Meta Tags

siringo · Post by **siringo** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 1:33 am

Hi,

I'm reading up on search engines and optimising web pages for them etc. I've read that the most important meta tags to use are the Title and Description tags.

I've viewed the source of the pages I'm using in my blog and I can see the Title tag, but not the Description tag.

Can it be added, and if so, how can I add relevant content to it for each page?

Thanks,
Matt.

Post by **Don Chambers** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 3:47 am

2 choices. First - you could edit your template/theme's index.tpl, and in the <head> section, add something like:

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<meta NAME="DESCRIPTION" CONTENT="whatever you want enclosed in quotes">

you can also add something like:

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    <meta NAME="KEYWORDS" CONTENT="whatever keywords separated by commas, everything enclosed in quotes">

Second choice - I believe there is a "head nugget" plugin. It accomplishes basically the same thing without revising the index.tpl file.

Regardless of which option you select, you can also add this:

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    <meta NAME="revisit-after" content="1 days">

You might also want to google "robots.txt" for additional ideas.
A decent starting point for a robots.txt file (located in your website root) might be:

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User-agent: *
Disallow: /bundled-libs/
Disallow: /deployment/
Disallow: /docs/
Disallow: /htmlarea/
Disallow: /include/
Disallow: /lang/
Disallow: /plugins/
Disallow: /sql/
Disallow: /templates/
Disallow: /templates_c/
Disallow: /uploads/

The mere existence of a robots.txt file encourages search engine robots to visit.

siringo · Post by **siringo** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 7:42 am

Thanks for all the help there Don.

Is there a way to be able to add a description when I create the post or will I have to manually add it after each post is created?

Thanks again,
Matt.

woocha · Post by **woocha** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 5:46 pm

yeah man, thanks for the info. I was wondering if I could manually updat my meta info.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Sat Jul 21, 2007 8:45 pm

Hi!

Yes, on spartacus you can find a Meta keywords event plugin.

Regards,
Garvin

siringo · Post by **siringo** » Sun Jul 22, 2007 2:46 am

Garvin, how would I go about getting one of the smart people here to create a meta description plugin?

From what I've read, search engines don't bother with the keyword meta tag anymore, but they do like to read the title and description tags.

Thanks,
Matt.

Post by **garvinhicking** » Mon Jul 23, 2007 2:26 pm

Hi!

siringo wrote:Garvin, how would I go about getting one of the smart people here to create a meta description plugin?

Whats not good about the existing one? serendipity_event_metadesc...?

Regards,
Garvin