SEO on rooms/properties

Hi Chris,

Thanks for your message. We do not provide direct integrations or support for specific SEO plugins, but we follow the WordPress guidelines to make use of the WordPress official pages/posts for every content generated through our plugin VikBooking.

As long as your SEO plugin is able to provide tools for the various WordPress pages/posts, you should be able to configure your settings properly, by making sure to have enough contents generated through VikBooking.

For example, the link you posted shows a page of type “Room Details” that could not be rewritten in a SEF way. This is why you read the query string value ?roomid=51. Your VikBooking listing with ID 51 is probably missing a dedicated Shortcode of type “Room Details” that is linked to a page of your website. Also, I would recommend checking the type of page/shortcode at the URL /holiday-home-details because by visting that URL we get the details page of a different listing (room-type ID in VikBooking).

What we suggest in these cases is to set up a Shortcode of type “Rooms List” in VikBooking and link it to a page of your WordPress website. This would get you a URL similar to /holiday-homes (or anything similar for the page slug), and when clicking the listing with ID 51 (listing name is “St Finian’s Bay Hideaway”), the URL would be rewritten to /holiday-homes/st-finians-bay-hideaway. You could easily achieve this configuration by adding a new Shortcode of type “Room Details” in VikBooking, by selecting the proper “Rooms List” as parent shortcode, and by adding a website page with this Shortcode (you could use either Gutenberg and our apposite block-type to create new pages of specific VikBooking types, or you can just use the apposite button “add to page” in the Shortcodes management page).

Once you get all URLs correctly configured, you can use any third-party SEO plugin to work on the various contents, but we suggest having a dedicated page, hence shortcode, to each listing.

We hope this helps! Also, feel free to reach out to our technicians through our website should you have any additional questions.

The VikWP Team

Thank you so much for your help. I have passed this on to my client ??

This seems to be working. Its a bit of a rigamarole, as it would be better to have one template to dynamically create the pages. But it will do for the time being.

I have a separate question. On the live site here https://skelligholidayhomes.com/ you’ll see that there is a search function, this is using an Elementor element, I can’t seem to find out how they did this. Is there an Elementor element for VikBooking?

Also on my new installation, I get an odd error happening, where I load into the page on the backend and a modal popup background appears and never goes away. Any ideas why?

Also i’ve had a request to add to the search functionality a way to select location, does the search shortcode have a way to do this?

• This reply was modified 5 months, 1 week ago by Christopher Mitchell.

Hi,

We understand it can be quite slow to create one Shortcode for each listing, and then connect it to a website page, but the only alternative solution is using Gutenberg. In fact, VikBooking provides a native Gutenberg block of type “Shortcode” that allows you to quickly create a new listing details page by simply selecting the listing from the apposite drop down menu. Both solutions will work just fine, and if you need to handle several listings, then using the Gutenberg block may be a lot faster, but if you are using another page-builder plugin, then you may not have Gutenberg available.

Regarding the home page of your website: that must be the “Search Form” widget of VikBooking that was published through your page builder plugin. The so called “Legacy Widgets” have been converted into “Blocks” for the latest WordPress versions, but we still support the “Legacy Widgets”, and that’s what was published in the home page.

If you are looking to add a location selection/filter facility to the booking form, then we suggest using the “Categories”. You can manage them through the wp-admin section of your website with VikBooking by assigning multiple listings to a “Category” (location), and then every booking form (widget/shortcode/block) generated by VikBooking will have a setting to enable/disable the categories selection, which will serve as a filter for the search operations.

Lastly, the odd error you described sounds like a CSS conflict with Bootstrap between your Theme and the default VikBooking styles. Basically, there’s a modal window that never gets displayed. It’s the consent form to subscribe to the RSS feeds of VikBooking. By using the browser inspector tool you should be able to display the modal body and opt-in or opt-out from the RSS feeds so that the modal window will never be displayed again.

We suggest getting in touch with our technical assistance team through our website should you need any help with the categories filtering or with some CSS conflicts. Thank you!

The VikWP Team

That fixed the odd conflict error.

I will suggest the categories for locations. I will also look at the legacy widgets.

Thank you for your help ??