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With regards to SEO - what is the perceived wisdom on meta tags, first page only or all pages?
MIke


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It depends what you expect them to do for you.

First of all: meta keywords are useless and a waste of your time, seo-wise. They’ve been abused heavily in the past, so none of the major bots trust them at all – they are just ignored.

However, a well-written meta description (200 characters or less, including punctuation and spaces) will form the explanation text shown below search results for that page. Each page’s description should be tailored to that specific page, but it can contain some boilerplate to link your site together. This is particularly useful for Freeway sites, as the code can be structured so as to have very little to do with the actual content until way further down the source, which can lead to some useless image alt text appearing as your page description.

Walter

On Mar 28, 2012, at 1:55 PM, Mike Thornley wrote:

With regards to SEO - what is the perceived wisdom on meta tags, first page only or all pages?
MIke


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Hi Walt

Do you have any examples?
Mike


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Good Service Guide has a pretty extreme set of meta tags, and ranks consistently well.

Note that on pages where the custom description hasn’t been set, the defaults take over, so you will see pages with the same description as one another, but the CMS I wrote allows the owner to set custom keywords and description on each listing. At the time I wrote this (6 or 7 years ago) the keywords were still a done thing. If I was doing this today, I would drop them for the most part.

Walter

On Mar 28, 2012, at 2:45 PM, Mike Thornley wrote:

Hi Walt

Do you have any examples?
Mike


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Regarding SEO I follow a simple rule Walter once formulated here:

“Be honest to google (bots) and google (bots) will be honest to you”

A few things as result I do is:

Page description (as written above) and H1 tag complement each other (including page-title). So I add (even if useless) a handfull keywords additional.

Semantic code:

Avoid style1, style2, style123 and item1, item2, item64

Read your items, such as header, css-menu, left-content, welcome-box, columns, sidebar, footer and try to imagine how this page could look like. If you can imagine, a machine probably can do, too.

Using single H1 each page,

using H tags to what they’re built: Headings

the rest is paragraph

As a result of all that, I have a certain satisfactory feeling doing my best creating readable and well-structured pages. The rest is not in my hands … !

Cheers

Thomas


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