How to auto generate a unique meta description?
-
The site I am working on is a code nightmare for starters. I'm editing a file called layout that controls the section of each page. The programmer from a while back got unique titles by putting this piece of code in:
<title><?= $this->metaTag ?></title>
In all the different controllers and stuff I can see where the title is the name of the product plus review or something to that effect.
How do I do this for the meta description? Right now the meta description is static in the layout file, and so every page has an identical one. I was hoping there was a way to make the meta description automatically use the first 140 characters on the page or something. Something like this:
-
Perfect!
Glad to hear it's all fixed
-
This worked like a charm! The site is on something called Zend cart I think and I had to sort through several Controllers but eventually found all the metaTag stuff in there and added a metaDesc variable next to them, unique meta descriptions on every page! Thanks!
-
Hi Daniel,
The first thing you need to do is to find the definition of the container that “this” is built out of and then add an element called metaDescription.
This will create an empty string until you populate it elsewhere.
Now where you want metaDescription shown, you just use
<title><?= $this->metaDescription ?></title> (replace metaTag with metaDescription).
Next, you need to search your code for the place where metaTag is assigned and add an assignment for metaDescription which can be whatever you want it to be ie a substring etc.
Hope that helps,
Sha
-
I just did a large 5k page website with the same kind of auto generation, It worked very well. I'm not sure how your website is setup and if the content is all on the database but ours is and we just had to fill in some variables like this.
<title><?=ucfirst($ctar[county_name]);?> Jail, <?=$star[state_name];?> | Bail Bonds & Lawyer Resources</title>
Most likely you are looking for something like strip tags.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Page auto directing to /#/id0 but no 301 in place?
I'm a little perplexed and hope someone technically savvy can help. Wordpress site. Our page: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation Redirects to: www.curveball-media.co.uk/animation/#/id0 I cannot see any reason for this. No 301s, nothing.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | curveballmedia0 -
Sitemap: unique sitemap or different sitemaps by Country
Hi guys, i have a question about sitemaps. We are doing an international site, e.x. www.offers.com for landing page and www.offers.com/br for brazil, www.offers.com/it for italy, etc... i don't if we should do an unique sitemap for all countries or separate sitemaps by country, e.x.: unique sitemap: www.offers.com/sitemap.xml - including all sitemaps www.offers.com/br/sitemap.xml - sitemap for brazil market only. Thank you
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | thekiller990 -
Measure impact from new meta descriptions
Hi guys, I'm looking to implement new meta descriptions across a site and i want to measure the impact. So far I'm thinking of extracting the CTR data from GWT for the last 90 days to get the most accurate CTR averages for each URL. Then once the new meta descriptions have been implemented, compare the CTR with the old CTR averages accross URLs. Do you think this would be the most accurate way of measuring the impact? Cheers, Chris
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | jayoliverwright1 -
Meta refresh bad for SEO
Hi there, Some external developers have created a wishlist for a website that allows visitors to add products to a wishlist and then send an enquiry. Very similar set-up to a shopping basket really (without the payment option). However, this wishlist lives in a separate iframe and refreshes every 30 seconds to reflect any items visitors add to their wishlist. This refreshing is done with a meta refresh. I'm aware of the obvious usability issue that the visitor's product only appears after 30 seconds in their wishlist. However, are there also any SEO issues due to the refreshing of the iframe every 30 seconds? Please let me know, whether small or large issues.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Robbern0 -
Duplicate Meta Descriptions in Press Releases
We have a client that does multiple press releases a year. One issue we noticed is that every press release has the same meta description tag and the duplicates are starting to really add up. Unfortunately the client does not want to create specialized meta descriptions for new press releases due to legal restrictions (every new meta description must be reviewed). What should we do about this?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Using Meta Header vs Robots.txt
Hey Mozzers, I am working on a site that has search-friendly parameters for their faceted navigation, however this makes it difficult to identify the parameters in a robots.txt file. I know that using the robots.txt file is highly recommended and powerful, but I am not sure how to do this when facets are using common words such as sizes. For example, a filtered url may look like www.website.com/category/brand/small.html Brand and size are both facets. Brand is a great filter, and size is very relevant for shoppers, but many products include "small" in the url, so it is tough to isolate that filter in the robots.txt. (I hope that makes sense). I am able to identify problematic pages and edit the Meta Head so I can add on any page that is causing these duplicate issues. My question is, is this a good idea? I want bots to crawl the facets, but indexing all of the facets causes duplicate issues. Thoughts?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | evan890 -
Help with Effective Meta Description
Can someone give me a sample of an effective meta description tag? All of the best practice stuff I read doesn't talk about how to raise CTR. It seems to me that this is a neglected area of SEO, and we want to do this right. Obviously, we will need to test. For example, my main home page keyword is "IT Support" Things I might want to put in the tag: Free Network Assessments 100% Risk Free Trials "Relentless IT Support" (Major Theme) 30 Years of Experience (since 1984) Eliminate your IT Support Headaches Forever (Too long) Call to action? BTW, Thanks to everyone for your help. This is a great community. Solid advice from experts. Here's an example of what I would create Relentless IT Support Since 1984. Trust and Accountability. 100% Risk Free Trials. Contact us today for Free IT Assessment.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CsmBill0 -
How to enable crawling for dynamic generated search result pages?
I want to enable crawling facility for dynamic generated search result pages which are generating by Magento Solr search. You can view more about it by following URLs. http://code.google.com/p/magento-solr/ http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=bamboo+table+lamp
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | CommercePundit
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=ceramic+table+lamp
http://www.vistastores.com/catalogsearch/result/?q=green+patio+umbrella Right now, Google is not crawling search result page because, I have added following syntax to Robots.txt file. Disallow: /*?q= So, How do I enable crawling of search result pages with best SEO practice? If any other inputs in same direction so, it will help me more to get it done.0