What’s the SEO plugin of choice amongst the EE core? I’ve tried NSM Better Meta, but not sure it was worth the $50. Can I do just as much with a free plugin?

I’ve never felt the need for a plugin. EE’s core functionality enables you to do an awful lot on your own without any PHP at all and I’ve had good results. It’s more a problem getting editorial staff to comply!

Interesting - how do you deal with meta data for each entry? Without being able to share custom fields across different channels I can’t think of a way of doing this with the native functionality. Am I missing something obvious?

Why do you need to share the custom fields across each channel? You can use Gypsy (free) to make it easier to use the same custom fields across multiple channels.

I just have meta fields per weblog entry, and some conditionals to do something automated if those meta tags are not there.

In general, articles have a summary slug of text that can be used for the unique description as well as the page lead-in-intro.

Better Meta will no doubt make things a bit easier and be worth the cash if you have a lot of weblogs/scope but for me, it’s out of the box every time.

if i don’t share custom fields I can’t see how I can have a field for meta title, keywords, description on each channel. gypsy would do the trick yes, but isn’t compatible with lots of other plugins I’ve used (unless this has been remedied recently) and is not supported in EE2 as far as I’m aware. :{

do you create SEO meta fields for each custom field group?

i’d much prefer to come across a robust, out of the box solution so keen to explore this further. $50 for better meta is a cost I’d rather avoid.

Matt Powell - 17 January 2012 10:34 AM

do you create SEO meta fields for each custom field group?

Yes, but on my sites I only have 3 or 4 weblogs which relate to a page that needs meta.

My bad on Gypsy - I’m resolutely hanging on to EE1.

I think Better Meta includes sitemaps etc too no?

More reading - I think you can workaround the lack of EE2 support with Gypsy using native EE according to thisthread - http://help.pixelandtonic.com/brandonkelly/topics/delay_in_updating_gypsy_to_2_0

It may do - I didn’t use that feature. I’ve made my own sitemaps in the past so just did that again on the site that was using Better Meta.

Regarding the workaround - if you have a lot of custom fields that just isn’t practical. Admin page load times can be severely compromised.

We’re in the process of building a ridiculously simple SEO plugin - for users benefits over developers so it wont have much functionality but would provide a really nice GUI for users and simple integration for developers.

In your template you could just insert, for example:-
{field_name:title}

It’s not my main project but is something we’ve been wanting to build for clients. A number of other plugins handle sitemaps and other areas of a site well enough, this one would just be really nice meta. We’ll be looking to charge around £15 per site but we’ll announce this nearer the time.

For a quick screenshot of it, check the attachment.

We use SEO Lite on our projects, it does a good job of managing title, description, and keyword tags, which I blogged about here.

Once you’ve rolled a sitemap.xml template, you’ve got most of the heavy lifting for that out of the way, especially if you just need the URL and last modified time.

I do like SEO lite yes. I suppose I’m always conscious of avoiding using plugins / addons where possible… must be a hangover from my wordpress days

One simple way to add meta descriptions is to use the {summary} tag in an article template’s header.

Wrap it within the exp:channel:entries tag and limit it to one entry.

Taking it a step further, you can add a field for the entry that is called Meta Description and call that one instead of Summary if you want something different than the summary.

That way the description is dynamically generated for each entry and you also can use custom fields.

For the section fronts, skip the channel:entries tag and just manually write the description.

Likewise, you do the same thing with titles.

I would go for SEO For firefox by Aaron Wall, the Author of SEOBook, which in my opinion is the best SEO book you can find on the web. The plugin is worth checking out!

Nice sharing dude. this is exactly one and only which I am looking for.
I also doing seo and I love to this job.

I’ve always used NSM Beta Meta. It’s so flexible and really powerful. Keeps your header code nice and need too without really long conditionals. Great if you are using templates to do multiple things.