What is the perceived wisdom on the use of meta tags and descriptions.
My own site has around 48 portfolio pages linked from the different areas of work the represent, call this the parent page. (4 parent pages with 12 portfolio pages)
Would you add the same meta tag and description to the portfolio page as the parent page or is this overkill?
You might do better to search the FreewayTalk forum website on this topic -
it keeps coming up and the answers stay much the same.
Straight and simple - meta tags and descriptions are nearly useless, search
engines do better when your site has meaningful (semantic) text content to
tell them what you’re all about. That means meaningful alt tags for images,
less graphic text and more actual text, enough text to create a coherent
outline of the message you wish to convey. There are several tools for even
the casual web designer to use to “see” their pages like a search engine
does.
Best wishes,
–
Ernie Simpson
On Thu, Jun 27, 2013 at 4:49 PM, Mike Thornley email@hiddenwrote:
Hi All
What is the perceived wisdom on the use of meta tags and descriptions.
My own site has around 48 portfolio pages linked from the different areas
of work the represent, call this the parent page. (4 parent pages with 12
portfolio pages)
Would you add the same meta tag and description to the portfolio page as
the parent page or is this overkill?
I would globally call this SEO - Search Engine Optimization.
The key here to understand is what happened in the past:
Assumed you are Madonna fan and started a search for her. I am pretty sure you ended up in a ranking like that:
See Madonna naked
Meet Madonna in your neighborhood
…
Clicking on one of them even brought you to a local car-reseller. Hää?
What happened?
All “optimized” pages had popular keywords (and descriptions) that often had nothing to do with the real content behind (armies of students did this for small money for SEO companies).
I think nothing to add.
A todays page requires another strategy, which has to ensure a certain content/structure relationship.
The easiest is:
Page Title and H1-Tag has to match so:
Welcome to the Stone Oven Pizza Baker - the original in Whatevercity.
as Page title
Welcome to the Stone Oven Pizza Baker - the original in Upper town.
is basically signalizing that the expected content is closer to the real one. Then you can add some keywords (pizza, italian, stone oven) if you want.
Walter once said:
Be honest to google, and google will be honest to you.
I love this and since I read it the first time, I keep this ALWAYS in mind.
Naturally there are a couple of more methods to do, but type in SEO and you’ll find various infos.
I’m no expert, for sure, but I just finished redoing a site that had 8 pages into a FW site with 36. I went through nearly every page and DID add meta descriptions, using guidelines from Dan Jasker’s video from a while back. The site went live just a week ago and I’m getting daily Google alerts on the changes. Of course, it doesn’t hurt that in the Google ecosystem (by which it basically owns everything) I’ve also added Google+ to the mix.
But to reinforce the comments of others, I think the key is still good content and content high up with clear descriptions of what the page is about.