Meta tags and SEO

The GovCMS distribution out-of-the-box provides a helpful set of tools to manage the appearance of your content in major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and many others. This is possible thanks to the Metatag module (https://www.drupal.org/project/metatag).

The Metatag module provides two areas to manage the metadata of your site:

1. Global Metatag administration area: This area is usually only accessible by Administrator users.

2. Content pages: Each content page allows you to manage the metadata for that page.

To understand how to manage content metadata, let’s conduct a simple search for “govcms training” in Google. One of the search results is https://www.govcms.gov.au/support/govcms-training. This is what the Google search result looks like:

The search result snippet consists of the following elements:

1. Page title

2. Site name

3. URL to the page

4. Search excerpt

As a Content Approver, you can manage all of these elements using the META TAGS pane in every content page.

When creating or editing content - the META TAGS pane is available on the right-hand side.

Figure: Meta Tags pane in GovCMS content

By default the main elements 1-4 will be pre-populated by GovCMS automatically when you create or update content.

In the screenshot above, the Page title field (5) populates elements 1 and 2 from the Google search result screenshot. The Description field (6) populates the search result excerpt (4). The URL alias (we learned about URL aliases in the previous topic) of the page is used as element 3 in the Google search result screenshot.

If you’d like to customise the search results display, you can manually update the information from the Meta Tags area.

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