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SEO Tips for Perch websites

I've been poking around Google Webmaster Tools recently and realized that "Rich Snippets" - the stuff that lets you tailor what appears in search listings - are really easy to implement if you use Perch. So I wrote a blog post about it and some other SEO suggestions: https://grabaperch.com/blog/archive/seo-tips-for-perch-websites

If anyone has any other SEO suggestions, let us know!
Rachel Andrew

Rachel Andrew 394 points

  • 7 years ago
Graham Street

Graham Street 17 points

7 years ago

Thanks for the info. Until recently we used our own 'meta_tags.html' template on all pages, to allow the content editors to change the title tag and meta description/keywords. Then 'Page Details' got enhanced to include page attributes. I'm now switching over to using these for the site we're now building.

I've modified seo.html to include some prompts for the content editors and to not display the meta description and keywords tags if nothing is added there for the page. My code is further down this post if anyone would like it.

I would really like to add a help prompt to 'Page title' and also change the order of the fields in Page Details to ... Navigation text, Page title, Description, Keywords. I can't see how I can do these things as I wonder if the 'Page title' and 'Navigation text' are added from 'core' before my additional fields are added from seo.html. Is this so and is there a way I can do this?

Here's my seo.html code, based on yours ...

<perch:if exists="description"><meta name="description" content="<perch:pages id="description" label="Description" type="textarea" size="xs" escape="true" help="The content will be truncated at 160 characters in the page code, as Google only wants and uses 160 characters." />" /></perch:if>
<perch:if exists="keywords"><meta name="keywords" content="<perch:pages id="keywords" label="Keywords" type="textarea" size="xs" escape="true" help="Separate with commas. No longer used by Google but some search engines still use these." />" /></perch:if>
<meta name="robots" content="<perch:pages id="noindex" label="Do not index" type="checkbox" value="noindex" append="," divider-before="Search engine indexing" /><perch:pages id="nofollow" label="Do not follow links" type="checkbox" value="nofollow" append="," /><perch:pages id="nosnippet" label="Do not show a snippet" type="checkbox" value="nosnippet" append="," />" />
Graham Street

Graham Street 17 points

7 years ago

I would really like to add a help prompt to 'Page title' and also change the order of the fields in Page Details to ... Navigation text, Page title, Description, Keywords.

I can't see how I can do these things as I wonder if the 'Page title' and 'Navigation text' are added from 'core' before my additional fields are added from seo.html. Is this so and is there a way I can do this?

Thanks, Graham
Graham Street

Graham Street 17 points

7 years ago

I've 'bumped' this one as I'd like to know if there's a way I can do this please. Quite a few of my accomplished customers would like access to the <head> tags. Until now we've provided them with a 'MetaTags' region but I'd like to standardise on Perch's 'Page Details' instead.
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

7 years ago

Ah - sorry Graham. We don't see this thread when you post to it, as you weren't the person who raised it. Hence the lack of response.

So the request is to be able to add help text to the fixed fields?
Graham Street

Graham Street 17 points

7 years ago

Yes, and even changing their order would be nice ... Navigation Text, Page title, Description, Keywords ... and then the 'SEO' type things are grouped together and can have useful help prompts. We use things like ...

Title - No more than 70 characters for Google.

Description - The content will be truncated at 160 characters in the page code, as Google only wants and uses 160 characters.

Keywords - Not used by Google, but may be used by other search engines.
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

7 years ago

Ok, noted, thanks!