Meta Tags and the Search Engines

One of the more valuable plugins or native facilities of a CMS (Content Management System) is the "Meta Tag" facility.

A "Meta Tag" is a part of the HTML of a page that is not generally human readable. It is there for the benefit of machines that read the page and interpret its contents. The tag might tell the machine what character set to display the page in, if the page has been moved - and how to find the new page, if the page is the "original or canonical" name of the page rather than one of possibly several different names - so the search engines don't index the page more than once and lower the search ranks because of duplicate content. Or the Meta tag can be information about the page so the search engines correctly categorize the page and show a reasonable description. 

This latter type of tag is what I'll talk about in this article - the Meta Keywords and Meta Description tags.

In glFusion, the "metatags" plugin provides the functionality to define specific keywords and description on an article by article basis. It allows the author (or editor) to add one or more of several types of meta strings to the document that will show be included in the HTML each time that document is displayed. 

The exact syntax of how to use this facility is not relevant at this point - it may be different in your CMS - what is relevant is what to put in them and why.

The Description meta tag is used by many search engines as the description of the page when you find that page through use of the search engine. 

Ends up with the text showing up in Google:

The description is what I put into the article's "meta:desc" tag. Note that Google will many times use the sentence that has the key words in it rather than the actual description meta tag you give it, unless the key words are actually in the meta description tag. Other search engines will use the description contents no matter what the key words used in the search are.

The "Keywords" tag highlights the key words you think are relevant in this article. Note that many/most search engines today lower your page rank if you put key words into this tag that are not also in the text of the article. In fact, most of the search engines discount the keywords tag in their algorithm or ignore it all together - but it is useful to put it in if you have the information anyway as there may be some search engine, somewhere, that uses it. 

The problem with the keywords meta tag is that it was so heavily abused in the past (putting the names of rock stars and other highly placed page topics into your keywords tag gave you high rank, even if your page was just spam or about collecting navel lint) that the engines simply figured out how to pull the key words from the article text. You also don't need to worry about putting synonyms in since the search engines these days are quite capable of looking for synonyms when you put your request into their search bar.

The one thing you really don't want to do is use a site-wide "default" set of key words or descriptions unless you've been pretty consistent with putting the real keywords and description meta tags on most of your content already. Having the same on all pages can lower your site's rank.

Tag: cms keyword description glfusion google search engine optimize page rank meta tag