Creating Dynamic Meta Information

[Charlesn]

Hello All,

A client of ours has brought in an SEO company to help with their (already quite good) search engine traffic. The company want to insert dynamic Meta information into each product to automatically fill in specific information when the crawlers visit the site. For example:

<meta name=”description” content=”Order <productname> from The Travelling Souk today- large range of <productname>’s available with next day delivery and personalised gift wrapping for <productname> available.” />

The <productname> would then reference the Actinic product name to generate the dynamic response.

Anyone have any ideas if this is possible? My initial thought is probably not as they way Actinic handles Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords would prevent this from being an option. I guess it would need to be on each page as part of the template, rather than using Actinic to fill in this information when the website is published? Can't see there being a way of overriding this though?

As always I'd be interested to hear your opinions.

Thanks
Charlie

[jont]

Anyone have any ideas if this is possible?

Have you tried it yourself to see what happens?

[Charlesn]

Actually, no. But thats primarily because I think it'll just put <productname> exactly as it is entered into the meta description field in Actinic. I'm reluctant to experiment with this too much for fear of damaging the SEO work thats been done on the site to date. Hence wanting to dip my toe into the waters of opinion to even ask if this might vaguely work!

In the spirit of endeavor I might try this on a product next week and upload in test mode to see what happens. Can't imagine I'll get lucky and find this just works though.

Charlie

[leehack]

I think it would be the other way and would work but you'd probably need some php involved and might get the variable used in a wrong area error message. There have been some posts on here about doing these areas automatically and i'm pretty sure that fairly recently a solution was provided to something very similar. Maybe worth a trawl if you hear nothing. If nothing else, add the variable and do an offline preview of that page, checking the underlying code to see what's produced.

[NormanRouxel]

In pseudo code rather than Actinicspeak

if Pagetype == 'Section' { block type="productList" { <productname> } }

will output the product name(s) if the page contains products and nothing if it doesn't.

[grantglendinnin]

If this is going site-wide then you may as well put:

<meta name=”description” content=”<productname>” />

All the other jargon that is duplicated on every page will have very little/no effect whatsoever. A bit of further thinking is required I think

[RuralWeb]

Another seo scam IMO

[Buzby]

We use a singe product per page but not in the normal sense.

We use the extended info page with all the navigation etc included.

In order to make every page different we use this method for the page name, meta description and keyword.

Mal, I don't understand why this would be a SEO scam as every page is different and titles and keywords are relevant to the product. I would appreciate your views.

If you look at this page http://www.qualitysilver.co.uk/acata...ing-TURM5.html and view the source code it will show as

<TITLE>Tungsten Carbide 5mm Court Ring - TURM5</TITLE>

<meta name="keywords" content="Tungsten,Carbide,5mm,Court,Ring,Tungsten Carbide 5mm Court Ring,TURM5">

<meta name="description" content="Tungsten Carbide 5mm Court Ring. A traditional... etc etc

The above is all generated from the code in the layout just using the product name and reference.

I have uploaded an image of what my layout looks like.

[Mike Hughes]

If this is going site-wide then you may as well put:

<meta name=”description” content=”<productname>” />

All the other jargon that is duplicated on every page will have very little/no effect whatsoever. A bit of further thinking is required I think

The meta description is what the search engines typically display in the results pages. The idea of the 'jargon' isn't necessarily to boost the rankings but rather to encourage people to click through to the site.

Mike

[grantglendinnin]

The meta description is what the search engines typically display in the results pages. The idea of the 'jargon' isn't necessarily to boost the rankings but rather to encourage people to click through to the site.

Mike

And with Google ever-more grouping page rankings, you'd get the first and second result showing two of your pages using almost identical title's and meta tags. Not a good idea IMO. Sounds like scam, no point wasting money for this type of SEO when you could spend some time doing this yourself to a much greater effect.

[Mike Hughes]

Sounds like scam, no point wasting money for this type of SEO when you could spend some time doing this yourself to a much greater effect.

See, I knew you understood this stuff. Sorry, I must have missed the tone of your earlire post (note to self: Don't forget to look for sarcasm in replies).

I guess the best way would be to have informative text that matches the purpose of the page and the mindset of the searcher. i.e. Product pages should tend to appear in the results for people who are looking to buy or are after detailed product info. Section pages are more for people looking to choose between several options.

If the website is properly structured, there really shouldn't be two product pages appearing in the results in the same place.

Mike

[AndyBorrett]

I have recently done a similar thing on our site www.seriouslysilver.co.uk

If you go to one of the products and look at the source code you can see.

I used the product description and some UDVs to make the meta description.

Have a look at this thread for all the info:-

http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=40987

[Charlesn]

I don't think it's going to be quite as simple as I'd first hoped. A little trial and error this afternoon appears to show that it just includes <productname> in the meta description and not the actual product name.

I've also tried <actinic:variable name="SectionName" /> (which due to my single product per section layout is the same) but this adds everything after the "/>" into the page layout and not as part of the meta description.

I've found another thread: http://community.actinic.com/showthread.php?t=40987 (as mentioned by Andy, above) which seems to be along the same lines, but this is only includes the variable and not the other information suggested by my clients SEO company.

Think some further head scratching and experimentation is required...

[NormanRouxel]

Charles

If you're using my post #5 as a basis then note that it not Actinic code. It's just a brief way of indicating what you have to do.

Best see the Starter Guide tutorials on using Variables and creating condition blocks for the "Actinic" way of doing this.