Metadata and Search Engine Optimization

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is the practice of crafting your web content in order to make it easily found by a search engine, improving its position in search results. SEO should be ingrained in the entire content of your webpage, but Drupal offers two fields allowing you to customize and improve your content's search results: Title and Description.

These fields can be accessed in the "Meta" menu on the right side of the Content Editor.

• Title: By default, the SEO Title populates from the content's Title field. Using a different title for SEO can allow you to use a more specific title that is more helpful on search results. For example, your content might be titled "Faculty and Staff," but changing the SEO title to "Chemistry Faculty and Staff" could make search results more useful to readers.
  
  Custom SEO titles should be limited to 65 characters, including spaces.
  
  If changing the title field, erase only the "[node:title]" section of the title and replace it with your text. Your finished SEO Title should be formatted as "YOUR TITLE HERE | [site:name]".
  
• Description: In most content types (all except Landing Pages), this field is populated by the content's "Summary" field. The Summary should already be search engine optimized, as it is used in the colgate.edu search engine. This means that most Summaries should not need to be changed for general SEO. 
  
  If you wish to add a custom Description, erase "[node:summary]" from the "Description" field and enter your custom Description in the field. The Description should be limited 150 characters, including spaces.
  
  When creating a Landing Page, you will need to input a Description.