I have a client who has hired an SEO company to do some work on their site. The site is built with WordPress and uses ECT. They seem to be unable to make changes on the store pages. I have copied their email to me - could anyone suggest what I should say back to them to help get this working correctly?

Here is their email to me:

There are currently a few issues that would prevent us from continuing our work:

As you said before, the site uses WordPress as well as VSAdmin. Some pages are edited in WordPress whereas others (product categories) are edited via VSAdmin. The WordPress access that was given works, but only lets us edit non-eCommerce pages--like the home page.

The product categories are broken in VSAdmin: i.e. changing things like meta data on these pages does not actually work. We have access to the PHP code making up VSAdmin, but the code is very terse and not well-documented.

In order to make the changes that we'd like to make, would you be able to fix product categories in VSAdmin so that all the fields work (like meta title, meta description, category description, etc.)?

This is for .php, but I expect it will work for wordpress.
Your product, categories, and proddetail pages will need some code the will pull in those changes the SEO company will make in your admin

https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/seo/dynamic-title-meta-php.asp

David

Hi Kelly, I've been in that situation and only gave WP access as for the ect I requested that they let me know what they wanted to change and I made the changes to the content such as added category headers or adjusted product description based on their recommendations. Outside third parties tend to only know WP themes / woo../ Yoast You can install if you have not already the ECT seo plug-in https://www.ecommercetemplates.com/wordpress/wp-plugins.asp to cover the meta tags and sitemap and they should be able to work with that. You could also setup a separate admin login with access only to the categories and if needed products. I prefer to keep admin login to as few as possible. The one time I did allow admin login to a third party they mucked things up. One word of caution - these companies out-souce some of the work so the company hired might not be the company doing the work. I've had to remove bad back-links that were causing my client a problem with the big G, once I requested the removal of those links the site was back in Google.

Winners never quit, quitters never win
CSS and Responsive Designs
User Manual for Ecommerce Templates

Great advice from Sinbad there.
This - "You could also setup a separate admin login with access only to the categories and if needed products." is what I did for a company I work with.
I also turned on notifications when that admin is logged into.
This serves several purposes.
I am able to see them logging and doing work, and I get the IP address so I can see that they are actually doing the work and not farming out to another person from who knows where as Sinbad mentioned.

David

Regarding the link from dbdave - I'm not sure what I should be adding to the store pages. Here is my "categories.php":

<?php
$GLOBALS['ectcartpage']='cart';
require('./wp-blog-header.php');
get_header();
?>

<?php if(get_option('wpg_sidebar_opt') =="left"){ ?>
<style type="text/css">
body {
background-image: url();
}
</style>

<div id="content-area" class=" leftsidebar">
<?php get_sidebar(); ?>
<?php }else{?>

<div id="content-area" class=" rightsidebar"><?php } ?>

<div id="main-area">
<br /><?php include "vsadmin/inc/inccategories.php";?>


</div> <!-- #main-area -->

<?php if(get_option('wpg_sidebar_opt') =="left"){ ?>
<?php }else{?><?php get_sidebar(); ?><?php } ?>
<div class="clearfix"></div>
</div> <!-- #content-area -->
<?php get_footer(); ?>

Is there something I should be adding to these pages to make this work for the SEO company?

Would installing the ECT SEO plugin be the best answer? If I do install that plugin, are there specific things I'll need to do after it is installed to get it to work correctly?

Thanks!