Hi All
4SEO version 1.4 has just been released, and it's getting us closer to our goal of a full modern SEO tool for your Joomla site by adding images sitemaps. 4SEO was able to create sitemaps from day one, but images is a slightly more complex topic and we had it on our roadmap for the 4th major release of 4SEO (in about 4 months!).
Rather than a lengthy blog post, I have made a video showing you both 1.3 and 1.4 new features in action, so if you favor videos or text, please enjoy. If you prefer text, I have also included the full transcript below.
4SEO version 1.3 and 1.4 in 4 minutes video
Full transcript of 4SEO version 1.3 and 1.4 video
Hi there, Yannick speaking. We just released 4SEO version 1.4 and I'd like to outline quickly what's new in it. I'll also go even more quickly through version 1.3 from end of august because I did not have a chance to do a video about it at the time. So here we go, 4SEO 1.3 first:
Version 1.3 was mostly about improving support for common extensions. We started with K2 and Hikashop. 4SEO already handles K2 and Hikashop without any specific plugin but with dedicated support, it's even easier to get results and these results are even more accurate. Let's have a quick look at Hikashop for instance.
Prior to version 1.3, you could have Structured data for your Hikashop pages but you would have had to create a structured data rule for that. That was not difficult, here is an example but still, YOU had to do it. Now I can disable that Hikashop rule and just let 4SEO extract the proper data from Hikashop when needed. I get a more thorough set of data, without having to do anything, as you can see here.
Let's have a look at the structured data with SEOInfo:
Another addition in version 1.3 was support for Frequently-Asked-Question structured data. Adding structured data for your Frequently-Asked-Question pages is very important as it may allow them to stand out in search results. As usual, this is set with a 4SEO rule, and we have one here. There are several ways to automatically detect FAQ content in your pages, based on CSS properties, or on shortcodes you can add to your own content. Lastly you can also manually add FAQPage structured data yourself for any given page.
Now let's move on to the latest version, 1.4! It has many improvements but the big addition is support for Images sitemaps. Adding images to your sitemap is now enabled by default and it all works automatically as usual.
We have reworked a bit the Settings page for clarity after adding a few options for collecting Images. You now have 3 tabs to configure Sitemaps creation although really only the Images tab is new. You can enable/disable including images in your sitemap and you have a few settings to ensure you include only good images. For instance, you can set minimum image width or height, or you can directly exclude one or many images from the sitemap .
As an example we have excluded here all images in the icons directory because they are too small and have no SEO benefit so we do not want search engines to spend time indexing them. After the site has been analyzed again, 4SEO now shows you the number of images included in the sitemap, and this is how it looks:
Note that 4SEO not only includes the image URL but also when available in content, the caption and image title, and this helps search engines understand an image content.
That's it for now, there are many more new and updated things in these 2 versions, and you can find them all in our detailed changelog, in 4SEO documentation at weeblr.com
Hope this was useful, thanks for watching!
Now what?
Our roadmap has still plenty of things to add to 4SEO. We've managed to be on track so far and plan on releasing support for more 3rd-party extensions in the future of course. We are also continuously working on reliability and making sure 4SEO works fine on all the various servers and extensions combinations we encounter.
As usual, you should check out the complete 4SEO changelog for details of what we added, changed or fixed in version 1.4.0 and of course, to learn what's ahead, have a look at a the roadmap: there's plenty to come!
Cheers,
Yannick