Where to insert Meta Description & Keywords

Where do I need to insert a Meta Description and a Meta Keywords?

Obviously on web pages like:

  • index.php
  • article.php
  • blog.php
  • profile.php
  • member-listing.php

But do I need to add them to things like:

  • log-in.php
  • log-out.php
  • activate.php (no html)
  • change-password.php
  • update-member-profile.php

In this second set of web pages, many of them either lack HTML or they require a user to be logged in.

Could someone help me understand this topic better?

Thanks.

Meta Keywords are now redundant, most probably due to technology being able to glean content from the full web-page rather than an author’s suggestion.

If you subscribe to Google Webmaster Tools then you will be inundated with the following:

HTML Improvements

Last updated Apr 2, 2015

Addressing the following may help your site’s user experience and performance.

Meta description Pages

Duplicate meta descriptions

Long meta descriptions

Short meta descriptions

Title tag Pages

We didn’t detect any issues with the title tags on your site.

Non-indexable content Pages

We didn’t detect any issues with non-indexable content on your site.

Google requires a single web-page to start crawling and produce detailed results.

Edit:
To reduce the number of Google SEO errors and to prevent any pages from being crawled, use the following:

  <meta name="robots" content="noindex,nofollow" />
  <meta name="googlebot" content="noindex, nofollow" />
  <meta name="msnbot" content="noindex, nofollow" />
  <meta name="slurp" content="noindex, nofollow" />

@John_Betong,

Interesting comments about Google, but it doesn’t answer my main question…

Meta Description and a Meta Keywords are hidden and not required to render any HTML pages. They are only used to increase your “SEO Brownie Points.”

Which pages would you like to be crawled and added to Google’s index for search benefits?

Please also note that the description tag will most probably be shown in search page results but may be changed at Google’s discretion,

As stated you don’t need to use the keywords meta tag since it’s long been redundant.

All meta tags go between the head tags in your documents:

<head>
<title>My page title</title> 
<meta name="description" content="This is an example of a meta description blah blah">
</head>

You don’t have to use meta descriptions either, Google in particular don’t use these for ranking purposes any more but may use one, or part of one, if it can’t find more relevant text in your document that better matches a search query.

If you feel your site would benefit from them just add them to key pages, ie home page, there’s no real need to add them to things like profile pages, member listings, login/out, password resets and so on.

For single entry pages (like an article or blog post) you could add unique meta descriptions if you wanted, but search engines are more likely to use extracts from the story to match the search query.

You might also find these detailed guidelines from Google helpful:

1 Like

Understood.

That’s what I’m asking you! :wink:

I always seems to struggle understanding how spiders work…

First of all, what is the difference between a “bot” and a “spider”?

This is how I think it works…

Google lands on your Home Page, and its spiders look for all links on the home page. It then navigates to each of those linked pages, and on each of those pages repeats the process.

Now what I am failing to understand is how Google handles dynamic links and pages.

You see, most of my client’s website is dynamic and database-driven.

For instance, let’s say a person went to the “Outdoors” section. My PHP would go to the database, and find links to all current articles and content about “Outdoors”. So the links would be built by PHP.

In other places, I have lots of pages related to a users account: Reset Password, Update Profile, Check Balance, Manage Friends, etc.

In those scenarios where web pages are not hard-coded, it is unclear to me what Google can and cannot see.

It is also unclear to me if I would need things like Keywords and Descriptions for the pages? :confused:

Right, and so I want to control as much as what Google has to show and say about my client’s website. (And to your earlier point, I don’t think “organic” keywords and descriptions are enough!)

The goal is to give people who search for my cleint’s website the most accurate and relevant material possible. (I just HATE website that don’t use < title > tags or where search results come up and it is some cryptic text - sometimes even with markup tags - to where you don’t know what the page is until you click on the link.)

This is not about playing the SEO game. Rather, it is about taking all of my hard work developing things, and all of my client’s hard work writing articles and product dscriptions and so on, and making sure Google displays it in the best light possible.

For my “article.php” page, I believe I put in PHP fields for the meta Keywords and meta Description so that depending on the article, it will pull appropriate words fro the database.

But for things like a log-in page, or a member profile or a change email page, and so on, I am unsure what Google even sees, and if it makes any sense to have to add these meta tags.

See my confusion?

Thanks.

I would have thought it was pretty obvious that you don’t want Google to index these pages, in which case, of course, there is no need to add meta description. Just block them in robots.txt and forget about them.

It also looks at all the text on a page, and takes a copy of the text which it then uses for search results.

To a search engine spider a link is a link, it doesn’t matter if it’s hard coded or generated automatically by a system.

Google will probably look at those pages, but will probably ignore them anyway since they don’t really have any value for web searches.

You don’t really have that much control over what what Google uses. Google will often pick a chunk of text from a page to use in a description and that can change depending what someone searches for. Also Google doesn’t always your exact page Title either.

At the end of the day

  • provide unique and useful/descriptive page Titles
  • on key pages add a meta description to describe the page contents
  • let Google sort the rest out, it does a rather good job!

Most of your points have already been clarified or beneficial site links to follow.

Which pages would you like to be crawled and added to Google’s index for search benefits?
That’s what I’m asking you! wink

Without seeing page content I can only hazard a guess and give a loose answer in trying to cater for every eventuality. e.g. your initial login screen may have details concerning site security, spamming, user benefits, typical solutions to new users, etc. Would you like Google to know how take care of your users?

I always seems to struggle understanding how spiders work…
First of all, what is the difference between a “bot” and a “spider”?

Wiki has an excellent answer to your question.

Now what I am failing to understand is how Google handles dynamic links and pages.

Google only sees final and rendered results from a user’s query. For instance if you have a site about cats and one user search for “black cats” and the other for “white cats”. How will you display the results? Care must be taken to prevent the resultant two pages, with different content, from both having a common title and description. i.e. “Title: Your Search Results”, “Description: Found the following pictures which may be of interest”. It is not easy with dynamic pages to try and tame the Google Beast from spotting your oversights. Treat the Google Bot as your friend and try and work with it because there is little chance of trying to change the system.

The goal is to give people who search for my cleint’s website the most accurate and relevant material possible…

This is not about playing the SEO game. Rather, it is about taking all of my hard work developing things, and all of my client’s hard work writing articles and product dscriptions and so on, and making sure Google displays it in the best light possible.

“This is not about playing the SEO game.” OH but it is!.

Search Engine Optimisation is making the best use of rendering your content, conform to standards such as having a relevant, unique title which must be not be too short and less than approximately 150 characters, similar for your unique description which can have about 255 characters. Pages which are not linked to your home page are best offered to crawlers in a dynamic Sitemap.xml (don’t forget about your black and white cats!)

Crawlers prefer fast rendered pages, with a http_response_code() of 200. Only then will the Crawlers submit your “hard work” to their database. If you have unique content then it will be probably appear on the first page of a user’s request otherwise may not even be in the top 100. There is a lot of very good competition to beat so best of luck, it is not easy.

If you had a free website about cats then most of your questions would have been resolved :cat:

Edit:
Google is not the only one out there, Bing has an alternative with some different features.

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