1902 SEO+ FAQs and guides

1902 SEO plus is a free to use Umbraco package developed by 1902 Software to help Umbraco website owners or managers to easily manage your site’s technical SEO settings.

You can download 1902 SEO+ here.

How it works

1902 SEO plus makes your SEO management easier by taking care of the technical stuff in the background while you focus on your content. Instead of manually coding the SEO tags to your website, all you have to do is input some text, choose from some dropdowns, and check some boxes.

You will also get actionable insights and recommendations on improving your site’s performance and technical SEO that are based on known best practices.

Installation

1902 SEO plus needs to scan all pages in your website in order to copy and import any existing SEO settings that you may have. This is done so that you don’t need to manually update all your pages, which on a big website can be a daunting task.

The scanning process will copy and import your existing SEO tags such as titles, meta descriptions, meta robots, canonical, Twitter card details, open graph details, structured data, etc.

If you happen to have duplicate tags (e.g., a page may have a title tag inserted by your current SEO package and another title tag that is hardcoded), 1902 SEO plus will only copy the first instance of the tag that it has encountered.

The process will run in the background and may take a while depending on the number of pages that you have.

Once you are completely sure that you have removed all existing tags, you can now enable 1902 SEO plus. When you enable the package, the scanner will run again as a precautionary measure to check that there really are no existing tags left.

1902 SEO plus is already enabled at this point, which means that the imported SEO tags from your site will already be inserted (i.e., no need to worry that search engines may crawl your site and find nothing because you have removed your tags. Your settings will be back in place once you have enabled the package, even while the scanner is running again.)

IMPORTANT: The scanning process may take a while, so we strongly advise that you enable 1902 SEO plus immediately after you have removed your tags. While you can rescan your website (i.e., to make sure that you haven’t missed removing a single tag) without enabling the package, this might result to a scenario where search engine crawlers visit your site while you have no SEO tags in place (i.e., because the old SEO plugin and/or hardcoded tags have been removed, and 1902 SEO plus is not yet enabled). This can affect your ranking in search results. So make sure to enable 1902 SEO plus as soon as you remove your existing SEO tags.

Yes. You have the option to rescan your pages any time after the initial scanning. When you enable the package, it will automatically rescan your site.

After the package is enabled and even while you are already using 1902 SEO plus, you can always rescan your pages through the dashboard.

A downloadable summary report will always be available after each scanning process.

The short answer is: to avoid duplicate tags.

But why would there be duplicate tags, and how exactly does it affect your SEO? Here’s the long answer:

1902 SEO+ helps you easily manage your site’s technical SEO by letting you simply enter text or upload images while it takes care of the code in the background. Upon installation of the package, 1902 SEO+ will scan your website for existing SEO tags (if you have any) and save it so that you don’t need to start over and reenter everything. Once enabled, 1902 SEO+ will then insert its own SEO tags into your website’s code.

If you are using the package on a brand new site or a website where you haven’t done any search optimization before, then there won’t be any chances of having duplicate tags. However, if you’re already doing SEO on your site (or have done so in the past)—whether through another package or through a custom function—well, this is where the duplicate tags issue arises.

In itself, duplicate tags are not much of a problem if you discount the fact that it adds (harmless) clutter to your site’s HTML. After all, since the package simply scanned and saved your existing values, the duplicate tags will be just that—duplicates. It’s only when you start editing text, changing images, or updating any SEO settings through the package that it becomes an issue—as while the tags that 1902 SEO+ is responsible for will be updated, the old tags that are still on your site won’t be.

This is then what happens: you get duplicate tags with different values—one is current and the other is not, but search engines will not be able to tell which is which, and might choose to honor the outdated one for your site’s ranking or for how it appears on search results.

So let’s say you didn’t remove existing tags on your site and enabled 1902 SEO+. Before installing the package, you have a page that was set to noindex—that is, this page will not be indexed by search engines and therefore will not show up in search results. One day, you decided to update this page and set it to be indexed through your settings in 1902 SEO+; you’re now ready for this page to be found by potential site visitors in search results. However, when search engines crawled your site, they found two conflicting meta robot tags and chose to respect the noindex tag instead. No matter how you then try to optimize your page for ranking, it’s seen by search engine crawlers as a page not to be indexed and therefore will never be found by your target visitors in search results.

This may be one of the extreme examples of the risk that comes with having duplicate tags, but you get the picture: removing existing tags is absolutely necessary to avoid these conflicts in the future.

Although you can still use 1902 SEO+ without doing this, we’ll make sure to warn you before you enable the package. You also have the option to rescan your pages even after enabling the package to double check that there are no more duplicate tags within your site before you proceed to use 1902 SEO+.

After you have removed your hard coded SEO tags (if there are any), it’s time to insert the partial view for 1902 SEO+.

You need to add the partial view in your Header Tag, This is mostly located on your master template.

Once you have added 1902 SEO+ partial view in your master template, click the ‘Save’ button, and you’re all set!

Using the package

1902 SEO plus cross-checks your site with known SEO best practices and Google’s own recommendations.

In the ‘Summary’ section of your page’s 1902 SEO plus tab, you can see insights and suggestions grouped into three categories: Template, Focus keywords, and Performance.

Important issues are marked in red; suggestions for improvement are in yellow; while good SEO practices are in green. Keep in mind that all these are simply recommendations and therefore some may not be applicable to your pages depending on the situation.

(For example, we may warn you that your site is set to noindex, nofollow because site owners usually want their pages to be indexed by search engines; but you may have deliberately set your page that way because you don’t want it to appear on search results.)

It is still completely up to you to decide which of the issues we flagged are worth paying attention to, and this section only serves to call your attention to aspects of your SEO that you may want to improve.

Here is a breakdown on how each aspect under these categories are reviewed:

Template

Meta Robot – checks the meta robots tag on your page (i.e., the part where you set index/noindex and follow/nofollow links).

AMP page – checks whether your page is a valid AMP page.

Open Graph (Open Graph, Twitter) - checks the Open Graph settings of your page; for the Title and Description, 1902 SEO plus also checks the length and provides recommendations based on minimum and maximum recommended lengths.

Title – checks the title tag for your page and provides recommendations based on minimum and maximum recommended lengths.

Meta Description - checks the meta description tag for your page and provides recommendations based on minimum and maximum recommended lengths.

Broken Links – checks all the links within your page and lets you know if any of them are broken.

Hreflang – checks the hreflang tag of your page.

Image Alt – checks all the images within your page and lets you know of any images with no alternate text.

Canonical URL – checks if you have set a canonical URL for your page.

Focus keyword

You can select a single focus keyword from the dropdown to see insights and recommendations for your content based on the selected keyword.

1902 SEO plus checks:

• If your focus keyword can be found on your (1) page title, (2) meta description, (3) page URL, and (4) page content.
• How many times your focus keyword was found in your content (keyword density), and compares it against the maximum recommended keyword density.
• If your focus keyword was also used for a different page within your site, to avoid keyword cannibalism.

Performance

Additional calls – checks the total calls count of your page against the maximum recommended count.

CSS and JS minification – checks whether your CSS and JS files are minified.

GZIP compression – checks whether GZIP compression is enabled or disabled.

HTML size – checks the size of your HTML against the recommended size.

Image size – checks the size of your images against the recommended size.