SEO: Custom meta description and title tag for each Event. Also a "list title" as opposed to Page Title and Headline
Please give more robust Search Engine Optimization capability to those of us who know its importance and know how to use it.
It's more than "SEO"; it's a matter of site functionality.
We get a lot of visitors from search engines. Often they find and go directly to an event description page, or the overall list of events, where they register and have are not even aware that they should know more about us first. For this reason, and for SEO reasons, we would benefit greatly if we were able to tweak the displayed page title and search snippet for EACH event description. Otherwise, Google picks up fragments of text containing the search words, which is usually does not help convert to a clickthrough, and does not help us explain what they've found.
I believe HTML 5 allows meta tags to be contained in the body of a page (rather than in the header), but it requires a certain specification in the header. I am unfamiliar with the required code and syntax, but surely someone at WA is. However WA's HTML editor immediately deletes any meta tag in the event description, unless it is contained in an HTML comment tag, which will probably make it ignored, or worse, look like spamming. So that needs attention from WA, too.
Please rocognize that a Title tag, a page Headline (e.g., H1), and the title of an event as shown in the master events list are NOT the same things (and for that matter, neither is the page's file name, which we cannot customize for an event, either, right?). Each serves a different purpose and needs to be worded specifically for that. The title that appears in a SERP would look stupid, wordy and redundant in a list of events, and would not be an attractive headline. It might contain stop words and punctuation and would often be relatively long, so it would not be good as a custom URL, either.
In summary, each event description (and similar generated pages) needs the following fields, which can contain defaults but need to be individually customizeable for that particular event:
- Custom URL (file name, for that particular event)
- Title tag (for that particular event). Field length should match Google's typical minimum (although actually Google goes by the space used, not character count, so allow a bit extra).
- Meta Description tag (for that particular event) (ditto regarding field length)
- "List" title (appears on the list of all events and as the Title macro in emails)
- Headline for the description text (an existing capability)
This is mainly about Google but of course all major search engines are relevant. And this is all standard SEO/marketing best practices, nothing "black hat" about it.
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Please follow the guide here: https://gethelp.wildapricot.com/en/articles/515-search-engine-optimization
We allow adding custom search terms for each custom created page, but not for specific events yet (since Events pages are generated automatically).
However, you can still add custom meta-tags for event details system page, if these search terms are applicabel for all events you make -
CoAND Executive Director commented
Can I add meta data? SEO and keywords to the pages generated in Wild Apricot?
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Michael commented
Hi, there doesn't seem to have been any news on this yet. Is there an update?
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Joshua D Lorenz commented
WildApricot, any traction on this request? This is pretty major for us organizations relying upon events.
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Liz Nettleton commented
Totally on board with this thread. Our SEO is heavily compromised as 70% of our web traffic is around our events - where we have no control to customise our URL.