Adding Meta Description and Keyword Tags to Your Template

If you want people to find your blog then there is a lot you can do to help this happen. It all comes under the heading of Search Engine Optimization, SEO as it is generally known.

There are whole blogs and websites dedicated to SEO and a simple search for SEO will find many of them. One of the tools you can use is meta description and keyword tags in the head of your blog template.

Sometimes you will see advice that it’s no longer worth using these because search engines no longer take any notice of them. This was brought about by web designers and site owners stuffing the keyword lists to try and trap anyone who entered any word at all into the search engine.

A few years ago a friend of mine once complained that his father was having trouble finding anything about his hobby. He was a keen bird watcher and he wanted to find sites with information about it. No matter what search terms about birds, bird watching or ornithology he entered into the search engines he was always directed to porn sites because of keyword stuffing.

As a result of this keyword stuffing some of the major search engines like Google deprecated these meta tags in their search engine results. In general they tend to ignore these tags and will probably penalise your site if you have been stuffing your keywords list. But, many of the search engines out there still do use these tags so it is worth including them in your template.

Blogger does not include these tags in their templates, and neither do any of the third party templates I have looked at. However, adding them is easy and I have seen advice that it can be done by quite simply adding the following tags immediately after the title tags in your blog header.

DON’T DO IT!

Yes, that is how you do it for an ordinary website. The rule is that the description and keywords should be appropriate to each page. If you simply copy the tags containing the same keywords and description to every page the search engine will conclude that you are trying to spam it and will most likely ban your site. Your site will not appear in any search results.

Blog software uses the same page layout for every page and therefore, as the search robots crawl through your blog, they will find the same description and keyword list on every page. You will probably be classed as a spammer and the blog you have worked on so hard will not show up in any search results.

The solution is simple: All you have to do is surround your description and keyword meta tags with the conditional tags highlighted below. This will ensure that the tags will only be included in your Home page.

<b:if cond='data:blog.pageType == "index"'>
<meta content='' name='description'/>
<meta content='' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>

You do, of course need to write the best possible description of your blog between the inverted commas after content in the description meta tag.

For the keywords tag you will fill in the most appropriate list of keywords or phrases for your blog separated by commas. Below, under the highlighted section, is what I added to this template today.

As you can see I have also included words both with and without capital letters and a few misspellings. This is to take into account that sometimes searchers are often in a hurry and don’t type the words correctly. Occasionally they do not spell the words correctly because they are not using their own language to search in English or one of the many other languages used on the Internet.

Finally, SEO is a constant process. You should regularly check your keyword list and description and, if necessary, revise them to get the best results. It is entirely possible that I will have made several changes before you read this post.

Technorati Tags: SEO,Tags,Templates,Keywords,Meta tags,Descriptions

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