Set Meta keywords and description

[Meis2M]

Hello

this is the source code of phpBB:

11-Jun-14 18-05-16.png (18.51 KiB) Viewed 14281 times

Code: Select all

<meta name="keywords" content="" />
<meta name="description" content="" />

both of them is empty and not good.

i think it is better auto fill that by system , use the "Site description" from "Board setting" in ACP or define a option to set in "Board setting" to set that.
this is very useful for SEO.

[rfdy]

most search engines (or at least the ones that matter, ie. google) ignore keywords. description on the other hand is rather important as it's what google displays under the link in the results and should be descriptive and unique.

there might already be a topic about this somewhere.

[Pete77s]

It doesn't hurt. Google grabs content from the page if there is no description filled in and uses that for description in search result page.

[NeilUK]

Yeah google and yahoo and others have ignored keywords for a long time now, better off without them sometimes as while google say they don't penalise keywords as such if they come over as spam then the pages are deleted from google's index. Better to not use them at all. Google only reads text from the content of the page now and the description which I agree is vital.

[NeilUK]

It doesn't hurt. Google grabs content from the page if there is no description filled in and uses that for description in search result page.

While it does pull the description from the content if no meta description is filled in it does penalise the page quite heavily in pageranking terms for not having one

Duplicate descriptions are also very bad now as well, if you use Google Webmaster tools it lists duplicate and no description in "key errors"

[keith10456]

+1

I don't see how it hurts to have keywords listed. Site descriptions are definitely beneficial. However, there is the problem with duplicate descriptions though as Neil stated. Not sure if there's a way to remedy that considering that the site description is in the header.

[NeilUK]

+1

I don't see how it hurts to have keywords listed. Site descriptions are definitely beneficial. However, there is the problem with duplicate descriptions though as Neil stated. Not sure if there's a way to remedy that considering that the site description is in the header.

The reason Google first decided to ignore keywords was due to "keyword stuffing", basically people were putting loads of keywords in the meta tag and few of them were relevant. For example a gaming website putting "Pamela Anderson or Playboy" in the keywords. So google decided to simply ignore them and only use the content, so it actually finds it's Focus Keyword from each page itself. Some mods would be able to set a focus keyword as SEO for Wordpress does but by default google finds what it considers the focus keyword.

It doesn't punish people for meta keywords , as some from google actually said, it can't punish them for being there, the algorithm doesn't even know they are there! Simply ignores them

[rfdy]

It also appears that google has begun penalizing (or at least down ranking) user-created content, so the description on topic view pages might not actually do that much (especially since they could be rich in text). Meta descriptions on the index and forum view pages are the most important as those have content that changes most frequently. In that case the meta description should really be set to the description specified in the ACP as a backup. Ideally, dedicated meta description fields should be available for both the board in general and for each forum.

[hanakin]

keywords can hurt page rankings with some search engines its best to remove it completely but description is absolutely essential. However since prosilver is a base theme the description is not filled in by default. You are meant to fill it in for your specific needs

[Pete77s]

... if no meta description is filled in it does penalise the page quite heavily in pageranking terms for not having one

Not true, says the Google man himself: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4gr88oHb-k#t=27



There will be, im sure, tweaks/mods that help bring 1st topic content into description tag but that's another topic.