provides stable and safe ranking with all search engines.
Magic sitemap
SEO Toolbox automatically generates a sitemap on-the-fly to help search engine crawlers index your website properly
A search engine crawler crawls your website to find your resources. However, a crawler is starved for time. If your site is complex, not all pages may be indexed. With a sitemap you help a crawler to index relevant resources at your website. A sitemap also hints at how often resources are updated and may need to be reindexed by crawlers.
SEO Toolbox automatically generates a sitemap for your website on-the-fly, meaning the sitemap is up-to-date the very millisecond a search engine crawler explores your website.
Magic hreflang for multi-lingual websites
SEO Toolbox automatically inserts correct hreflang attributes in page headers for multi-lingual pages, which satisfies search engine crawlers for language correctness
A website with pages translated into other languages needs to define a <link rel="alternate" hreflang="x" /> for each language and country variant (like en-gb and en-us). They need to be placed in a page's <head> section for a search engine to show relevant content in search results for different parts of the world.
Common mistake #1, Missing cross links: If page A links to page B, page B must also link to page A. If not, a search engine crawler may decide to ignore all hreflang attributes, or misinterpret them. So, ALL variants of a page need to link to each other. After working with just a few multi-lingual pages, you will quickly realize you need a tool to help you get page variant links right automatically.
SEO Toolbox automatically inserts hreflang tags in multi-lingual page headers, making sure search engine crawlers pick up your multi-lingual pages correctly for best possible world-wide resource indexing.
Avoid duplicate URLs
Map a page's friendly URLs to a single canonical URL
Optimizely(Episerver) creates several ("friendly") URLs for each page, providing as many ways to your website content as possible. However, Google and other search engines regard each URL an unique page. So, page ranking for a specific page is distributed between all its friendly URLs, which gives your website lower ranking in total. You have to fix that if you want high page ranking!
SEO Toolbox solves the problem with minimal work for Optimizely(Episerver) Editors. Pick one page URL as the canonical URL in the SEO Toolbox editor widget, to give that URL all page rank points. Canonical URLs get higher ranking, which means your website gets higher ranking in total.
Keep SEO ranking after site rebuild
Manage old URLs with bulk XML file upload or RegEx
Most websites build valuable SEO ranking over time. Avoid loosing it when you rebuild the website or change CMS! Make sure your visitors' old bookmarks continue working to avoid visitors who can no longer find their favorite pages. And above all, make sure the website keeps its relevance and ranking with search engines.
With SEO Toolbox an Optimizely(Episerver) Admin can edit redirects (301, 302) manually, export/import URLs in XML format, import URLs from Google Search Console, and define powerful redirect rules with RegEx. SEO Toolbox is more flexible and robust than the usual .Net C# hack to retrain crawlers for your 100 or so most valuable URLs after a website rebuild.
Define custom 404s and 410s
Use multiple custom 404s and 410s to push for other relevant content or lead visitors to other parts of your website
Let's say you have a commerce website, selling toys. Using Google Search Console you discover that visitors look for plastic cars, while you only have metal cars. Wouldn't it be nice to have a specific 404 for any /toys/cars/plastic/ URL to explain you don't have plastic cars, but these "abc" very fine metal cars instead? If you had plastic cars previously, and have deleted those pages… You could define a custom 410 for any /toys/cars/plastic/ URL to explain how much better your metal cars are?
Important! Define 410s for deleted campaign or coupon redeem pages, to avoid having late customers confused or angry!!!
With SEO Toolbox an Optimizely(Episerver) Admin can define custom 404s and 410s for parts of the website. However, this requires code to actually render custom 404s and 410s. Refer to SEO Toolbox Manual for further information.
Note: SEO Toolbox does NOT manage your global 404!