Customize SEO

Helios Calendar allows the creation of custom meta data and page titles for it's public calendar. This data can be edit within the Helios admin console.

• Indexing - Turn indexing on/off for the public calendar. When ON search engines are told to index¹ public calendar pages & events, when OFF crawlers are instructed to skip over the calendar and events.
• Hide After - Default number of days after the event occurs for it's details page expires metadata to “hide” the event from search engines.
• Sitemap Size - To improve sitemap access calendars with large numbers of events are divided into multiple event sitemaps. This setting determines how many events should be included in each sitemap (when the limit is reached an additional sitemap id generated).
• Bot Filter - Regex used to filter event views for bots/spiders/crawlers. When a match against this setting is made the view is NOT counted for event reports.

¹Indexing of a site in a search engine includes that site in the search results.

Supported Data

• Page Title - The title displayed in the browser window (and tab for many browsers).
• Meta Keywords - Not visible to visitors but used by some search engines to rank and/or classify site pages. (Comma Separated)
• Meta Description - Not visible to visitors but used by search engines to describe pages in search results.

Pages Supported

• Calendar Digest
• Event Browse & Location Event Browse
• Location Map
• Event Submission
• Event Search
• Event Search Results
• Newsletter Welcome
• Newsletter Subscription (New Sign-up, Subscription Edit & Cancel)
• Newsletter Archive (Browse Only)
• Email to a Friend
• Event RSVP
• Calendar Tools
• RSS Feed Builder
• Event Browse Filter
• Public Calendar Sign In
• Public User Account (Overview, Events, etc.)

To best optimize the structure of your calendar each page of the public calendar can be edited independently of the others, allowing you to fully customize your public calendar page titles and meta content.

For some pages Helios uses saved event or newsletter data. Event Title is used for both the Page Title & Description tag for:

Other Pages

Some pages within the public calendar are populated with user generated content but are not editable within the admin console Search Optimization settings.

Event Details & Event Series List

• Page Title = Event Title
• Meta Description = Event Description
• Meta Keywords = Event Browse Keywords

Location Profile

• Page Title = Location Name
• Meta Description = Location Description
• Meta Keywords = Location Map Keywords

Newsletter Archive (Viewing Individual Newsletter)

• Page Title = Newsletter Subject
• Meta Description = “[Cal_Name] Newsletter Archive Mailing From [Send_Date]”
• Meta Keywords = Not Used

Quality Not Quantity

In an effort to discourage spamming these fields Helios imposes reasonable limits on the amount of data that can be saved for each. In addition all code tags (HTML, JavaScript, PHP, etc) are filtered from the input before it is saved.

Recommended Settings

• Page Title: Up to 60 Characters
• Keywords: 10-12 words/phrases per Page (Comma Separated)
• Description: Up to 150 Characters

Note: While Google has publicly announced that it plans to continue ignoring the keyword meta tag there are other search engines that utilize it, to varying degrees. In an effort to maximize Helios Calendar's search engine friendliness Refresh has decided to include support for this tag.

Helios Calendar Sitemap File Locations

• Sitemap Index - located at: /sitemap/index.php (Contains All Helios Sitemaps)
• robots.txt - located at: /robots.txt

You may wish to include references to these files in your sites primary sitemap index and/or robots.txt file to aid in their discovery by search engines. If Helios Calendar is not installed on your site root the contents of it's robots.txt file can be (updated and) added to your root robots.txt file.

Additional Resources

About Search Engine Optimization - (Wikipedia)

Search Engine Specific Resources

• Google Webmaster Tools
• Bing Webmaster Center