Meta tags

Sometimes your page or content needs a little bit of help to make things work in the most optimized method, such as if you are using a Marketing Page and need to add a custom teaser or page title so that it looks good for your news feed or when shared on social media sites.

When this happens, you will need to manually edit your content's Meta tags sections. These are found near the bottom of the page and contain several sections, nearly all things you can change if needed:

The primary sections you will be making edits to are the Title and the Summary fields which are what search engines traditionally look at for information about the page and what the page contains. 

By default, these meta tags are pulled from the page's content. The meta tags Page title uses the Title of the page. The Description meta tag uses the summary field, and the other fields will pull from similar fields. 

While these defaults generally work just fine, you are also able to override the defaults on any page and are able to change the meta tags.  An example of this would be to make an edit to the Page title meta tag to be something that is a more SEO optimized title vs the original title field, which might be written more as a headline. 

The meta tags are located below the menu settings when on a page's edit screen. To override any of these defaults, empty out the text that already exists in that field.  An example would be in the Page title area where you might find the "[node:title] | UO [site:name]" text.

The items in [ ] brackets, such as [node:title], are items which are called tokens. Tokens are how we set the default content that appears in your news feeds, shared content, and on search engines. These tokens are based on the contents of the fields that already exist on your page.

Some of the most frequently used meta tags are:

• [node:title]
  This is your page's title.
• [site:name]
  This is your site's name.
• [node:summary]
  This is pulled from the Summary field, located above your main edit content area, or in your Marketing page "Teaser" content.

Note: Search engines, such as Google, don't often re-index information about a page, even if you make changes to things in your meta-tags. if you recently updated an old page and are not seeing those changes reflected in Google, it can be for many reasons. Google sometimes doesn't even look at the pages description and rather shows what it thinks is the relevant information based on the user doing the search, the search term, etc.

This is why we recommend publishing your page only once you have finalized everything as search engines are the most likely to grab your content just after it is published.