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hey again,
I think I’ve noticed something that could be improved and make a massive SEO boost for Symbio contributors…
Unless people are hand crafting product short descriptions (which is ideal, but time consuming), there is no easy way to auto generate them for SEO plugins like Yoast SEO. Thus Google just guesses, and not well often. If there was the same text that gets added to the page content on uploading an image (taken from the “Description” field of the image metadata) put straight into the Product Short Description field, then you could use Yoast with a variable like %%excerpt_only%% in the meta template for products to generate the page description based ONLY on that, and not on what else Google sees around it. This would lead to much better meta descriptions in Google, and would allow the user to control more of what shows up. So in summary – can you add the ability to auto generate the Product Short Description on upload, getting the data from the images “Description” field?
Hope that makes sense 🙂
One additional thing too: site:www.microstockman.com look at it in Google images to see only my sites images. Click on a bunch of the stock ones and you’ll see quite often the name and description doesn’t match the image. Its grabbing wrong data and applying it to the image. I think its getting it from the related images section of the product page, and even from sidebars where I display some images next to blog posts.
Anyone else found the same? Thoughts?
Regarding the first thing – in most sites that use Symbiostock, you’re just using the description field anyways for all the meta descriptions, so is what you’re suggesting adding a means of shortening the description so that it fits the meta description more accurately?
Instead of %%excerpt_only%% why don’t you just put %%description%% and let the SEO program cut it off?
As for #2, this is entirely dependent on how Google reads your site, and therefore based on your navigation and theme. This site for example:
has all the proper titles and descriptions showing up for it in Google images. It may also take some time if your site is newly launched.
Thanks for your responses Robin.
As for the first one, does %%description%% work for anyone else with Yoast SEO? It does nothing for me and I cannot see it listed as a variable on their page: http://kb.yoast.com/article/146-yoast-wordpress-seo-titles-metas-template-variables – thus my suggestion
I use %%excerpt%% and it works.
I don’t use Yoast, but upon looking it looks like Redneck is right – %%excerpt%% should auto-generate it from the post content. Let us know if that works.
Interesting – when I look at my site, the descriptions are generally OK, but the title is always “Backyard Stock Photos.”.
In Yoast, I have my Titles and Meta set up like this:
Is this right, and is there some other setting to force a rewriting of these settings across the product pages?
Steve
has all the proper titles and descriptions showing up for it in Google images. It may also take some time if your site is newly launched.
I’m not 100% sure if this works but this is what I did in my website. Just provide “Alt Text” in your images in Media Library
I recalled this in an earlier post from Redneck. For some reason I have two media sections as you can see above so I changed both to this and then checked force rewrite titles in the General Tab. I’m sure that will take some time, but I’ll see what happens.
Sure.
WP Admin Panel
SEO – Titles & Metas – Post TypesPosts- Title template: %%title%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
Meta Description Template: %%excerpt%%
Meta Keywords Template: %%tag%%Same for “Pages”.
Media
Title template: %%title%% %%page%%
Meta description template: %%excerpt%%
Meta keywords template: %%tag%%The YOAST plugin should rewrite the meta data right away.
For the meta data of static pages use Pages template.
For meta data of product pages use the second “Media” template.For some reason it didn’t on mine. It looks as though I had the right settings, but the source of each page simply said Title – Backyard Stock Photos. After doing that force rewrite, all of them have the correct title, but, naturally, Google Images still shows Backyard Stock Photos. I’m sure over time it will catch up.
Well if nothing else we got a conversation going! 🙂
So %%excerpt%% works it seems, but for some reason it doesn’t show up the detail in the snippet preview on the product page. But when I inspect a published page it is showing the right info in the meta description field in the header, so thats good.
The down side is, being auto-generated you can’t really control too much what gets put in there. It seems from some of my indexed images in Google it has grabbed all sorts of data like price, tags etc. to fill the space. So a more foolproof method would be to put the image description into the Product Short Description field upon upload automatically, then use the %%excerpt_only%% variable which forces only the excerpt to be used.
Also, same with what amazeindesign said earlier, wouldn’t it be great if upon upload the images meta description got used as the alt tag for all of the media related to it, rather than at the moment it seems its just using the image title for both Title and Alt tags.
I guess what I’m saying is, all the media we upload has meta data embedded in it. So is there some ways we can better use that automatically for SEO? Open to ideas…
Also under the Yoast – Advanced – Permalinks tabs you might want to consider (for those using it) ticking the “Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL” option, from what I understand, as WordPress makes a ‘post’ of every image uploaded, which is just an ugly, useless page with a small image on it which can be indexed by Google. We don’t want people landing there, rather on the product page.
Do I understand that correctly, Robin?
The down side is, being auto-generated you can’t really control too much what gets put in there. It seems from some of my indexed images in Google it has grabbed all sorts of data like price, tags etc. to fill the space. So a more foolproof method would be to put the image description into the Product Short Description field upon upload automatically, then use the %%excerpt_only%% variable which forces only the excerpt to be used.
Yes, you can. You can type whatever you want to into that meta data template. Text or variables. If you use the variable %%excerpt%% it will read out and publish whatever you have in the IPTC caption field which is automatically written into that WP text field. So basically, keep your IPTC data organized (I do it in Lightroom) and WP and Yoast will automatically do the rest for you.
However, and that’s one thing you can’t completely control, Google reserves the right to adjust search listings and replace text of meta titles and descriptions to whatever they seem fit in their own search results.
So don’t sweat the SEO thing too much. Make sure you have a good and relevant meta title and description (matching the actual text on your pages/posts and try to avoid repetitions. And add new content on a regular basis. Google will do the rest.
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