SEO Basics for Evolution CMS: Titles, WWW Canonicalization, Sitemaps, and 404s

Many SEO problems on Evolution CMS sites do not come from missing advanced tooling. They come from basic things that were never set up properly: weak titles, duplicate hostnames, no sitemap strategy, and unhelpful error pages.

Core lessons from the article

• use pagetitle for search-facing titles and menutitle for shorter navigation labels
• pick one canonical hostname variant — with or without www — and redirect the other
• generate XML and HTML sitemaps intentionally
• treat the 404 page as part of the SEO layer, not an afterthought

Why pagetitle and menutitle should differ

A short navigation label such as “News” can coexist with a more useful search-facing title such as “Tourism News”. Evolution CMS gives you both fields, so there is no reason to force one job onto a single value.

Canonical host choice

Whether you prefer the site with www or without it matters less than being consistent. The important part is avoiding duplicate host versions and consolidating link signals through a redirect policy.

Why this still matters

Even in modern builds, these fundamentals are still worth checking. Advanced SEO work rarely helps if the site still leaks duplicates, wastes title fields, or fails to expose a coherent crawl structure.