New V6 feature - Custom Meta Fields

[Ray]

This is a powerful new feature of Zoom V6, and given the number of people asking us about this, we thought it would be nice to elaborate on it a bit more.

The feature is documented in detail in the V6 Help file (under "Indexing your website" -> "Custom Meta Search Fields").

The Custom Meta Fields feature in V6 allows you to create a database-like search criteria for your website or online shop. This means you can have additional search fields like "Price", "Author", etc. for each item. It effectively means you can use Zoom to build simple custom databases with a multi-criteria search without actually having a database.

You will need to specify these fields and their values in the HTML of the pages being indexed. You do this with meta tags like the following:

<meta name="NUMROOMS" content="1">
<meta name="PRICE" content="300000">
<meta name="SUBURB" content="Sydney">
<meta name="AGENT" content="Bob McGuinn">

And then you setup Zoom (on the "Custom Meta Fields" panel of the "Configure" tab) to correspond to these fields so that it knows how to pick these up.

We have a demo site here (http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/demos/fruitshop/) that shows this feature in action.

And there's a tutorial here (http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/support/tutorial_custom_meta_fields.html) which goes through in detail how this demo site was setup. We recommend looking at these two links in conjunction with the V6 Help file.

[Jimbot]

Using the above example, if there were three agents selling the property...

Bob McGuinn
John Smith
Jane Doe

can the content in the head section be defined like this...

<meta name="AGENT" content="Bob McGuinn, John Smith, Jane Doe">

[wrensoft]

It needs to be defined one value per line.
<meta name="AGENT" content="Bob McGuinn">
<meta name="AGENT" content="John Smith">
<meta name="AGENT" content="Jane Doe">

And you need to select the Multi-select field type in the Zoom configuration window. See the help file for additional details.

[Ray]

It depends on how you want the "Agents" to be searched. If you want a list of options on the search form, then you'd want the Multi-select method as explained above.

If you want a text box that the user types into, then you could potentially do it as you mentioned here:

can the content in the head section be defined like this...

<meta name="AGENT" content="Bob McGuinn, John Smith, Jane Doe">

But make sure to have "Partial (substring) text match" enabled for that meta field.

[andysiddell]

If you wanted to be able to use a drop down list of agents, instead of the multi-select method, but still have more than one agent per page, how would you do this using the multi select option?

[Ray]

You would do that by specifying the meta field type as Multi-select in Zoom, and creating your own search form HTML so that the user interface to it is a dropdown rather than a multi-select box.

The advanced search page (http://www.wrensoft.com/zoom/demos/fruitshop/cgi-bin/advanced_search.html) for the fruit shop demo is an example of using a self-made search form rather than an automatically generated one.

[andysiddell]

Thanks Ray, that works a treat!

Andy

[renee]

It depends on how you want the "Agents" to be searched. If you want a list of options on the search form, then you'd want the Multi-select method as explained above.

If you want a text box that the user types into, then you could potentially do it as you mentioned here:



But make sure to have "Partial (substring) text match" enabled for that meta field.

I would like to use the feature described in the quote. But the reply states "you could potentially do it". Does that mean it may not be accurate? I want users to type their search term into a text box.

[Ray]

I would like to use the feature described in the quote. But the reply states "you could potentially do it". Does that mean it may not be accurate? I want users to type their search term into a text box.

Well the reason I said that is because partial text matching does not ensure that each value is considered separately. This means "red" will match "fredrick" and "winfred". But if this is acceptable for you, then it may be a reasonable solution.

[renee]

Well the reason I said that is because partial text matching does not ensure that each value is considered separately. This means "red" will match "fredrick" and "winfred". But if this is acceptable for you, then it may be a reasonable solution.
Thank-you Ray for the quick response.

My main concern was listing too many meta tags in my html document. I didn't want to go over any limits as far as SEO is concerned. I'm not sure if there are any limits.
On the average my pages will have a "Zoomimage" and up to five "Zoomcategory" tags and up to three meta name tags for custom meta fields. Also, the usual title, description and keywords.

I thought using a comma to separate category names might seem a little less cluttered.

Does partial text matching consider each value separately when listed in a separate tag?

Also, are you aware of what number of tags is recommended for SEO?

Thank-you - Renee

[Ray]

Does partial text matching consider each value separately when listed in a separate tag?

Yes. This requires the "Multi-select" type to be selected for that meta field, which allows the user to select from each individual value.

Also, are you aware of what number of tags is recommended for SEO?

As far as I know, there are no search engines penalizing pages for having too many META tags. It would make most sense that they would ignore meta tags they do not recognize, as it would be the case here.

[renee]

I am a new user of Zoom and inexperienced, but regarding my earlier post about separating values in the "Zoomcategory" meta tag I wanted to allow visitors to type search terms into a text box (no selections).

I briefly experimented with the tags. I could comma separate values in the meta name tag for a custom meta field and my search would work, but if I did the same for the "Zoomcategory" tag it would not work for me. I tried a comma and a semi-colon.

So, I guess just to be on the safe side I will list each category in its own tag as suggested in the Help examples.

Thank-you again - Renee