CMS Made Simple Forums

I am working on a site which has a LOT of SEO issues - mainly with the title tags, descriptions, and alt tags.

It appears that CMSMS is configured to use a global setting for these in page defaults? If so this causes all the pages to have the same title and description.

What is the proper way to utilize title tags, meta descriptions and such in CSSMS for my pages so they are not all the same?

The {title} tag is using the info from the 'page title' box which is used in the default templates in the <title>{title} - {sitename}</title> which will show in the browser title bar they are also used in the page above the default content box <h2>{title}</h2>...

The page default metadata box is for general site metadata, if you want descriptions/keywords for each page use the page specific metadata box, remember to use only keywords that are actually on the page...

Content is still king when it comes to SEO...

Thank you so much.

Just to be sure I understand correctly, I should REMOVE the global metadata to use the page specific metadata?

In other words user either the page defaults, or page specific but not both correct?

earcandy wrote:Just to be sure I understand correctly, I should REMOVE the global metadata to use the page specific metadata?

Nope. If by "global metadata" you mean the {metadata}, not at all, unless you use a third party module or plugin, or customize the code somehow.

Help for the metadata tag

What does this do?

Displays the metadata for this page. Both global metdata from the global settings page and metadata for each page will be shown.

How do I use it?

Just insert the tag into your template like: {metadata}

Thank you.

So I guess with CMSMS we just ignore all the SEO errors about duplicate title tags, duplicate H1's etc etc?

Example:

My Page specific metadata:

<meta name="title" content="California School of Law Online Law School">

Yet the title appears to Google as:

Home :: California School of Law :: California School of Law Online Law School

With the warning:

Your title tag is more than 71 characters

I see this in the template also:
<title>{if $page_name !='home'}{title} - {/if}{sitename}</title>


Driving me mad trying to figure out how to correct this.

earcandy wrote:So I guess with CMSMS we just ignore all the SEO errors about duplicate title tags, duplicate H1's etc etc?

No. If you search the forums you'll find a lot of posts about canonical urls, and how to use them in CMSMS and benefit from these in terms of SEO.
Title tags don't have to be duplicates and, if they are, you must be doing something wrong. You can compose, through Smarty logic, unique titles for just about any module that produces content (again search the forum and see the News module sample templates).
About duplicate H1's... that's a bit controversial as there was never a good reason for that tag being used for SEO purposes, and with HTML5, it won't even be a factor anymore: do a web wide search about that and you'll see what I mean.

Dr.CSS wrote:Content is still king when it comes to SEO...

That's the main thing to take into consideration, even when doing SEO optimization: the rest are only techniques to maximize the content value in terms of what search engine algorithms use to compute a page value.
As an example, it doesn't really matter how many links can be used to reach a certain page in a site: the canonical url will be the one the Search Engine will register as the only valid one, and that will have to be the one that you will have to use in all your internal links.

Might give some more info http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/viewtopic.php?t=36912