[archive] phpBB SEO Dynamic Meta Tags

nims

Though many of you will disagree but I strongly feel Google and Yahoo still use meta tags such as "keywords" and "description" along with "Title" tag to rank websites in search results.

I have myself experimented with my website and seen it follow the keywords and description to great importance. There are some sites that use a particular keyword extensively in these tags and are thus rated on the top, even though they do not have much usefull content inside. Sad

So IMHO we shud also concentrate on this very important MOD. Smile

dcz

You are right.

Meta tags are not considered enough these days. I mean, it is true once adding the keyword tag was almost enough to show up first in search engine and that now, it's very different, but this is far to mean they are not useful.

Actually, Google does use the meta tags and it's not only a matter of providing with description and keywords tags. When you tell your website is rated "general", and actually tell it's open for indexing, you are in some way lowering the Google responsibility.
I mean, otherwise, it would be only Google to chose how to rate and select a category for your web-site.
It's not really like if they cared, since they claim to index all web-sites, but still, it could become more important to tell such information as the Internet will be more and more regulated.
If you look at this thinking about lows and responsibilities, by adding the index follow tag you clearly give the right to Google to keep copies of copyrighted content from your site in it's cache and, by stating the category, you do not let him alone in taking the "risk" to output results from your web-site to every users.
You say your site is ok for PG 13, then, it's not as much Google's responsibility to have shown this page to someone younger than 18 or 21.

Meta descriptions will be used by Google as a general description of the page for general queries such as : the site command
But it will still be able to show the part of the text matching a more specific query.

What is to avoid is too long meta tags and worst, same Meta's for all pages.

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nims

So that makes this MOD worth updating Smile

I hope once you are through with your Google Sitemaps MOD ( I guess the most important at this moment ), you might consider working on this MOD so that we all can thank you once again Wink

Keep up the good work buddy.

dcz

It's already as is a good enhancement, as all content in meta tags will be actually found in the page.

As well, the title should (I mean, we cannot do much about bad content) contain the most important keywords of the post and be descriptive. With good content quality, this can give us some pretty good and short meta tags which is a good thing.

For example, the idea to grab some part of the first post to build up a description is not this good I think, because a lot of interesting post starts with un-interesting content, such as "hello, so yes you are right, this bla and bla", before the interesting :"now let me elaborate more on this precisely".

Here, the keywords the most likely listed are the one being the most used in the forum being as well being inside the post content (all of it). So if you go through the search table optimizing process and run a well organized forum with good content, you'll end up with very good keywords in the meta tags, as keywords should really be keywords anyway, thus used a lot in the forum.

Besides, if meta are not dead, it's not a reason to go for the absolute perfect meta for all pages, would be useless SEO wise I think.
The important matter here is dynamic, honesty (the content is related to them) and efficiency, few server load for dynamic meta everywhere.

Anyway, I'll update this and will add some more features, but it will not further what is really necessary and useful SEO wise.

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HB. · PR0 Joined: 26 Oct 2006 Posts: 62

dcz

exactly

HB. · PR0 Joined: 26 Oct 2006 Posts: 62

After I installed this MOD it appears nothing is showing in my description for my topics. Do you know what I should look for to correct. All I'm getting is

dcz

Well it should work, could be your editing to have done something, please check, and if not enough, post here the mod's code you've got in page_header.php.

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HB. · PR0 Joined: 26 Oct 2006 Posts: 62

Lets make sure I have this right

dcz

Well yes.

A link would help out to check here.

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Politicsinfo · Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 2

Hi!

First of all: congrats with the job done. It's a great mod with a lot of potential.

I've just installed it and it works great.

However, I have one little remark. I find the "description" tag could be improved.

Now, when viewing a topic in phpbb, this is the generated code:

$description = $board_config['sitename'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['cat_title'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['forum_name'] . ' :: ' . $meta_row['topic_title'];

But I've noticed Google (and Yahoo) prefer to display results with a more extended description. Also, an extended description is more attractive for people looking at the search results.

For example, a search on Jacques Chirac (French president - winks at author)

results in:

dcz

And welcome Very Happy

Actually, if you look at your example ( Laughing

) case, the little text selected by Google as a description is not the meta description content :

Politicsinfo · Joined: 17 Dec 2006 Posts: 2

AmirAbbas

dcz

This is already scheduled Wink