Dedicated (meta) title tag

[brynwhyman]

With the desire to have an accurate page title for SEO purposes, it's pretty common to want to set a meta title tag that's different to the page title that's saved in the CMS.

Currently, the framework sets the title tag to inherit the page title. I think that's a good default as it requires no further action by the content author but for many, modifying this shouldn't require a Developer to set up a custom field (IMO).

It would be nice for the CMS to have a dedicated field to add a meta title tag on the base page. If a value was entered here it would override the default page title value.

Docs on how this currently works here: https://docs.silverstripe.org/en/4/developer_guides/templates/common_variables/#meta-tags

[kinglozzer]

We had this in core in 3.0, and it was removed (I can’t remember why, but it still seems short-sighted to me!), so I copied the functionality out into a module: https://github.com/kinglozzer/silverstripe-metatitle. I’d be in favour of adding this back in to the CMS module - it doesn’t make much sense IMO to include the option of custom meta tags but not include a simple meta title field.

[christopherdarling]

Agree with @kinglozzer use his module on every site

[brynwhyman]

@kinglozzer I think the functionality in your module as it stands would make a great addition to the CMS module.

[chillu]

I've removed this way back in the day because it didn't strike me as a baseline CMS feature, and can easily be handled in a module. In hindsight, I might have underestimated how many authors and site owners value this feature for SEO purposes. Note that you can already distinguish the navigation title (often shorter, shown in menus) from the page title (often longer, shown in page body, browser title, search engines, CMS page tree).

Could you describe the use case for a third way to set the title? Note that Google recommends using <title>, and even in its create good titles advice only references <meta description> rather than <meta title>

[kinglozzer]

Could you describe the use case for a third way to set the title?

It’s usually for SEO - not necessarily ranking these days, but often as a one-line sales pitch - where the content you want to use wouldn’t make sense as an h1. E.g. bigfork.co.uk has a <title> of Bigfork - Digital Marketing & Web Design Agency - Norwich & Cambridge, and that’s what shows up in Google search results, but the h1 on the page is different. It’s probably possible to achieve the same with hidden h1s, but I think that’s generally frowned upon

Note that Google recommends using