Improve Virtuemart 1.1 metatags & SEO - Joomla & VirtueMart Tips & How To's

GJC Website Design UK, Joomla Developer, VirtueMart Developer, Template Developer, web site designs, England, Britain, UK, Belgium, search-engine optimisation (SEO). Multilingual.

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VirtueMart 1.1
Metatags

Below are some simple hacks to improve your VirtueMart 1.1 metatags especially the html title.

Html titles are critical to good search engine visibility and the meta description and meta keywords play a part as well. The standard Virtuemart 1.1. does make an effort to reflect the product in the metatags and html titles but just lists the product name as html title and the site global meta keywords. The product short description is used as the meta description so make sure that is relevant.

The standard metatags in our example would be:

Virtuemart 2.0 shipping module Postcode - ZIP code

and metatags of:

website design, Joomla, Templates, web site design, England, Britain, UK

But these can be improved with a couple of simple code hacks.

Firstly name the categories and if possible the manufacturers with some of your keywords - in my case things like Virtuemart, Joomla, Extensions etc.

virtuemart metatags_category_manufacturer

virtuemart metatags_category_manufacturer

This just allows us an easy interface to add the required keywords keywords.

Then open file administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.product_details.php around line 235 and replace this code:

// Set Dynamic Page Title
if( function_exists('mb_substr')) {
  $page_title = mb_substr($product_name, 0, 64, vmGetCharset() );
} else {
  $page_title = substr($product_name, 0, 64 );
 
}
$vm_mainframe->setPageTitle( @html_entity_decode( $page_title, ENT_QUOTES, vmGetCharset() ));
 
// Prepend Product Short Description Meta Tag "description"
if( vmIsJoomla('1.5')) {
  $document = JFactory::getDocument();
  $document->setDescription(strip_tags( $db_product->f("product_s_desc")));
} else {
  $mainframe->prependMetaTag( "description", strip_tags( $db_product->f("product_s_desc")) );
}

with

// Set Dynamic Page Title//GJC
$category_name = $ps_product_category->get_name_by_catid($category_id);
$manufacturer_name = $ps_product->get_mf_name($product_id);
if( function_exists('mb_substr')) {
  $page_title = mb_substr($product_name, 0, 128, vmGetCharset() ).'|'.$manufacturer_name.'|'.$category_name;
} else {
  $page_title = substr($product_name, 0, 128 );  
}
$vm_mainframe->setPageTitle( @html_entity_decode( $page_title, ENT_QUOTES, vmGetCharset() ));
 
// Prepend Product Short Description Meta Tag "description"
if( vmIsJoomla('1.5')) {
  $document = JFactory::getDocument();
  $document->setDescription(strip_tags( $db_product->f("product_s_desc")));
  $keys = str_replace('|',', ',$page_title);
  $document->setMetaData("keywords", $keys);
} else {
  $mainframe->prependMetaTag( "description", strip_tags( $db_product->f("product_s_desc")) );
}

This will give a html title of:

Virtuemart 2.0 shipping module Postcode - ZIP code|Virtuemart 2.0 Plugins|Joomla Downloads

and metatags of:

Virtuemart 2.0 shipping module Postcode - ZIP code, Virtuemart 2.0 Plugins, Joomla Downloads

Much better.

This idea can also be extended to the Category page (Browse page in Virtuemart speak) especially if your category description is relatively simple. You could use some string replacement to tidy the title.

virtuemart metatags_category_browse

Open file administrator/components/com_virtuemart/html/shop.browse.php around line 73.

Replace

if( $category_id ) {
  /**
    * CATEGORY DESCRIPTION
    */
  $db->query( "SELECT category_id, category_name FROM #__{vm}_category WHERE category_id='$category_id'");
  $db->next_record();
  $category_name = shopMakeHtmlSafe( $db->f('category_name') );
 
  // Set Dynamic Page Title
  $vm_mainframe->setPageTitle( $db->f("category_name") );
 
  $desc =  $ps_product_category->get_description($category_id);
  $desc = vmCommonHTML::ParseContentByPlugins( $desc );
  // Prepend Product Short Description Meta Tag "description" when applicable
  $mainframe->prependMetaTag( "description", substr(strip_tags($desc ), 0, 255) );
 
}

with

 
if( $category_id ) {
  /**
    * CATEGORY DESCRIPTION
    */
  $db->query( "SELECT category_id, category_name FROM #__{vm}_category WHERE category_id='$category_id'");
  $db->next_record();
  $category_name = shopMakeHtmlSafe( $db->f('category_name') );
 
  // Set Dynamic Page Title
  $desc =  $ps_product_category->get_description($category_id);
  $desc = str_replace(' & ','|',$desc);
        $desc = str_replace(' - ','|',$desc);
  $pagetitle = $desc."|".$db->f("category_name");
  $vm_mainframe->setPageTitle( $pagetitle );
  $desc =  $ps_product_category->get_description($category_id);
  $desc = vmCommonHTML::ParseContentByPlugins( $desc );
  // Prepend Product Short Description Meta Tag "description" when applicable
  $mainframe->prependMetaTag( "description", substr(strip_tags($desc ), 0, 255) );
  $keys = str_replace('|',', ',$pagetitle);
  $document = JFactory::getDocument();
  $document->setMetaData("keywords", $keys);
 
}

This will give a html title of:

VirtueMart|Joomla plugins|Joomla modules|VirtueMart 2 shipping plugins|Joomla Downloads

and metatags of:

VirtueMart, Joomla plugins, Joomla modules, VirtueMart 2 shipping plugins, Joomla Downloads

Last Updated on Saturday, 12 January 2013 13:35

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Improve Virtuemart 1.1 metatags & SEO|Joomla & VirtueMart Tips & How To's

GJC Website Design UK, Joomla Developer, VirtueMart Developer, Template Developer, web site designs, England, Britain, UK, Belgium, search-engine optimisation (SEO). Multilingual.

category, product, description, desc, title, virtuemart, page, html, joomla, meta, mainframe, substr, metatags, keywords, document, tags, plugins, strip, replace, short, shipping, code, vmgetcharset, set, dynamic, prependmetatag, tag, keys, str, downloads, setpagetitle, prepend, getdocument, jfactory, module, pagetitle, postcode, simple, zip, vmcommonhtml

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