Meta title Tag dilemma.... need help
-
Hey, Guys
I have a dilemma that I cannot figure out how to solve. One thing that I have learned is that the meta tag is probably one of the most important factors of SEO. I work in the industry of real estate and we are located in a mid-sized market, Augusta, GA, which does not have a hugely competitive digital marketplace. So, I have told my web developer the changes that I want her to make to our major sub-domain pages on our website. I am anticipating that once she makes these changes which will allow me to make the necessary SEO changes to website, that we will see some good results. I have one dilemma that I can't figure out how to solve with the meta title tag.
Check out our rental section: http://aubenrealty.com/rentals.cfm
Now, click on any rental property and it will take you to that rental's page. Notice the page title " Auben Realty- real estate....." This is identical for every active and non-active property on our website. Every time we create a new property, this is what it spits out. Now, take it a step further and click on " Contact me about this property," and you will see the same page title.
My dilemma is, " How do we fix this?"
My assumption is that the best page title would be the address for each property( ex, 1322 Laurel Street, Augusta Ga 30904), right ?
Is this some kind of simple coding adjustment?
-
If you want to have total control over what goes into the title on each and every page, as your developer mentioned, that would definitely require some extra custom programming - can't begin to give a ballpark figure without talking more specifics.
If you're okay with something at least semi-standard across the board that would just include having the actual property address in the title, I can't see that taking more than a couple of hours of programming (if that).
Without looking at the actual source, I'm 99% sure that your property details are already being stored in a database. With that said, I imagine they can just duplicate the existing header into a new file (i.e. header2.cfm), insert CFM code into the title tag that pulls the property address, and then replace the header file that is currently included in the rentaldetail.cfm page with the new one.
Should you make any global changes in the header in the future, you will need to update both header files.
There's really probably a variety of ways to handle this, but that's my 2 cents.
For whatever it's worth...
I've worked on several real estate websites myself. They can get rather complicated. There's definitely a great deal of power in developing your own solution, but it can be costly and time-consuming - you can easily spend $20K for something good.
If you see yourself continuing to need other programming adjustments, it may be easier to jump over to one of the more customizable commercial solutions, such as http://www.diversesolutions.com or http://www.realestatewebmasters.com . Please note that I'm not trying to bump your developer out of work - they can certainly assist with either of the above solutions, and will likely be necessary for the first one.
Hope that helps -
-
Thanks, Paul
You are correct. Since making this post I was able to speak to our developer and she said that we are not using a popular CMS. It's just something simple that she custom built for us as an attempt to cut down cost for us. The website was built before my time at this company and the original thought was that the website and content would not grow to the point of us needing a CMS because CMS can be expensive. This may not be the case going forward. Our developer said that she will build us a database and figure out a way to give us access to this database so that we will have the ability to tinker with page titles. We feel that this is the best solution.
Here is an email that she sent us:
_....The problem with that is what I explained earlier, your site uses the same header and footer for every page. That's why the title appears on every page the same way._Basically think of it like this....
we have a header and footer, each as one file. So the home page would look like this...
header
homepage content
footer
We do this, so if you make a change to the header or footer, it affects every single page without actually having to update 20 different pages...... So all of your meta tags including the title tag are all located in the header file.
Having said that, to change those out on a page by page basis, it can be done absolutely, but to keep using the header and footer files, it will need to be database driven and changed out based on what page is displaying. I would need to give you guys a place to be able to go in and edit the title tag on each individual page. So it can be done, but as you can see it isn't as easy as just changing some text, some things would need to be programmed to make it happen.....
Please weigh in on this guys. The last thing that I want is for this developer to pull the wool over our eyes.
-
I don't see evidence of a popular CMS being utilized on the page you mentioned, but it does use ColdFusion, which is a scripting language, and I would guess is probably communicating with a database that holds the various details for each property listing. I don't think it would be too difficult for your developer to pull the address into the title tag.
-
No, it's worth a lot Paul.
Thank you for clearing that point up for me!!!
-
For whatever it's worth, I just wanted to clarify the difference between meta tags and the actual title element.
I've seen a number of cases where people use something like:
or
Please note that Google does not consider the above to be a title element, and will not treat it as so.
You want to make sure your title element looks more like this:
<title>My Page Title</title>
-
Thanks, Guys
Yes, I know. We have to make a lot of changes to make and I am the first person to really take up the SEO baton with this company. I have a lot of work ahead of me as you can tell. The good thing is that these are not hard fixes and I am not in a really competitive market. A lot of the people in this real estate market don't know or care to know anything about SEO. Apparently, the person who set up our website did not know a lot about SEO and stuffed the meta data. I also have the issue of not having access to making these changes. The only person has access to this is our web developer and she does not respond in a speedy fashion. I will ask about which platform we are on. I am pretty sure that we are not on Wordpress. I am very familiar with Wordpress. I have used Drupul before too. This CMS is very simple and basic. I will find out and hopefully you guys will be able to help me with my dilemma then.
Thanks,
-
Yes, I agree with Chris. Can you tell us what platform you are using for your site. Is it Word Press, Drupal, Joomal? It sounds like your CMS is automatically concatenating a title tag for dynamic page queries that include the property specific info. This is one thing that really drives me crazy as an SEO. Without question, whatever platform you are on, you need to be able to, as a site manager, SEO or Webmaster, be able to customize the title, description , canonical and Robots meta tags for every single page on the site. Unfortunately, there are many, even some of the best ones, that won't let you do that.
-
Man first of all you need SEO professional from 2013 not from 2010.Things have been changing a lot.
You have crowded your site with lot of keywords. Definitely be in hit list of Keyword stuffing penalty.
Press CTRL+U to see source code of each page.On line 15 onwards you will see meta data.Which CMS you are using right now so that I can guide you accordingly.If its php.you can add custom URL and meta desciption.No keywords please.Kindly share the CMS so that we shall guide you about fix.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Meta Keywords - Should I define them myself
Hi All, Im sure this has been answered somewhere but I couldn't find it. SEOQuake etc suggest you should define meta keywords. However I was under the impression that this was not best practice Can anyone confirm what I should do/ is best practice? Cheers Bowey
Technical SEO | | CFCU0 -
I really need some help with Magento and Duplicate Page Content results I;m getting
Hi, We use Magento for our eCommerce platform and I'm getting a number of duplicate page content results. It mainly concerns the duplicate page content errors for our category pages. Firstly It seems like the product type and filter options highlighted in the picture are causing duplicate page content Also one particularity category is getting a lot from duplicate page content errors , http://www.tidy-books.co.uk/shop-all-products I understand that this category page is using duplicate pages of other category pages so I set this to exclude them from the site map but it looks likes its till being picked up? I've attached the csv file showing these errors as well. - > Any help would be massively appreciated Thanks filter.png moz-tidy-books-uk-crawl_issues-01-OCT-2014.csv
Technical SEO | | tidybooks0 -
Windows Acces used for e-commerce site - help needed
Hello everybody, I am working on this e-commerce website built on windows access and it's a nightmare to change the html content on it.has anyone used it before? It doesn't allow me to change the content for the html tags even though it should and i don't have a clue about what to do. Thanks oscar
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar0 -
Registered Trademark in a Meta Title or Content
I know that registered trademarks don't hurt SEO, however if the trademark is used in the middle of a popular search phrase (see below) will it hurt the site's chanced of getting ranked for this term. Example: Funkybrand® Shoes PS I found one brand that used the trademark Acuvue® contact lenses. thanks!
Technical SEO | | yanaiguana1110 -
Meta Tag Description Warning is wrong. Description is indexed and shows.
My crawl report shows that there are 22 Meta Tag Descriptions missing. I double checked on Google and it shows the meta descriptions just fine. What's wrong with the report or am I missing something?
Technical SEO | | onlinemarketersdotca0 -
Will I still get Duplicate Meta Data Errors with the correct use of the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags?
Hi Guys, One of our sites has an extensive number category page lsitings, so we implemented the rel="next" and rel="prev" tags for these pages (as suggested by Google below), However, we still see duplicate meta data errors in SEOMoz crawl reports and also in Google webmaster tools. Does the SEOMoz crawl tool test for the correct use of rel="next" and "prev" tags and not list meta data errors, if the tags are correctly implemented? Or, is it necessary to still use unique meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, even though we are using the rel="next" and "prev" tags, as recommended by Google? Thanks, George Implementing rel=”next” and rel=”prev” If you prefer option 3 (above) for your site, let’s get started! Let’s say you have content paginated into the URLs: http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1
Technical SEO | | gkgrant
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3
http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4 On the first page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=1, you’d include in the section: On the second page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2: On the third page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=3: And on the last page, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=4: A few points to mention: The first page only contains rel=”next” and no rel=”prev” markup. Pages two to the second-to-last page should be doubly-linked with both rel=”next” and rel=”prev” markup. The last page only contains markup for rel=”prev”, not rel=”next”. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” values can be either relative or absolute URLs (as allowed by the tag). And, if you include a <base> link in your document, relative paths will resolve according to the base URL. rel=”next” and rel=”prev” only need to be declared within the section, not within the document . We allow rel=”previous” as a syntactic variant of rel=”prev” links. rel="next" and rel="previous" on the one hand and rel="canonical" on the other constitute independent concepts. Both declarations can be included in the same page. For example, http://www.example.com/article?story=abc&page=2&sessionid=123 may contain: rel=”prev” and rel=”next” act as hints to Google, not absolute directives. When implemented incorrectly, such as omitting an expected rel="prev" or rel="next" designation in the series, we'll continue to index the page(s), and rely on our own heuristics to understand your content.0 -
Help with google adsense
Hi i wonder if anyone can help me with google adsense. I am having trouble making money with google adsense. I have been altering my pages to try and get better results with google adsense but nothing works. my traffic at the moment is about 3000 visitors a day but this should be doubled to around 6000 a day within the next two months. here is the layout of a typical page and i would be grateful for any advice on how to alter it to make money with google adsense http://www.in2town.co.uk/showbiz-gossip/rihanna-news/rihanna-shocks-fans-over-her-sexy-body-claims
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Google caching meta tags from another site?
We have several sites on the same server. On the weekend we relocated some servers, changing IP address. A client has since noticed something freaky with the meta tags. 1. They search for their companyname, and another site from the same server appears in position 1. It is completely unrelated, has never happened before, and the company name is not used in any incoming text links. Eg search for company1 on Google. Company1.com.au appears at position 2, but at position1 is school1.com.au. The words company1 don't appear anywhere on the site. I've analysed all incoming links with a gazillion tools, and can't find any link text of company1, linking to school1. 2. Even more freaky, searching for company1.com.au at Google. The results at Google in position 1 for the last three days has been: Meta Title for school1 (but hovering/clicking actual goes to URL for company1)
Technical SEO | | ozgeekmum
Meta Description for school1
URL for company1.com.au Clicking on the cached copy of result1, it shows a cached version of school1 taken on March 18. Today is 29 March. Logically we are trying to get Google to spider both sites again quickly. We've asked the clients to update their home pages. Resubmitted xml sitemaps. Checked the HTTP status codes - both are happily returning 200s. Different cookies. I found another instance on a forum: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/questions/10578/incorrect-meta-information-in-google Any ideas?0