Important Questions

[fans4life]

Hi there,

I bought SEF Patch extended version and even though it was very cheap, I would like to have more documentation than you guys provide.
Not everyone is a SEF gurus and not everyone understands what the heck SEF is. I think most of the people understand their sites need it to increase the traffic. I'm one of these people. I do have basic understanding what it is but I have no idea what tags I want to use to make my site rank higher on the search engines.
Your documentation (no offense) sucks and no matter how wonderful your product is, it means nothing except for the people who know what they're doing when it comes to SEF. However, majority doesn't.
Would it hurt or kill you to actually give your recommendations on how it should be set up for an average site? If someone wants a deeper understanding, they can always do some deep research. I don't currently have time to read 800 pages books on th subject, I'm sorry. When I have the time, I'll try to find out as much as I can. It does seem to be a fascinating feature.
Can you please provide the most common installation set up in a clear manner?
For example, what am I suppose to fill in for the Title field in the Meta Settings global setup so it doesn't take the entire site's default Title but individual items'?
What the heck is Meta Tag Robots Settings? There are 4 available settings and I think if you just gave a brief explanation of each, people would appreciate your product more. Why individual items don't follow global Meta Tag Robots settings by default?
What are the examples of custom Meta fields? What do you recommend and what people should be filling in those tags?
What is URL meta and what do we do with it?

This will probably take you 15 min to answer but it'll save tons of hours for lots of people.

I'm sorry for my rant, but I got a little fed up with either unfinished products or complete lack of documentation or support.

-Tony.

[joomlatwork]

SEO is a complex topic and there are a lot of sites with documentation how you can apply SEO. The component just makes it available to set up an SEO specific strategy and this has nothing to do with the documentation (that is our opinion).

The basic in this case are:
- To be able to control the titles
- To be able to setup META fields and have full control over these tags;
- To be able to cleanup the Joomla generate http head sections;
- To be able to apply custom META fields.

What we did was just to apply this patch to make joomla SEO 'compatible.

SEO depends for which source your are optimizing. The SEF Patch component is just an element in this proces.

For more information about SEO check for example:
http://www.searchengineforums.com/bin/Ultimate.cgi

Regards,

Richard

[fans4life]

Richard,

I understand you just provided a tool to make the most out of Joomla. And that's not what I'm trying to say. You just admitted yourself SEO is a complex topic and not everyone is SEO savvy and to be honest, not everyone wants to be. I don't have the time to read up on SEO for example.  Most people know what it is but not everyone knows how to apply it. If you know your car needs gasoline, that doesn't mean you should know how the engine runs. When I buy a TV it comes out of the factory pre-set for an average customer. If I want to fine tune it I will do more research. But if you don't want to spend time researching, the way the TV comes is enough to watch it. Why not apply the same logic here?
And I perfectly understand the purpose of your component. And this is great that it's very flexible and anyone who has a clue can customize it. Unfortunately, not everyone has a clue. Why not just give your recommendations and just 2 more pages to your document explaining very briefly what changing each option will mean? Don't you think a lot of people would benefit from that?

Also, can someone answer questions from my initial post? I still haven't figured these things.

Regards,

-Tony.

[joomlatwork]

Some months ago I started to write a book about SEO and Joomla, I think you can convince me to finish this..

About your questions:

Code:

Can you please provide the most common installation set up in a clear manner?

This is the default settings (what is now insite the configuration part)

Code:

For example, what am I suppose to fill in for the Title field in the Meta Settings global setup so it doesn't take the entire site's default Title but individual items'?

The configuration Title settings is the default format of how the title should be showed. In this case it is [TITLE]-[SITENAME]. So a content item title will be within this format whereby the title is the content title and sitename is ofcourse the sitename. Personally I'am not "happy" with this configuration but a lot of users where requesting this kind of format. In this case I should advise you to set the title format [TITLE]. Notice that the title tag is one of the most important tags in relation of SEO and that you should put the 'strategic' keywords within your title.

Code:

What the heck is Meta Tag Robots Settings? There are 4 available settings and I think if you just gave a brief explanation of each, people would appreciate your product more.

With the tag robots you can let the search engine (like Google) now if the pages may be included within the search engine (= index), not be included within the search engine (no index), that links may be followed on the specific page (follow) or that the links may not be followed (nofollow).

Code:

Why individual items don't follow global Meta Tag Robots settings by default?

Default for search engines is index, follow if the tag is not present. Therefor the default settings is that it's not showed. Some SEO will always display this tag since they are convinced that it has influence (in this case you can apply the default settings on index, follow) but personally I don't think this has influence.

Code:

What are the examples of custom Meta fields? What do you recommend and what people should be filling in those tags?

examples are copyright, rating, subject. In this case some believe that this can give advantage in some search engines. What I personal always do is put the sitename within the copyright field.

Code:

What is URL meta and what do we do with it?

URL META settings you can assign titles and META data to URL's. This is for example if you are using third party components where you don't have the ability to assign META data and titles within the component self. Just take the output URL of the specific page and you can optimize the page.

Regards

Richard

[fans4life]

Hi Richard,

Thanks for your answers. I hope you do write the book and it won't be 800 pages long.
You left room for 5 custom meta tags. What are the other tags that are helpful in search engines rankings besides the few you listed?

I'm trying to use URL Repository and I'm not sure why it's not working. I have phhBB forum and the path is:
http://www.fans4life.net/forum/

So I set the relative path to /forum...didn't work, I set it to /forum/...no luck, simply forum...same result.
What am I suppose to do? phhBB has its own description & keywords meta tags in the set up area and I don't seem to be able to overwrite them.

Also, even though I selected index, follow option in the global configuration it always comes up as "Hide Robots Meta tag" when I add individual items. When I add URL in the URL depository it comes up as default. What am I doing wrong?
You also mentioned you were not big fan of [Title] - [Sitename] Title meta tag. Since I know nothing about it, can you tell us why and what format you're fan of?

Regards,

-Tony.