CMS: Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

To modify the Meta data used by search engines click on the SEO tab of the page you are working on.  The resulting page will look like this.

Page Title

The page title is one of the most important elements on your page for search engines.  This is the subject of the page.  Any keyword phrases you put in the title must also be in the content of the page or they will be ignored.  The total length of your title should not exceed 50 characters.  Anything longer will be cut off in the search results display.

Keywords

The keywords field is a depreciated meta field that modern search engines no longer use.  However if you want you can still enter your keywords here for older search engines.

Description

The description text you enter here will most likely be used in the search results of seach engines (but not allways).  This text should give an honest summary of the page including the targetted phrases of the page.  The total length should not exceed 150 characters

Custom Meta Tags

Here you can enter any custom meta tag that you need.  The most common example is placing a verification tag here when creating a google analytics account.

Targetted Phrases

This is for a future feature that will allow you to analyze the the final output of the page and provide you with infomation related to your targetted goals of the page.  Enter the keywords that you feel this page is targeting here.

Google Search Results & Your Meta Data

Below is a search results page from google showing where this meta data will potentially be displayed in the search results.

Important Note: Search engines many times will not use your title or description in the search results based on their analysis of the page.  You have no control over this.  Some times they will take a snippet of text from the page, or use the anchor text of incoming pages for the page title.  For the description, it is common for them to use snippets of text from the page based on what the user searched for.

SEO Settings

There are various settings you can set to influcnece how this page is handled by the search engines.  Click on the Settings menu to see the following page.

Exclude from Search

This setting when checked will add a NoIndex meta tag to the page telling the search engines not to index this page.  Important Note: It you turn on this setting for a base page for your blog, news articles, ecommerce, etc, then all resulting pages of that module will be excluded.

No Follow Link for Search Engines

This setting will add the "nofollow" attribute to all places that this page appears automatically created site menus.  Important Note: This will only affect where this page appears in system menus.  It will not affect any place you create a manual link inside  content.

No Caching

This setting when checked will add a noarchive meta tag to the page telling search engines not to cache a copy of this page.  Important Note: It you turn on this setting for a base page for your blog, news articles, ecommerce, etc, then all resulting pages of that module will be cached.