CakePHP 2 1 3 SEO Meta Descriptions for individual pages vs default ctp

Question

My default.ctp which is located in \app\View\Layouts  contains my meta descriptions and keywords. I'm adding new pages to my site and would like to be able to customize the meta description and keywords just for these specific pages. Is there code that I can add to the individual .ctp files located in app\View\Pages that would then override the meta descriptions found in default.ctp?

Answer 1

Google will tend to prefer page contents over meta descriptions more often in case of the description duplicates on many pages, however, there doesn't necessarily have to be a correlation of course.

startIfEmpty() was introduced with CakePHP 2.3, in earlier versions, it would be necessary to test for an existing block manually, something like for example:

$description = $this->fetch('description');
if(empty($description)) {
    echo $this->Html->meta('description', 'Default description');
}
echo $description;

Specific page template
$this->assign('description', $this->Html->meta('description', 'Specific description'));