Subscribe to this feed June 8, 2007

Typo3 CMS SEO (Part 3): Metatags

Part three of a ten part series: Typo3 SEO

One of the biggest challenges with maintaining a website – especially a large site – is keeping up with all the metadata (or data about data). Not exactly fun for humans – but for search engines, metadata can be a valuable source of information.

As search engines were getting started, the <meta name = “keywords”…> tag was used as a primary source of data to determine relevancy. However, today, search engines are much better at determining relevancy based on site content. Many SEO experts argue that meta keywords and descriptions are rarely used by search engines. However, most will tell you that at least providing unique meta descriptions for each page is a good thing to do – especially since the description could help compel users to click through to your site:

Either way, I’ll leave that to you to decide – and show you how the Typo3 CMS framework easily handles this metadata any way you want.

Enabling Meta Keyword and Meta Description Tags with Typo3

Out of the box, meta keywords and meta descriptions are easy to add to any page. For any page, select “Page Properties” and choose “Advanced” under type. Then fill in the keywords and description fields. Note: if you leave the field blank, the metatag will not be generated.

Then, simply drop this code in your setup to “activate” the META object: 

page.meta.keywords.field = keywords
page.meta.description.field = description

So, for the above page, and with the above setup, Typo3 uses a built-in META object generate the following HTML: 

<meta name=”keywords” content=”web design, web development, content
management, search engine marketing, web hosting.” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Our services include: web design,
web development, content management, search engine marketing, web 
hosting.” />

Setting Global Metatags – with Page-Specific Metatags

From an SEO perspective, it is better to have unique metatags to help search engines tell one page from another. However, if you wanted to specify a default setting for all pages, and also leave yourself the option of overriding the default, use this setup instead: 

page.meta.keywords = keyword 1, keyword 2...
page.meta.keywords.override.field = keywords
page.meta.description = your description here...
page.meta.description.override.field = description

Further Customizing Metatags with the headerData Object

Instead of using page.meta.[tag] to generate your tags, Typo3 also allows you to insert custom content (such as Javascript, meta-tags, CSS, etc) into the header section of the page with the headerData object. Here’s another setup example: 

# Meta Keywords
page.headerData.10 = TEXT
page.headerData.10.insertData=1
page.headerData.10.case=lower
page.headerData.10.wrap = <meta name ="keywords" content ="|">
page.headerData.10.value = Keyword 1, keyword 2
# Meta Description
page.headerData.20 = TEXT
page.headerData.20.insertData=1
page.headerData.20.wrap = <meta name ="description" content ="|">
page.headerData.20.value = Your description goes here…
# Meta Copyright
page.headerData.30 = TEXT
page.headerData.30.insertData=1
page.headerData.30.wrap = <meta name ="copyright" content ="|">
page.headerData.30.value = © 2007 Company Name

The above setup will produce: 

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keyword 1, keyword 2” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Your description goes here…” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”© 2007 Company Name” />

Next article in this series:

H Tags: Customizing your H1, H2, H(x) tags with Typo3

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