Meta Title and Description settings explained
Each Guide can have a meta title and meta description included. This text doesn’t show in the guest view but will be used by search engines and link previews on social media sites and instant messaging. You can update the standard meta title and meta description for your guides at the Account level or set it at guide level if you want different details to be attached to different guides.
Table of contents:
- Setting the meta title and meta description at Account level
- Setting the meta title and meta description at Guide level
- Indexing
Setting the meta title and meta description at Account level
To set the meta title and meta description for all of your guides go to the Account tab and then the Branding page. Click Edit on the Meta title and Description section. Here you can view the default template meta title and description text or edit to add your own.
When updating the meta text, you can include your guide name as a short code, this will then populate the guide name in place of the short code in the meta text. This is particularly useful when updating the Account level settings so that the meta text is customised to each guide. The short code to use is {{guide_name}} – it must be EXACTLY this code with both the curly brackets and should NOT contain your actual guide/property name, use the code EXACTLY as {{guide_name}} and it will then populate automatically.
Setting the meta title and meta description at Guide level
To set the meta title and meta description for individual guides go to the Guides tab to view the Guide Details page. Click Edit on the Meta title and Description section. Here you can change the meta title and meta description just for this guide.
Indexing
As standard, all Touch Stay guides have a “no_index” flag in the meta data. This tells search engines, such as Google or Duck Duck Go, not to index them or return them in search results. Note that we never make any guide links public but if you, or one of your guests, posts a link to your guide on a social media site, or any other website, then Google and other search engines will find it.
If you are adding your Touch Stay guide to your own website and are happy for Google and other search engines to find it and return it in search results then you can switch off the “no_index” flag.
This setting is not available at the account level and must be done on a per guide basis through the “Meta Title and Description” options on the Guide Details page.
WARNING: If you decide to index your guide and later change your mind it is not an instant process for your guide to no longer be available through Google search. Please use this option with caution and only if you are confident of the impact it will have. If you are unsure at all, then we recommend not changing the default setting.