Something that we've been seeing more of our clients requesting is SEO support for their sites. These clients often have 3rd party companies who are providing the service and need a simple way to edit the page title, header 1, keywords and meta description.

Currently, we have to turn on support for meta tags, hide the page layout title (since it's duplicated in the title and header) and modify the style design to accomodate the above needs. This seems like more effort than should be necessary and is non-obvious for WebGUI new-comers.

I'd like to see the template redesign take these issues into account and push for better support through RFE's to improve the Page Layout asset.

William

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Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

If I understand correctly, this has to do mostly with the asset and the only thing that might need to be modified in the templates is where exactly the headers are. Can you be more specific; give an example what we could do with the template?

Also: you are talking about the page layout, but wouldn't you need those options for assets in wobject focus?

Rogier,

You bring up some good points. First let me say that I'm far more concerned with page layouts than with wobjects. Let's consider those edge cases. Furthermore, an office discussion yesterday led us to think that we might be able to use the new keywords field and the synopsis field. Unfortunately, my testing is showing that these variables are not available when WebGUI processes the Style Template so we would need to submit RFE's to modify that behavior.

Additionally, while reviewing the default Style 02 template,  I noticed that the title tag is showing up after the head.tags are injected. I'd suggest that the title tag comes before the head.tags template variable. I'd expect the page title to be more important than extra headers applied via an asset.

Regarding your idea of an SEO console, I concur that it'd be great to have a global setting for this info that could then be overridden on a per-page basis. I've submitted an RFE for this feature. Please comment or add karma.

William

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Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

We wanted to put the head.tags first, because then the charset meta tag is at the top, which is required for us and good practice. Are you sure that order is important for seo in the case of the title tag?

No, I'm not sure but the general rule of thumb is the higher the keywords are on the page, the more relevance they are given. I'd go for what W3C suggests then let individuals tweak to their own needs/desires.

William

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Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com

Rogier,

We've discovered another reason these elements need to be moved from core WebGUI libraries and out into the templates.

By putting head.tags first, any custom css that is added on a per-page basis will be overridden by the global css files. This is the opposite behavior to what is expected when applying cascading styles.

Yes, good point.

Rogier | United Knowledge
www.unitedknowledge.nl · www.webgui-help.nl

The RFE for SEO has had quite a bit of activity today. In the process, I discovered that the keywords and synopsis are being injected into pages as meta tags already (did anyone else know this was the default behavior?). We also identified a bug whereby the synopsis is not being output.

Hopefully JT will approve the RFE for 7.6 and give us more control of where these elements get placed into the templates. There are some issues with the current behavior that need to be addressed. Please post your ideas to the RFE directly if you have ideas or issues with my suggestions.

Furthermore, JT asked if we should create an RFE to pull all head tags out of WebGUI code and put them into the style templates. This would give template editors more control of the output which I'm strongly in favor of. I think code-generated HTML is evil. I'm interested in hearing what others think.

What impact would this have on migrating an existing site to the next version of WebGUI? I think we could find a way to have the upgrade script inject the tags into the style templates.

William

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Knowmad Technologies
http://www.knowmad.com