Helpdesk

SEO stands for search engine optimization and is very important in making your site more attractive and reliable for the search engines so that it can appear higher in search results.

In administration panel > System > SEO settings there are 2 sections:

1. Global settings

Global settings section will let you edit default values for all the script modules that have no SEO settings of their own.

There are two parts here:

Both admin mode (/admin/seo/default_edit/admin) and user mode (/admin/seo/default_edit/user) settings include the following options:

Metadata

Title. Title stands for the information that is displayed on top of the browser window. It can be page name or name of the menu item etc.Keywords (meta tag). Insert the words and short phrases here that best describe the contents of the page/website.
Description (meta tag). This field contains short description of the page. This is the information that can be displayed in search results page of a search engine.
It is possible to edit metadata in all available site languages.

Open Graph data

Open Graph protocol lets you determine certain parameters for your website pages that can be used by social networks, Facebook in particular. You will be able to manage the way your site page is shown in the news feed any time someone ‘likes’ the page.

og:title – object title as shown in the network, e.g.
og:type – the type of your object (article, website, book, profile, etc.). For more details check the documentation.
og:image – link to image that conveys the main idea of the entry. Image from third party websites can be used, e.g.http://some-website.com/images/123.jpg” />

og:description – one or two sentences that describe your object. By default Facebook collects the information from Description (meta tag). Recommended length: max 150 symbols, e.g.

Some of the parameters are collected automatically, for example image or site URL. In the admin panel of PG Real Estate you can indicate og:title, og:type, og:description. Multiple languages are supported here as well.

Place language code in URL

If you activate this setting, your site links will look like this: http:////, e.g.http://site.com/en/index.php. It makes sense to place language code in URLs if you want different language versions of your site to have separate links.

Additionally, you can elect to not index language versions separately. If you activate this setting, all language versions of a page will be considered duplicate pages. It means that the search engine crawler will regard the content on all pages versions as identical and will only index the page in the main site language.

The above information refers to the admin mode entirely; however there are extra settings that can be adjusted further for the user mode. Please see below.

2. SEO advanced settings

This section has 5 subsections:

2.1. Module settings

2.1.1 List of module links

Module settings section gives an opportunity to edit SEO settings for each particular module that is available in the drop-down menu. Whether a module is available here, depends upon its importance. We try to include all relevant modules into the list.

This is how it works: select a module in the drop-down menu.

In case you have edited some of the URLs already, the changes will be visible directly in the list as ‘Rewrite’ (see more info on rewriting URLs below):

2.1.2 Rewriting the URL

Let us take users management for example (/admin/seo_advanced/listing/users) >> users view link (/admin/seo_advanced/edit/users/view).

Default link looks like this: http://site.com/users/view/[id]/[section]. The default link is a pattern for all user profile pages. Example: http://site.com/users/view/1/overview, and we get to view this agency’s profile:

URLs can be composed of text blocks and variables. Text blocks are displayed as simple text, while variables are enclosed into square brackets [variable_name|default_value]. In our sample default link http://site.com/users/view/[id]/[section] we have two variables: [id] which stands for user ID, and [section] which stands for the profile section we are currently viewing.

Typically, the URL manager consists of 3 sections:

1. Section where the editable URL parts are displayed.

2. Section where you can add new text blocks.

3. Section where you can add optional, dynamic parameters.

After you have added a text block or a dynamic block into the URL, you can edit them by clicking on them.

For some variables you can add default values by typing them after the logical slash, for example [id|1].

For other variables no default values are required because they can be omitted from the URL ([section]).

In the case with user ID, if no value is processed by the script – when for some reason a user ID is missing or not available (user with said ID has been deleted from the site) – you will be taken to the profile page of user with ID=1. In other words, default value is used automatically to fill in the space when a necessary parameter is missing from the URL.

Tips:

1. Every URL should start with the text part.
2. Text parts should not repeat the names of existing modules (for example /users/, /mailbox) to avoid possible links disruption for other modules.
3. Dynamic blocks should take turns with text blocks in order to avoid confusion and appearance of broken links.

Adding a text block:

Some URLs do not need any dynamic parameters, example: http://site.com/users/agent-index . This URL can only refer to the account page of every authorized agent on the site. In order to change this link you simply type some text to replace /users/account.

Some URLs require dynamic parameters, for example user profile page that we have discussed above. The link editor will contain pre-set options that you only need to click to edit and indicate the default value if prompted:

Optional blocks can be deleted from the URL. To delete, click on the block area and then click Delete icon:

When you click on the block area, it switches to the edit mode. You can edit the fields and save (), delete (), or cancel () the changes in case a block cannot be deleted.

Some blocks can change their position in the URL. They are marked with dashed line and you can drag-and-drop them around (with reasonable restrictions, see Tips above).

Blocks that cannot change their position are marked orange. Usually these are the first and the last blocks in the editable part of the URL.

2.1.3 Editing other parameters of the page

Metadata

– Title. Title stands for the information that is displayed on top of the browser window. It can be page name or name of the menu item etc.
– Keywords (meta tag). Insert the words and short phrases here that best describe the contents of the page/website.
– Description (meta tag). This field contains short description of the page. This is the information that can be displayed in search results page of a search engine.

It is possible to edit metadata in all available site languages.

Unlike the global metadata settings, you can use specific variables for each particular module. The list of available variables is called ‘Available templates’ and is placed just below the URL manager. E.g. variables for the /admin/seo/edit/users/view link:

[name|By default] [fname|By default] [sname|By default] [user_type|By default] [user_type_str|By default] [unique_name|By default] [contact_email|By default] [contact_phone|By default] [location|By default]

or

[id|By default] [operation_type|By default] [operation_type_str|By default] [property|By default][location|By default] [country|By default] [region|By default] [city|By default] [address|By default][section|By default] [pdf|By default] [headline|By default] [price|By default] [status|By default] [sold|By default]

Every link has its own set of variables, generated by the module. Multiple languages are supported here as well.

H1 header tag

H1 tag marks the main header of a web page. It is an important information that helps rank your site pages in the search results. Be sure to include relevant keywords into the header.

Multiple languages are supported. You can also use the page variables (available templates) in the H1 tag field.

No index

No index setting stands for closing the page from being indexed by search engines. Tags noindex and nofollow will be added to the page. The same can be done using robots.txt file (see below for more info).

Open Graph

You can use page variables in og:title, og:type and og:description too.

2.2. SEO Analytics

Indicate your site domain here to collect the information about your site index status. Please note that when you do it for the first time, it may take a while till the information is gathered.

Domain age is received from the Whois service.

PageRank stands for the site ranking in Google.

The information here can be incomplete due to certain access restrictions. Use webmaster tools in corresponding systems for more details.

2.3. Tracker

If you use Google Analytics, indicate your account ID. You can also use tracking codes from other providers.

2.4. Robots.txt

All the changes will apply to the file in the root folder of your site.

For more details check http://www.robotstxt.org/robotstxt.html .

2.5. Sitemap

Generating an XML site map may take some time as well. The contents will be saved in the file sitemap.xml in the root folder of your site.

The purpose of sitemap.xml is to help search engine crawlers learn about your site pages, their importance and update frequency. Please keep in mind however that it is more of a prompt and not a command for the search engines.

Note that if you already have one such file, it will be rewritten after the new generation process.

If your site contains over 50,000 pages, the site map will be split into several files: sitemap.xml, sitemap2.xml, and so on. In this case a sitemap_index.xml file will be necessary. The system will generate this file automatically and place it into the root folder of your site. When you submit your site to search engines, indicate the path to the sitemap_index.xml file.

For more details check http://www.sitemaps.org/ .