Content SEO - Hidden In Plain Sight

Javeed Chida
Javeed Chida
3 Minute Read
It cannot be that it was just forgotten,
This fundamental feature, thus I sought
Through thick of forum, blog, e'en post ill-gotten
Until my quest returned me to the spot
Where sat the creature with expression cursed
Inquiring why I didn't look here first.
 
This post is the result of a search for how to configure SEO metadata tags for content. We're all familiar with how to specify those for pages - simply go to the page in Control Panel, choose the SEO tab and enter the Title, Description and Keywords.
 
 
 
Well, it so happens that you can do this for content as well, but not in the same way as we do it for pages.
 
Let's back up a bit. WHY would we need to specify SEO for a content. Those meta tags (title, description and keywords) are relevant at a page level so search engines can determine if a given page has relevancy to a given search.
 
But, content, unlike pages, is just markup that is part of a whole! When we think of a content-driven website, we think of pages with each page having one (often more than one) Web Content Display portlet instances, and, don't forget, possibly one or more Asset Publisher portlet instances.
 
Ah! Asset Publisher, a clever device that brings back content items meeting specified criteria.
 
If you code your Asset Puiblisher's Application Display Template (ADT) mindfully, it will likely have a link to a detail view of that content item. And if you've gone all the way, then you know that the detail view you see is really hosted on a placeholder page that also contains an Asset Publisher portlet instance that is configured as its Default Asset Publisher, and that your content has its Display Page set to the placeholder page we just talked about. All of this setup helps the Asset Publisher engine apply your content template to your content XHTML and render it on the placeholder page. These are details you are quite familiar with if you have used Asset Publisher before. 
 
If the previous paragraph is all new to you, you are in for a treat! Read this short blog post and come back here if you're still interested in this one. 
Warning: you may not want to come back for a while because Asset Publisher might just blow you away and preoccupy you with several little project ideas.
 
Now, the first thing to do is go to a page that has your Asset Publisher portlet instance duly configured. Here's mine, with a fancy card view for each result.
 
Next, click on one of the content items so you get to the detail view of your content. This basically follows the link you coded in your ADT.
 
And view the page source for that selected content item. You should see something like the below.
 
 
Spot the three tags we care about - title, description and keywords and study their values.
Title: Young Night - Browse Poems - Liferay
Description: Hand in hand, we take it all in: The babble of the river, The whisper of the wind,
Keywords: free verse
 
Now, let's see where those values are coming from. Go into the Control Panel, then Web Content Repository, and edit the content item in question. 
 
The title is just the Title on the Content tab. 
 
 
Note that the  Title  specified is  Young Night . But if you look at what got into the page source above, you can see we had:  Young Night - Browse Poems - Liferay . The page name and site name seem to get suffixed to the Title. 
 
Next, click on the  Abstract  tab. The  Abstract field  sources your description meta tag.
 
 
Finally, click on the  Categorization  tab. The Categories and Tags, together, source the keywords meta tag. We have one category specified,  free-verse . 
 
 
For kicks, let's add a few tags.
 
 
Now, let's go view the page source again. We should see the newly added tags show up for the keywords meta tag. Note that the tags and the categories are consolidated into a comma-separated list.
 
 
So, there we have it. For content items that are served up via the Asset Publisher, we can now control the SEO title, description and keywords via content metadata.
 
The interesting thing here is that we're making our content SEO-friendly without really thinking about it. But if an SEO specialist were to come by and ask us how they might effect changes in a specific content item's SEO tags, we now know where to point them.
 
Isn't life[ray] beautiful?
Page Comments
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Bryan Cheung
9 Years Ago
Nice post, Javeed. What do you think of the usability of these functions? Do you think there would ever be a case where you want the meta information to be different from the info in the fields they're taken from?
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Javeed Chida Bryan Cheung
9 Years Ago
Hi Bryan. Thanks for the comment.

Since you ask, currently the title in the page head is sourced as the content item title + page name + site name. That's pretty safe, but I am bracing for one of our clients to possibly request a custom title for each content item.

That being said, it would be very cool to house a little SEO subsection (with free-form fields for Title, Description and Keywords) inside of the Display Page tab of the content edit screen - same as we do for a Page. I consider Display Page may be the most appropriate home for that data since having a Display Page is suggestive that the content item may be served up all by itself as a result of navigating from an Asset Publisher. Further more, keywords currently comes from tags and categories. Not hard to imagine wanting more in there from a pure SEO perspective without having to create a content tag for it. Just a few thoughts.

Thank you, again, for engaging. :-)
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(You)
8 Years Ago
[...] In my last technical post titled Content SEO - Hidden in Plain Sight, I exposed a caveat in the way the title of a content item is auto-crafted by Liferay. Here’s an excerpt from that article,... [...] Read More
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