Meta tags and SEO

The GovCMS distribution provides a helpful set of tools to manage the appearance of your content in major search engines such as Google, Bing, Yahoo and others. This functionality is provided by 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: The metadata for can be managed at the page level for all content or pages.

To understand how to manage content metadata, perform a simple search for “Drupal metatag” in Google. The first search result is https://www.drupal.org/project/metatag.

The search result snippet consists of the following elements:

1. URL to the page

2. Page title

3. Site name

4. Search excerpt

Image of search results

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 of the page in an expandable section.

Showing Metatag section in the content edit screen

By default the main elements are pre-populated by GovCMS automatically when you create or update content. These elements are populated using tokens. (Tokens are covered in the next lesson).

In the screenshot above, the Page title field populates elements 1 and 2 from the Google search result screenshot. The Description field (6) populates the search result excerpt (4). The URL alias of the page (covered in Unit 7) is used as element 3 in the Google search result screenshot.

Search results display can be customised by manually updating the information in the Meta Tags area.