arc_meta: A Textpattern Plugin to Help Improve Your SEO

The second of the two Textpattern plugins I wrote as part of this site’s rebuild is ready to be released into the wild. I previously released the first of these plugin’s, arc_social_share, last month. Now it’s arc_meta’s turn, a new plugin to help improve your site’s SEO and get more out of social marketing.

Once installed arc_meta will add some new fields to the article write, section and category forms for setting meta data for the meta/page title and meta description. These can then be used on your site using a number of new Textpattern tags for your templates. The meta title field adds the ability to add an alternative title to the article/section/category title used by the new arc_meta_title tag (more on that in a moment); the meta description field lets you set a short description for the page’s meta description output using the new arc_meta_description tag.

The arc_meta_title tag outputs a <title> tag. The format of the title is set using configurable defaults (accessible from the plugin’s Options page); the format is defined using patterns with tokens representing the different parts of the title. For example, a section title by default is configured as:

%s | %n

%s represents the section title and %n the site’s name. If the section being viewed has an alternative meta title set it will be used to replace %s instead of the section’s actual title. For example, on this site I have a section called Blog which makes sense when viewed in the context of the site; however, I have an alternative meta title for the section, Web Development Blog, so that is more descriptive when viewed in search results. With arc_meta you can do this for articles, sections and categories.

The arc_meta_description tag will output a meta description tag if you’ve set a meta description for the page. The description will also be used to set the open graph and Twitter card descriptions output by arc_meta_open_graph and arc_meta_twitter_card, respectively. These two tags are intended to help improve the display of links to content on your site.

One final new tag that this plugin will make available to you is arc_meta_canonical that will output a canonical URL meta tag. The URL is based on the rules the default template Textpattern ships with. By using the arc_meta_canonical tag you can remove some of that coding logic from your templates.

Head over to the arc_meta plugin page to grab the latest copy of the plugin and for full documentation. If you’ve got support questions please post them on the plugin’s Textpattern Forum thread. The code for the plugin is also available on GitHub.

• Textpattern
• SEO

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