A Creative TypePad SEO Hack
May 21, 2008
This article reprinted from the the TypePad Hacks Weblog. The original article can be found online:
http://www.typepadhacks.org/2008/05/a-creative-type.html
© 2008, John T Unger
John and I came up with this interesting hack the other day when we were talking about search engine optimization for TypePad blogs.
There's a field in the TypePad post editor called "Keywords". If you don't see the field when you're in the post editor, click on the "Customize the display of this page" link at the bottom of the editor. That will bring you to a pop up window where you can specifically choose to see the field, or you can choose the "Advanced" screen configuration, which also will enable the display of the Keyword field.
The purpose of the Keywords field isn't terribly obvious. And if you're like me, you probably figured since the field was near the Technorati tags, it had something to do with internet search or was SEO related.
It doesn't have anything to do with either.
But if you re-purpose the field, it could. What if you put comma separated key words in it, then took those key words and put them in the <HEAD> section of your individual archives ("permalink") pages with a <META> key words entry? That should be pretty straight forward since the key words are kept in the MTEntryKeywords variable.
All you'd have to do is edit up the head-common module in your Advanced Template set, then use the MTInclude command to insert the module in the Individual Archives template. This would be the only template where I think the customized Key Words would be appropriate. Leave all the other templates alone.
That should give you a customized <META> key words entry per post!
I suppose you could use the same concept if you wanted to create custom, dynamic <META> description entries on a post-by-post basis instead of Key Word entries.
SixApart people (I know you're reading) - if you re-purpose this field in the standard templates, you can still use it for what it was meant for in the first place. Then, give us another field in the editor and another MT variable to hold the <META> description text. This would give a nice little SEO boost to individual posts.
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More Like This: TypePad Hacks
Michigosh says:
I have done exactly this on my personal blogs & several others I've created for clients over the past 2-3 yrs. It works! Although it can be a chore to input a string of keywords for every post.
I've also re-purposed the Keywords field for some other alternate uses, in one case to display a thumbnail (instead of the entry title) on the individual page navigation. But I'm curious, if SixApart didn't originally intend that field for SEO purposes, do you know what the heck was its purpose?
Posted: May 21, 2008 10:28:32 AM
Dave Weiss says:
That is a STUPENDOUS idea - diplaying a thumbnail is a brilliant use. You could even use that hack to do the author images like we do on a per-post basis. That solution wouldn't be automated, but it could be fun.
What other things could you do with this? How about some creative ideas from readers?
BTW, the key words are meant for internal search. When you want to search your blog from within the TypePad service, you can search for key words. Handy if you have hundreds or thousands of posts that you'd have to wade through to find the one about "x" topic.
Posted: May 21, 2008 1:35:16 PM
Preston says:
I've honestly been stringing keywords in that thing for probably a year without knowing what it did. Any idea what the purpose of it actually is (before re-working it for some other purpose)?
Posted: May 21, 2008 8:51:55 PM
Dave Weiss says:
See my comment above.
Posted: May 22, 2008 3:42:44 AM
Dave Weiss says:
@Michigosh: Thanks so much for the spark of an idea. John and I had been going back and forth for about a month on how to implement his Emoodicon idea.
By taking my idea of the per post keyword hack and mixing it with your idea to display a thumbnail, we hammered out a great solution for displaying the Emoodicons.
John writes about it here.
It's a really great feeling when you can come up with an idea, have someone add in a twist that you didn't think about, then come up with something that is even better.
Posted: May 29, 2008 5:31:44 PM
Tin Pig says:
I've also used that keywords field a few times on other blogs. I love the thumbnail idea.... clever.
Posted: May 29, 2008 8:43:30 PM
Michigosh says:
@David & John: Wow, yes, it sure is a good feeling to see my idea grow beyond me — I'm really glad to have inspired you! But I think the real credit should go to Chris (www.smallworldmedia.co.uk) because he's the one who inspired me, by discovering that TP fields can be re-purposed & publishing his hack several years ago in the now-defunct TypePad Users Group. I remain grateful to him & all the other early TP users who blazed the "hacking" way. Not to mention you both for continuing the path....
Posted: Jun 1, 2008 12:37:06 PM
Chris says:
Thanks Michigosh! For anyone that's interested, here's my original post on hacking the different fields in TypePad: http://www.smallworldmedia.co.uk/weblog/2004/04/organising_data.html
Posted: Jun 2, 2008 3:55:58 AM
Family Travel Girl says:
David, great article. Would something like this help solve the problem of having the same meta description show up for every Google indexed page? This duplicate meta description error is driving me nuts! -- FamilyTravelGirl
Posted: Jun 9, 2008 3:23:46 PM
Dave Weiss says:
Keyword meta tag, description meta tag, whatever you want!
The general idea you should take away by reading the comments is that you can put whatever you want in that Keyword field and use it however you'd like to use it.
It's an "internal" field with a use within TypePad. It has no bearing on the outside world unless you make it so, as I proposed in this hack.
Caveat: If you use this field for something other than what it was meant for, that functionality will be affected. So @Michigosh's use for storing a thumbnail would kind of hose the concept of Keywords being a internal search mechanism. But seeing that the field rarely gets used (and people don't even know what it's for), re-purposing it probably is not that big of a deal for most users.
Posted: Jun 9, 2008 11:23:10 PM
Dave Weiss says:
But to answer your question, yes, it would help tremendously.
For people who think meta tags have no bearing on the search engines anymore, they are very mistaken, as you see from your results.
Engines take that meta tag description and plug it right into their index, although I think that is typical for newer pages that have not been fully indexed. I don't have empirical evidence for that statement, only my experience of working on SEO projects for the past 4 years.
Posted: Jun 9, 2008 11:27:44 PM
James says:
not to sound dense, but i'm wondering if David can elaborate a bit on the procedure here. I did the dynamic tags hack successfully, but I'm having trouble with the jargon used to describe how to do this one. can you describe with a little more detail what exactly you do where? thank you so much.
What if you put comma separated key words in it, then took those key words and put them in the section of your individual archives ("permalink") pages with a key words entry? All you'd have to do is edit up the head-common module in your Advanced Template set, then use the MTInclude command to insert the module in the Individual Archives template.
Posted: Jul 13, 2008 12:51:48 PM
Dave Weiss says:
@James:
Go into your post editor. If you don't see the "Keywords" field, customize the display of the editor. Choose the Advanced setting to see all the fields available, or do a Custom setting and choose to view the Keywords field.
Keywords is the field that you can use creatively without messing around with any externally facing data. If you want META keywords on a per-post basis, enter them in the Keywords field separated by commas. If you want a per post META description, put short but descriptive text here. If you want to use a thumbnail or some other image on a per-post basis, put the image tag here, etc., etc.
Now, to get the data into the post's permalink HTML, you'll have to edit the individual archive template (you have to be using Advanced Templates for this). Go to the Design tab of your blog. Look for the template named Individual Archives. Open it.
You'll see all the code that is used to dynamically control the eventual page source for each post. The very first line of code pulls in the default TypePad < head > module for permalinks. This default module is called head-individual. Inside the default head-individual module, TypePad uses an include directive to automatically insert common HTML that all pages use into the < head > section of each page or post. The code they include is contained within the default head-common module.
See the documentation on these modules here.
So to make per-post META tags (keywords or descriptions) work, you'll need to create an edited version of the head-common module and paste it into a customized head-individual module. In other words, go to the link above, copy the head-common code, then strip out the part the pulls in the blog-level meta description or keywords - < $MTBlogMetaKeywords$ > or < $MTBlogMetaDescription$ > - and create code that pulls in the data that is stored in the post's Keyword field. That data is maintained in a variable called < $MTEntryKeywords$ >.
Example: Replace < $MTBlogMetaKeywords$ > with
(Remove the extra spaces I put in on either side of the dollar sign).
Now, go back to the same link above. Copy the code TypePad gives you for the default head-individual module. In your design, create a new template module. Name it head-individual. Paste TypePad's default code into template module body.
Where TypePad has the include directive that pulls in the default head-common code, you're going to want to replace that with the edited code you created earlier - the code with all the common head code which now includes the line with the MTEntryKeywords command in it.
Save your new head-individual module. You can publish that if you want to, or you can wait to publish all the changes at once.
Finally, go back to the individual-archives template. Remove TypePad's call to include the default head-individual module and replace it with a call to include our new, edited one.
< $MTInclude module="head-individual"$ >
Save and publish.
That should do it.
Of course, if you're going to use TypePad's Keyword field for some other use (like the thumbnail idea), you wont' need to bother with head-common and head individual - just edit the individual archives template as needed, using the MTEntryKeywords variable as necessary.
Still confused?
Some day, when we don't have a huge backlog of projects, maybe we will do a screencast for this or write up a more detailed post with screen captures and code.
Posted: Jul 13, 2008 11:53:22 PM
Dave Weiss says:
Sorry.
TypePad stripped out my META tag code example. Hopefully, by adding a space before and after the greater than and less than symbols, it will show up in this comment.
Above, it should read:
Example: Replace < $MTBlogMetaKeywords$ > with < meta name="keywords" content="< $MTEntryKeywords$ >"
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 12:01:12 AM
James says:
Thank you, that sounds pretty straightforward. I'll give a shot. I noticed i'm getting more search engine traffic since doing the dynamic tags replacement, so hopefully this one will improve it further. Thanks again.
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 12:40:28 AM
James says:
Also: I'm assuming that as long as I keep this tweaked line the same in my new head individual file --
<$MTEntryTitle remove_html="1"$> -- <$MTBlogName$>
-- that this will not conflict with my prior tweak of switching around the name and post title to improve SEO? And that this tweak is additive to that previous one, and not a substitute? or is it?
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 2:52:22 AM
Dave Weiss says:
Good to hear search engine traffic is improving.
Of course, if you have hacked your templates already for things like title tags, you will have to incorporate those existing changes into the instructions I posted.
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 3:08:02 AM
Jeff says:
Thanks for the info here. (although it is definitely Not what I wanted to hear) I found this page thru a search on 'seo and typepad'. I'd been looking to see how to use that field correctly. It seems to me that using the term, 'keywords', for the field in question could only have been meant to deceive users into believing that the product they were paying for was more powerful. Whoever it was that chose to use the term had enough experience to know it would be quite misleading. Making mistakes is one thing but purposely misleading paying customers is another.
Can anybody give me a scenario where the the person who chose the term, 'keywords' didn't know better?
Sorry for the rant. I don't want to bring down the quality of this page.
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 5:23:16 PM
Dave Weiss says:
@Jeff:
You know, I'm always trying to post things that are helpful and I want people to be successful with their TypePad blogs.
But your comment can't be how you really feel, can it?
Maybe there is something else you're upset about - something that frustrates you with TypePad? I'll try to help with whatever issues you're having.
It's an internal search feature. It's useful. Even if you re-purpose the field and use it as mentioned above, it will still work internally. I could easily see that having a blog with 200, 2,000, or 10,000 posts would make it a little difficult to find a particular post you want to revisit or update.
We often suggest changes to TypePad, and they are happy to hear our feedback. Some suggestions make it into the product, some don't. Maybe this will be one of those things that gets incorporated.
Posted: Jul 14, 2008 6:20:19 PM
SEO Guide says:
David great information, thanks, I have been looking for this solution for a while. One question though. How come you have not done on this site. It shows the same description tag for every post on the blog. Thanks man.
Posted: Aug 1, 2008 5:03:24 PM
Dave Weiss says:
@SEO:
Good point on why we haven't done the hack on this site. I suppose it's a bit of "the cobbler's children go shoeless" thing.
We are victims of our own success, so the more work we do on others' blogs, the less time we have to work on this one. Every once in a while, you'll see a big update come through, mostly during down times when we don't have other blogs to work on or we just bite the bullet and crank out some updates.
We promise to do more as time allows.
There is so much content here that is good, each post seems to live on forever with new comments and questions, so that helps bridge the gap between bursts of change and new content.
Posted: Aug 1, 2008 6:43:32 PM
Garbanzo says:
Fantastic tip and many thanks! I extended this idea and used MTEntryExcerpt to fill in for meta name description and title. And while I was mucking around, I used another tip from this site to modify the page titles. With all three changes in conjunction, I'm sure that this will positive affect SERP.
Posted: Aug 1, 2008 10:53:56 PM
Mike says:
Great stuff. I've been wanting to add keywords but since Typepad only uses them internal searching I hadn't bothered. After reading your post I was about to add them by copying the Technorati tags in the the keyword field and re-publishing every post. Time consuming to say the least.
I was going to use the Technorati tags since they are in effect keywords for Technorati so my keywords for search engines would be the same.
Being the lazy type I decided that instead of re-purposing some code it would be easier to multi-purpose some instead by reusing the Technorti-tag module code. The technorati tags would work the same as before plus be used as keywords.
In the head-common module I changed your line of code to:
< meta name="keywords" content=" < MTEntryTags glue=", " > < $ MTTagLabel $ > < /MTEntryTags >" / >
[spaces added before the greater and lesser than symbols so it will hopefully show in the post]
This seemed to work very well as I now in a few seconds have all the keywords I've wanted on my post.
Thanks for guiding the way
Posted: Aug 18, 2008 8:45:26 PM
Dave Weiss says:
Yay Michael!
Now you're getting it! You'll be a full-on TypePad Hack in no time.
There are all sorts of things you can do if you just think outside the box a bit or take a step back and look at all the different MT tags and parameters that are given to you.
And with the flexibility of the Advanced Templates, you can do tons more stuff instead of just using out-of-the-box functionality.
Let me know if you come up with anything else that might be useful.
Posted: Aug 19, 2008 11:13:36 PM
Kate says:
I hate to come on hear and plead the novice card, but i think i have too, sorry David, but even your expanded explanation just goes over my head. Is there a simple, step by step version available anywhere.... (simple to the level of step 1 - open design tab, step 2 - ....)
I've managed to add the horizontal nav bar and the footer using your hacks, but this one just confuses me! Help, please! :)
Posted: Sep 10, 2008 7:22:55 AM