Data Center Hub

Modx 0.9.X and 1.X have a default keyword manager that you may manually apply to each page but it is rather clunky to use, requiring each keyword entered manually first to the list, then manually applied to each page.

An easier way to do this is to create a Template Variable for the keywords and add it to the default template for the site. You can apply a default list to all pages and then manually edit each page to fine tune your keywords and descriptions.

Keywords first:

As site admin on the Modx manager interface you should first create a Template Variable (TV) called keywords, caption of Meta Keywords, default text of “type your keywords for the page here”, input type “text“, Input Option Values blank, Default Value; enter a list of your site-wide default keywords separated by commas. E.G. “Web Servers, Web Hosting, Dedicated Servers” etc. Tick off “Lock the template variable” leave Widget and Sort Order blank, Tick off your templates to use the TV, choose a Category E.G. Modx Default Templates and save it.

Now go to your template and add the following

<meta name=”keywords” content=”[*keywords*]” />

Save the template, clear the site cache and view your page. All the pages using this template should have the default keywords now. If you pull up an individual page and edit in the manager interface, you should see the keyword list which you can customize for each page. If you already added keywords to your pages- don’t forget to deselect them and save the page for each page you have applied them to. You don’t want to have keywords added twice.

Now add the Description Meta data-

Adding Meta description is even easier- just add:

<meta name=”description” content=”[*description*]“/>

to your Modx template; if you entered a description into the description field when creating your document, you should see this in the HTML source for the pages of your web site.

BASE HREF tag

Don’t forget to add a BASE HREF tag to your site so that all links are built relative to your site root, regardless of how the site is called. This can be helpful if you have another domain as an alias for your site.

<base href=”http://www.domain.com/”></base>

Replace www.domain.com/ with your site root URL.

301 Redirect

You should use a 301 redirect for sites that might be viewed using the domain name (domain.com without www) rather than the host (www, etc) name. How to do this varies depending on your web server. Here is an article I wrote on both 301 redirects and BASE HREF.