Thread

I am looking to move one of my websites over to EE but I have some concerns regarding the search engine friendliness of EE.

I have looked at a few of the EE powered websites in your showcase and I have seen that all of them display the same keyword and description meta tag information for every page on the website.

This is obviously a big problem in getting your site ranking well in Google.  Are there any hacks or plugins available to rectify this problem?

Regards

That’s not actually correct. Google does not even use meta data for indexing and ranking. Meta tags stopped being used years ago due to massive abuse. Virtually all big search engines stopped using them altogether. Some SE do use the meta description tag, but that’s just for defining the resource.

As for using specific items for meta tags, you can surely do that with EE! You can make the title of your topic be the keywords, you can make the summary of an article the keywords as well. Basically you can use any part of an article to place into any area of a webpage. Including in the header and meta tags.

I thought it’d be great to find a plugin that filtered common words to clean it up, but then I found solspace and used the tags module. That way whatever the article is tagged as, those words can be placed in the meta tags. But again, since they aren’t used anymore I just sort of blew it off.

I don’t agree with you that the ‘description’ and ‘keyword’ meta tags are not relevant anymore.  Nobody knows for certain what the search engines use to rank pages and I do not want to take a risk by using the same tags across the whole of my website. I do not want to end up with a duplicate content penalty by any of the search engines.

Also I know how important the description meta is in the search engine listings, if you have a well written description it can make the difference between someone clicking on your link or the other links on the page.

Wikipedia explains the relevance of the meta tags better than me…  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meta_element

Thanks for the link to the tagging module, it looks very good.

I might have been unclear what I meant. I believe that the description is used. But only to show as a result. Not to index.

From that page:

[edit] The keywords attribute
The keywords attribute was popularized by search engines such as Infoseek and AltaVista in 1995, and its popularity quickly grew until it became one of the most commonly used meta elements[1]. By late 1997, however, search engine providers realized that information stored in meta elements, especially the keyword attribute, was often unreliable and misleading, and at worst, used to draw users into spam sites. (Unscrupulous webmasters could easily place false keywords into their meta elements in order to draw people to their site.)

Search engines began dropping support for metadata provided by the meta element in 1998, and by the early 2000s, most search engines had veered completely away from reliance on meta elements, and in July 2002 AltaVista, one of the last major search engines to still offer support, finally stopped considering them[2]. The Director of Research at Google, Monika Henziger, was quoted (in 2002) as saying, “Currently we don’t trust metadata”[3].

No consensus exist whether or not the keywords attribute has any impact on ranking at any of the major search engine today. It is being speculated that they do, if the keywords used in the meta can be found in the page copy itself. 37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta attribute keywords is little to none[4].

Anyway, I agree that it’s a bad idea to ignore them altogether. Which is why I originally got the tags module. I also agree that nobody knows how google actually does manage ranking. Course I guess the reality is, if they made it public the first thing that would happen is people would abuse it!

you can, as mentioned, also put the summary only in your meta ‘description’ or ‘keywords’. that’s one thing that’s really gret about EE. you can put things anywhere with very little effort.

here’s how I added my keywords using the tags into meta keywords:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}"}
<meta name="keywords" content=" {exp:tag:tags entry_id="{entry_id}"}{tag},{/exp:tag:tags} "/>
<meta name="Description" content="{title}"/>
{/exp:weblog:entries}

If you wanted to use just the summary of your article to add to the description you can do that like this (which of course doesn’t require doing any add-ons):

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{master_weblog_name}"}
<meta name="description" content="{summary}"/>
{/exp:weblog:entries}

FYI obviously I don’t work for EE, so they could easily have better responses for you

I actually have a couple of extra fields in my publish page and so I can put in whatever keywords and description I like ...

then, in the entry/index/static or whatever page I’m using, I put the following in the header ... thus, I can have whatever I want for each page

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="{my_weblog}" disable="categories|category_fields|member_data|pagination|trackbacks"}
<title>{title}</title>
<meta name="description" content="{meta_description}" />
<meta name="keywords" content="{meta_keywords}" />
{/exp:weblog:entries}

If I want to be really fancy, I can set up a set of DC tags in some templates and add descriptions and keywords to them too ..

AND, if I want to use a separate {page_title} custom field in the publish form, I can have a real fancy <h1> tag that is different from the {title} ..

In addition .. if I’m using the static page module, I can put whatever I like in the url so that I can make a url with all of my keywords .. you can even have a template group with a Keyword as a subdomain

<a href="http://keyword1.mydomain.com/keyword2/keyword3/keyword4/keyword5/keyword6/">http://keyword1.mydomain.com/keyword2/keyword3/keyword4/keyword5/keyword6/</a>

actually, I don’t personally have such url’s, but it is possible .. depends how many keywords you want in your url.

So .. very simply .. the possibilities are endless and its up to your ingenuity to find how you can achieve this in EE ... and the framework will do it automagically..

not all of the EE sites in the showcase are made with people who have an SEO obsession

I have looked at a few of the EE powered websites in your showcase and I have seen that all of them display the same keyword and description meta tag information for every page on the website.

This is obviously a big problem in getting your site ranking well in Google.

Actually, it’s not. Still, depending on your setup it is no problem at all to create individual meta tags for individual articles. No hacks required.