Page Titles and Meta Tags
As most users access a web site through a search engine, raising your web site up the rankings is vital for drawing visitors to your site. This article describes what
page titles and
meta tags are, and how these can be customised to display your site within search engines as you require.
Page Titles
The
Page Title appears in the browser's title bar and is used by search engines such as Google for indexing, and in their search results. Here are some key points about page titles:
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Hubb's page titles are automatically configured to display your site and entity name. e.g.site name : article title. This means the site name is specific to the page being viewed and should therefore be a good description of the web page content. There may be times however when you wish to overwrite the default page title to add more specific information, whether that be your industry, city, name or other items that you feel would help people find you.
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Google truncates pages titles that are longer than 66 characters. This means you should attempt to keep your page titles to be within this limit. Remember the standard page title length will be your site name plus the title of the particular section, or article, being viewed.
Meta Tags
Meta tags are inserted into your web pages to provide additional information about the page content. This is often used by search engines in the listing of your web site. Each tag consists of a 'name' and 'contents'.
Keywords Tag
The keywords tag was created to list the words that make up the key content of a webpage. This was often exploited by webmasters in the past, who added popular search terms that weren't associated with the content of their web site, in order to raise them up the search engine rankings. Keywords are now largely ignored by search engines e.g.Google, but some search engines however e.g.Yahoo, say they still support the tag so there's no harm in adding it.
Description Tag
Unlike the keywords attribute, the description attribute is supported by most major search engines. The description attribute provides a concise explanation of a Web page's content. This allows the Web page authors to give a more meaningful description for listings than might be displayed if the search engine was unable to automatically create its own description, based on the page content. The description is often, but not always, displayed on search engine results pages, so it can affect click-through rates. Here are some key points to consider regarding the description tag:
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Almost all search engines recommend it to be shorter than 200 characters of plain text, and may actually only display the first 150 characters.
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The description tag is your primary sales copy for people to read as it's what will often be displayed in search engines. make sure then is succinctly describes your content is a eye catching way.
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Industry commentators have suggested that major search engines also consider keywords located in the description attribute when ranking pages, so try to include key search terms that you'd want to be displayed under.
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Although your general description tag can be used throughout your site it may be useful to write specific desription tags for key pages. For example if you offer several specific services you'd probably want to have a completely different description tag on each of your service pages.
Editing Page Titles and Meta Tags
Editing Page Titles and Meta Tags globally across your site
You can change the page title or meta tags across all the pages on your site as follows:
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Select the Settings icon, from the left hand navigation within the Web Office.
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Next select the Page Titles and Meta Tags option, located under the 'General' category, from the left-hand navigation pane.
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Select the entity you wish to change on the left i.e. article, group, shop category or shop item. The entity describes the type of page, so changing the 'group' entity will modify the page title for all the group homepages, which are the pages that are accessed when someone selects an option from the site navigation menu.
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Once the appropriate entity is selected you can then change the Page title and Meta Tags as follows:
The page title can be modified by either adding free text to the page title edit box, or you can add other information e.g.organisation name, from the Merge fields area on the right-hand side by first selecting the relevant field and then clicking the add button.
To add a new meta tag select Add new meta tag and enter the name of the meta tag e.g.Description, in the relevant box and the content of that tag within the the content area, and select the OK button to add the new tag (you may need to scroll to locate the OK button).
To edit an existing meta tag select the
icon next to the relevant tag.
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Once you have setup the page title and meta tags required you can select another entity to modify its title. Once all the titles have been set correctly click the Save button, in the top-right corner, to commit your changes.
Editing Title or Meta Tags for a specific page
Sometimes you may want to overwrite the page title or meta tags of a specific group or article. This can be achieved as follows:
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To edit the page title, or meta tags, for a specific group folder or article select the Site Manager tab in the Web Office. To edit the page title for shop content select the Shop tab.
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Select the specific piece of content that you wish to edit the page title for e.g.an article.
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You can then edit the following:
To edit the page title or meta tags for a group, or all the articles in the group, click the cog icon and then the Tasks button and select Edit the page title and meta tags for groupname. The page will then refresh
to display an interface to change the page title and meta tags for the group, or for all the articles in the group. Selecting the Override settings option will allow you to specify the settings.
To edit the page title or meta tags for a specific article select the properties tab and then click on the 'Page Titles and Meta-Tags' section where the page title or meta data can be modified.
Editing this information for the shop is similar to above. To edit the shop category and items, first select it and then click the cog icon and then the Tasks button and select 'edit the page title and meta tags for category' . To override the Title and Meta-tags select the override radio buttons.
Changing your site's page titles or meta tags won't display immediately in search engines. Search engines take several weeks normally to re-index your site and won't normally have a huge impact on the ranking of your site in search engines, especially as the default page titles are already useful to search engines.