One of the easy ways to change how your site appears in search engine results is to change the metadata for your site’s pages. Sephone’s content management systems (datAvenger and datAvenger lite) allow you to change this information for any page on your site.

There are three main pieces of metadata for every page: the title, the description, and the keywords.

The page’s title is what appears in your browser’s title bar when you visit the page, and it also appears as the default title if you create a bookmark for the site. In the search engine world, the page’s title is what appears as the link to your site in the search results.

The page’s description is a short summary of what visitors would find on the page. This is often the text that appears underneath the page’s title in search engine results pages.

The keywords are a set of comma-separated words that describe the content of the page. Keywords used to play a major role in where your site appeared within search engine results, but now search engines rarely (if ever) look at keywords when visiting a page.

Setting meta data in datAvenger

datAvenger 4 gives you complete control over sitewide and page-specific metadata. To change the metadata on any page, edit the page in the Architecture tab and then click on the + button next to “Metadata”. datAvenger automatically generates a page title for you, but you’re free to change this if you like. You can also add keywords and a description in this space.

You also have the ability to specify sitewide meta data for any pages that do not have page-specific meta information. In the Globals tab, click on the blue META tab. Here you can specify a default title or a sitewide title prefix or suffix. datAvenger will show you a live preview of how your title will appear as you change these fields. You’re also able to change default keywords or the default description in this section.

Unless you’ve been given meta data from an external service, you can leave the “Custom Tags” field blank. This field is for advanced users who receive HTML meta data tags, and it can cause your page to display incorrectly if it is not entered in the right way!

Setting meta data in datAvenger lite

datAvenger lite 3.5 gives you the ability to edit meta data for any of your pages. Click on the <M> button after selecting any page in the Content tab. You’ll then have the option to specify a title, keywords, or a description. Like in datAvenger, leave the “Custom” box empty unless you’ve been given HTML meta data tags to enter!