Introduction
Your platform offers some Search Engine Optimization (SEO) features to help improve the ranking and presentation of public courses and learning plans in organic search results.
Specifically:
- Creation of a sitemap that allows search engines to crawl all the content in the public catalog
- For the platform home page: A rich link preview, with a title, thumbnail image and meta description text
- For courses and learning plans*: Redirects, meta descriptions, and user-friendly URL slugs
*These SEO options can be configured for all courses and learning plans but will only apply to the content included in publicly visible catalogs. For more information see the article on the public catalog.
Prerequisites
The SEO features described in this article are available with the e-commerce pack. Please contact your Docebo representative for information about how to obtain it.
Sitemap creation
First of all, a sitemap is created that allows search engines to crawl the courses and learning plans in the public catalog.
The sitemap urls are https://mydocebolms/sitemap and https://mydocebolms/sitemap.txt. A distinct sitemap will be generated for each extended enterprise client/domain, to take into account the different public catalogs that are configured in each one.
Note: When a search engine visits https://mydocebolms/sitemap, a sitemap is generated and cached for 12 hours. If a course or learning plan is added, updated, or removed from the catalog within this period, the changes may not be reflected in the sitemap until the cache expires, meaning newly added courses might not appear, and removed courses might still be listed.
Rich link preview for the platform home page
This setting lets you configure a title, description and thumbnail image that can be used to provide a rich link preview of your platform’s URL, for example when it appears in search results, or when it is pasted into a document, chat, or other app that supports rich link previews.
To configure the link preview:
- Select Admin menu > SETTINGS > Advanced settings > SEO settings.
- In the section Link preview for platform home page:
- Enter the Title and Description text that you want to appear in the preview.
- Click Upload file and select the thumbnail image to use in the preview.
- When you are finished click Save changes.
Server-side rendering
The platform generates a static HTML version of each course or learning plan page in the public catalog whenever a crawler requests it.
This static HTML page retains the same content as the original one, and includes a <title> tag with the course or learning plan title, along with a meta description that can be customized as described in the following chapters .
The title and meta description will appear in search engine results when users search for the course or learning plan.
SEO options for courses
To set the SEO options for a course, select Admin menu > E-LEARNING > Course management and then click on the desired course to open its configuration page.
In the Properties tab, the SEO settings let you configure:
- Meta description. A short summary text describing the course. This can affect how the course page URL is displayed in search results, as search engines may use the meta description as the snippet underneath the page title.
- Redirect URL: Here you can enter the URL of another course to which users should be redirected when they attempt to access this course. You might do this, for example, when a course has been unpublished or superseded by a newer one. In this way, people who still have the old link can be directed to the correct course.
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Course custom slug: A URL slug is the last part of a web address that serves as a unique identifier of the page. You can customize this part to obtain a course page URL that is more user-friendly and readable. For example, instead of :
https://my.platform.com/learn/courses/74/4995%20ilt→https://my.platform.com/learn/courses/74/marketing-ILT-course
A descriptive course slug may also help with search ranking.
SEO options for learning plans
In the case of learning plans, you can configure the same SEO option as those described for courses.
Select Admin menu > E-LEARNING > Learning plans and click on the desired learning plan to open its configuration page. Then in Properties tab > SEO settings, configure the options as described in the chapter SEO options for courses.
Bulk CSV upload of SEO settings
Instead of setting the Meta description, Redirect URLs or Custom slugs at the level of the individual course or learning plan, you can do so in bulk by uploading a CSV file.
To do this:
- Select Admin menu > SETTINGS > Advanced settings > SEO setting
- In the section Bulk upload redirect URLs, slugs, and meta descriptions click Download the sample CSV to download the example file showing the structure you should use.
- Edit the file, inserting for each course or learning plan the redirect URL, custom slug, and meta description that you want to use. You can leave empty (populate with the empty string “”) any field where you don’t want to specify anything. On any row that you include, only the ID is required.
- Click Upload CSV file and browse your computer to select the file you have prepared. Then click Next.
- In the next screen you will see a preview of the items that will be imported. Review this and click Next again to initiate the import.
A background job is created to update the properties of the courses and learning plans. When the update is complete you will see the values applied in the Properties > SEO settings tab of each course or learning plan.
Requirements for custom slugs
Each custom slug must be unique, it can consist of numbers, letters and the following special characters: - and _
Maximum character limit 255