Search Engines - advice please

[vidmarc]

I'm trying to get our site listed higher on search engines. I've been playing around with an online META tag analyzer, and I'm seeing these suggestions:

Author / Twitter Card / Google Plus Publisher / Open Graph

Quote

Webpage has a keywords meta tag.
The keywords meta tag is obsolete, and no search engines does use the keywords meta tag in their web ranking nowadays.

Are these worth considering?

Social Card Preview

Image

<!-- Google / Search Engine Tags -->

<!-- Facebook Meta Tags -->

<!-- Twitter Meta Tags -->

 

Also, when using the MERGE Data for tags, I founnd that the data is larger than preferred. I'm now trying the REPLACE option isntead of MERGE to see if it make a difference in overall rankings.

Any thoughts /suggestions on best practices? Thanks in advance.

[havenswift-hosting]

Their statement is correct in that the keywords meta tags hasnt been used for many, many years and it isnt worth spending the time filling those in.

Always use Replace and not Merge and then ensure you have completely UNIQUE and SEO relevant meta title and meta description for every single page (categories, products, documents etc) and that what is written is relevant to the text on that page - it is almost pointless just filling in meta title and meta description without these including relevant keyword phrases for that specific page. The skin should have one <h1> tag per page, one or two <h2> tags per page and that these are relevant to all of the above. 

Ensure you have the following : https for all pages ; schema.org microdata on product pages (https://www.cubecart.com/extensions/plugins/google-schema-org-microdata-plugin) ; fast hosting (page load times in increasingly becoming important) ; quality sitemap for pages and images which are created on a weekly basis (or more often if lots of pages are added daily) and both of these are submitted via Google Console ; fix any errors notified via Google Console

Once you have the above basic stuff done, then you can start on the harder stuff !

[vidmarc]

Thanks, will give your plugin a try.  I'm running the latest CubeCart install with Foundation, do I need to make any template edits?

[havenswift-hosting]

With Foundation you will need to make a few very simple edits but documented on the install tab in the plugin

[vidmarc]

I've had a look at the Meta code generated by Cubecart and I don't see "Meta title" for each product. I've filled in the Meta title in the Search Engines tab, but it isn't displaying

Here's what should be displaying for each item.

Quote

<meta name="title" content="content here" />

Any suggestions?

[vidmarc]

Looking at foundation/templates/element.meta.php I see there is no <meta name = "title"> included.

Is this an error?

OK, I added this to the template and it now correctly displays the Meta title. Suggest this gets fixed!

<meta name="title" content="{if isset($META_TITLE)}{$META_TITLE}{/if}">

 

[bsmither]

I am not sure what you are wanting with <meta name="title">, but I find no reference to this specifically named meta tag when doing some initial research.

If what you are wanting is the <title> tag, it is not in the element.meta.php template. You will find <title>{$META_TITLE}</title> in the main.php and main.checkout.php templates.