Incorporating site-wide meta tags into an Umbraco CMS website (SEO tip)

For search engine optimisation a common method is to use meta tags in the head element of each page.  It’s obviously trivial to introduce a site-wide meta description and keywords but usually each page should have different content for these.  This post is simply the way I have found to be successful to easily have meta description and keywords set in an Umbraco CMS for each page. 

1. First of all create a new Document Type in Umbraco’s settings called “Meta Tags”.
2. Add a custom tag to this called “Meta Data”.
3. Create a new property named “Meta Description” (default alias will be “metaDescription”) in the Meta Data tab
4. Create another property named “Meta Keywords” (default alias will be “metaKeywords”) in the Meta Data tab

 

Now you have the Document Type “Meta Tags” and this has no Allowed Templates so cannot be used alone to create a content page.  From now on, any Document Types that you would like to have meta tags on, you can use “Meta Tags” as its Master Document Type.  This will introduce the “Meta Tags” properties automatically to this page.

To add the meta tag mark up to your page, you can insert the following in the head tag of your master page: 

And if you would like a page to inherit meta data from a parent page you can change these to:

 

Now you can easily control what meta tags are defined on every page from one Document Type.  Of course you could take this even further and generalise the “Meta Tags” Document Type to accommodate many more site-wide content you want to control for all pages from one place.