| Virtuemart SEO 5 - Metadata |
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| Friday, 07 September 2007 | |
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Virtuemart is somewhere in between. Its has been getting better of recent months, but one area in which it still needs improvement is metadata - it doesn't allow you to add any at all.
Whats the solution? .... How to Add Metadata to VirtuemartSimple. You need to use a Search Engine Friendly URL Component. In terms of being easy to use, I prefer Artio SEF to sh404SEF and SEF Advance (sorry Yannick and Emir) but all three allow you to add metadata to Virtuemart.
Artio does a very good job of wrapping up the URL and metadata in one page so that you can control all aspects of a page without jumping back and forth. With Artio SEF and SEF Advance you can do exactly the same thing but you need to edit the URL and the metadata in separate parts of the component. You also need to manually cut and paste each URL into the metadata area.
Comments (2)
  written by Teaboy1, September 27, 2007
Thanks Steve and Yannick for all this info.
I think I'm beginning to get my head around the meta titles stuff. Got very confused so I thought I'd write out what I've done: - JRE SEF patch installed (works, but looks complex) - sh404sef now installed and basics are working well (I love the function that avoids duplicate URLs, very clever) - Then published Yannick's shCustomtags module in footer position -> saw it generating auto page titles like this: Solar panels | 5w solar panels then if I want to overwrite manually for certain pages, then I can click the meta button in the sh404sef URLs list as described above. I have a feeling that the clever PHP stuff in the params on the shCustom module could improve, or possibly replace the need for the JRE patch. But it's way over my head... Does the above sound vaguely sensible? ;-) Thanks Teaboy Write comment
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Some components to a great job of incorporating basic SEO ideas giving you the chance to add metadata, unique page titles and more. Other components are so stubbornly opposed to basic SEO thats its best to just tell Google to ignore them altogether.
I'd like to comment a bit on this :
- with sh404SEF, you don't need to go to another place or cut/paste the non-sef URL. From the SEF URL list, just select a given URL and press the META button to access all meta entry field. There is also a dedicated button for Homepage meta
- the dedicated META management area (distinct from what is described above, and accessed with the Meta Management button on main control panel) is mostly intended for URL which don't have a SEF equivalent (because there is no plugin for a particuler comp or because you elected to skip it for some reason). SEF URL meta are also found there for completeness, but normally you should never get there
- what is really different in sh404SEF in terms of Meta management is that it generates Title, desc and keywords AUTOMATICALLY for regular content and ... Virtuemart (in addition to allowing setting them up manually of course). I have taken another approach than usual meta generator. I think fully automatic meta yield average results because it is hard to identify the relevant information in a page.
So I am using (just like for URL) a PLUGIN system to build up the meta.
For instance the Virtuemart meta plugin will build up the following tags for a product page:
Title : product_name | category 1 | category 2 | shop name
Desc : the product short description, taken from VM database
keywords : same data as title, with commas instead of | (not too much effort here, keywords are not really useful anyway, except for Baidu!)
Please check out for instance : http://extensions.siliana.net/...flyer.html
All tags on this page are autmatically generated, yet I believe they are pertinent. Another big advantage of this plugin system is that it will also use the appropriate language for your tags, without you doing anyting else than filling up VM description fields. This is why I am using a module rather than a bot, because a system bot cannot fetch multi-lingual data from Joomfish database
Hope this makes things a bit clearer. Thanks a bunch for this good Virtuemart series!
Regards
Yannick