MODx SEO CMS... Which title do you use for what?

I was just going through the Dutch translation for 1.0 RC 3 and was considering naming some of the titles differently. We (sterc.nl) use the title tags in a certain way which we think is really beneficial for SEO. Because MODx is a SEO CMS, we really think MODx should focus more on this in the CMS itself. Especially the title-naming.

At Sterc, we rename the titles in the CMS. I’ll explain the way we use them below.

Title
Our title: Title
Usage: We use this for internal reference only

Long title
Our title: SEO Title
Usage: We use this for our <title></title> tags (which will also be displayed in the search engines.

Description
Our title: SEO Description
Usage: We use this for our <meta name="description" contents="..." /> tag, which will also show in the search engines. This should be a textarea actually, but hey, we can live with it.

Document alias
Our title: SEO URL
Usage: Same usage, just a different name. Our users don’t really get what an alias is. They do know what an URL is of course.

Summary
Our title: SEO Keywords
Usage: We enter our keywords here for <meta name="keywords" contents="..." />. We think the current meta keywords solution isn’t really useful. We never use it...

Menu title
Our title: Menu title
Usage: nothing changed here


What do you guys think of these title names? I know not everyone uses it this way and I was wondering how other users make use of these fields and if anyone renames them. Does anyone think we should change this somehow or make it changable in the CMS config (Tools => Configuration) ?

You are free to use the fields for whatever you wish. You can even edit the language files to change the prompts to anything you want. Personally, I prefer to use TVs for extended fields, such as meta tags.

They won’t change in the MODx distribution. I suggest you create a standard ManagerManager ruleset you use with each project and you’ll maintain complete freedom to do as you please here. I like your rationale though, and share a huge amount of disdain for the Meta content handling. This was created prior to TVs and really does a poor job!

As a question though, do you really see any benefit in Google from meta-keywords. Matt Cutts from Google claims they completely ignore them I believe, and at best weigh them so insignificantly that I wonder if maintaining them is remotely usefule. I can make a great argument for using them for internal search ranking in Ajax Search though. Other SEs might treat them differently.

Ryan, you’re correct there. Meta keywords are indeed totally useless but some of our clients think it’s really beneficial for other/older search engines, which is kinda true It kind of comforts them.

We’ll just stick to our own translation I guess, which I showed above and leave the official translation as is.

Quote from: Nomark at Jul 27, 2009, 12:34 PM

Ryan, you’re correct there. Meta keywords are indeed totally useless but some of our clients think it’s really beneficial for other/older search engines, which is kinda true It kind of comforts them.

It’s a lot easier indeed to just turn them on if requested rather than explain that circa-1998 "techniques" don’t really apply any longer.

@Nomark

I tend to use the default title fields as follows:

pagetitle - HTML title tag
longtitle - main page heading (typically H1 or H2)

May I ask what field you use for the visible heading on the page?

Anton

Longtitle or text entered in the document content (the field with the rich text editor).

In case anyone wondered how it would look like if you made these changes... Here’s a screenshot attached.

We changed the following:
- removed the meta keywords tab
- renamed and reordered the general tab (fields are: Menu title=pagetitle, SEO title=longtitle, SEO URL=alias, SEO description=introtext, SEO keywords=description)
- added the wp_theme for TinyMCE and reordered the buttons + removed HTML path

That’s it. We’ll be releasing this changed version of MODx after our vacation (early September).

There is no need to hack the core. The ManagerManager plugin will change the names of the fields on the forms quite nicely.

Ah right, Ryan mentioned that too. Will try that too Thanks.