Girl Geekette dotNet

At one point, meta tags were of the utmost importance to search engines. They became an essential part in ranking. That is - until meta tag abuse because widely used as false tactics for listings.

Currently, there are 2 meta tags that are very important when it comes to search engines. The keywords and the description meta tags are the essential ones to use.

When building a website, the hard part is knowing how to target your site for the keywords - for the keywords are what search engines will relate each page to. You want to place about 20 keywords at the most in each page in the meta tags. Also, you want to reuse the same keywords in your page itself in the text. If you use the same keywords in your description (The brief summary that will show up for that page in the search engine) and title, the keyword density (the number of times you use that keyword on the page) will become heavier and give that page a chance to be higher ranked.

Generally, with template websites, it is not easy to find 20 keywords that will be used on every page and have the same keywords repeat on every page to be relative in the articles. The best practice is to target the keywords on each page and have them change on every page.

For example: If your website is titled "Joe’s Camp Adventure", you might have 15 pages - one for each day. With most template websites, the same title would be on each page. The same description and keywords would be used on each page as well. If the description of the website is "The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999", and the keywords for the website are "camp camping, campfire, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" these keywords and the same title would repeat on every page.

If the first page in this website is "Monday, July 1st" and the text itself talks about going hiking along the river, fishing, building a campfire and sleeping outdoors then you want to use keywords from the text on that day. Per the above, the keywords "bear" and "fox" might apply to Tuesday’s camping day but not Monday’s. You would also want the title of that page to reflect "Monday July 1st" and not just the same generic "The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999" .

To do this, you would want to set the meta tag description on the first page to be similar to the title you would use on that page. It is also a good idea to use the same words in your keywords meta tag.

It is the best practice to have a different title, keywords and description for each page instead of a generic one.

Not So Good:

<title><Joe’s Camp Adventure></title>
<meta name="description" content=" The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999" />
<meta name="keywords" content="camp camping, campfire, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" />

<title><Joe’s Camp Adventure></title>
<meta name="description" content=" The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999" />
<meta name="keywords" content="camp camping, campfire, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" />

<title><Joe’s Camp Adventure></title>
<meta name="description" content=" The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999" />
<meta name="keywords" content="camp camping, campfire, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" />

Very Good:

<title><Joe’s Camp Adventure></title>
<meta name="description" content=" The Adventures Joe Had While Camping in the Summer of 1999" />
<meta name="keywords" content="adventures, camp, camping, snake, rainy, bass, water, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" />

<title><Monday, July 1st on Joe’s Camp Adventure - Fishing and Singing Around the Campfire></title>
<meta name="description" content=" The adventures of Joe’s camping trip while fishing and singing around the campfire Monday" />
<meta name="keywords" content="joe, adventure, camp, camping, campfire, fishing, singing, bass, water, 1999, Monday, July" />

<title><Tuesday July 2nd on Joe’s Camp Adventure - Hiking with a fox and a bear></title>
<meta name="description" content=" What it was like for Joe to hike with a fox and a bear during his camp adventure Tuesday" />
<meta name="keywords" content="camp, adventure, snake, rainy, July, 1999, hiking, bear, fox" />

As you can see, each page might have a similar word used throughout - Joe - but the keywords, description and title tags are tailored for each individual page and not one generic one used for each.

How I applied this:

In the original Aleeya.net, I used the same title, description and about 100 keywords in every page. What I have done with the new Aleeya dotNet has changed this.

I have each page tailored to have its own individual set of keywords. The keywords depend on the posts on the page. Each post has 4 keywords tied to it. Whichever posts show on a page, it will use those keywords for that page. This will give each page a new set of keywords and use combinations as well (For multiple posts on a page such as Archives or categories)

To make sure, I have set it so when a page is viewed with multiple posts, it does show a "generic" description, but when a single post is viewed, it uses the title of the post as the description and the page title. This will give individual pages an individual title and description. When a page is viewed in category form with multiple posts from that category, the category is used in the page title.

So, for now, in the new Aleeya dotNet, most pages have individual descriptions and titles. Every page will have individual keywords that are tied to keywords from each post. This will increase the chances of each keyword being searched for within the whole site from a search engine, and not just the same 20 for every page. Since you want each keyword to be relative to the text of every page - this way it will. They keywords for each post will be repeated in the text, title, and description. This in theory, should give keyword density (the number of times the keyword appears on each page) a heavier amount - which in turn will rank that page higher as an individual page. This in turn, will get more than just the main page spidered and each page linked to different keywords.

For further reading:
How to Use HTML Meta Tags
The Keywords Inside
Meta Tag Analyzer