Not a developer? Go to MovableType.com

How can I generate appropriate meta tags in my posts?

Asked by Rick
Posted March 17, 2012, in Featured.

Back

2 Answers

Rick on March 17, 2012, 6:00 p.m. Reply

Hamid,

From an SEO perspective, the meta keywords and meta description are fairly useless, mostly because they are not displayed in the browser.

For SEO, you want a good descriptive title. Usually this can be derived from page titles and your blog name like this:

<head>
    <$mt:include module="HTML Head"$>
    <title><$mt:PageTitle encode_html="1"$> | <$mt:BlogName encode_html="1"$></title>
</head>

Use different code on index and category archives.

In some cases Google will use the meta description as an alternative description when presenting page results. So creating a good description can be worthwhile (although I don’t see evidence that it affects page rank). For this, a custom entry or page field should work. That can be accomplished with the Custom Fields plugin included in MT Pro, or my MoreData plugin, or a custom plugin. Or you could even use the EntryExcerpt field if you weren’t planning on using that for anything else.

See Google Webmaster Tools blog post Meta tags

I don’t see any such mention of meta keywords as a factor in page ranking or to serve any useful functions whatsoever.

The reason that the page title tag contributes to page rank is that it is transparent. The title is displayed on browser tags for example.

The best way to boost page rank is to have fresh, engaging, relevant, well structured, and transparent content on your website. Also you need quality inbound links to your site. The rest is “gimmicks” in my opinion. Google’s job is to cut through the gimmicks and give their visitors good search results.

How can I generate appropriate meta tags in my posts?

2 Answers

Rick

Ask An Expert

View Questions by Status