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Search Engine Optimization for Your Blog - Part 2

Posted on: Tue, 2006-08-01 16:12 | By: matt | In:

Meta tags are an important part of any site. Even though the meta information is not part of the content a user sees, the meta tags are important for you to get your content ranked higher and more accurately in search engines. Meta tags go inside the <head>. The typical place for them is just following the </title> tag.

This is one of the easiest ways to optimize your code for search engines.

Meta Description Tag

The description meta tag gives a description of your site or page. Having a description of each post is the preferred method of using this tag. Though, to have a description of the site is better than nothing at all.

An example for this post would be:
&#60;meta name="description" content="Meta tags are an important part of any site." /&#62;

An example for the site site home page would be:
&#60;meta name="description" content="MattFarina.com - Tech / Faith / Life." /&#62;

Meta Keywords Tag

The keywords meta tag provides a set of comma separated key words for page or site. For a page like this one a good set of keywords would be 'meta, tags, description, keywords, author, robots'. The code would look something like this:

&#60;meta name="keywords" content="meta, tags, description, keywords, author, robots" /&#62;

Meta Author Tag

The author tag is just what it implies. This is the author of the content. This can be a person or organization. It can be a name, email address, or both.

An example is my author tag which reads:
&#60;meta name="author" content="Matt Farina" /&#62;

Adding Meta Tags To Drupal

Adding these meta tags to most blogs is easy. I'll cover a few popular ones here.

To add them to drupal while using the phptemplate theme engine is easy. Open up the page.tpl.php file for the theme you want to add the meta tags to. In here, following the <title> tag, add your meta tags. This will provide a site wide solution, not page specific characteristics.

Adding Meta Tags To Wordpress

Adding the meta tags to wordpress is just as easy as drupal. In wordpress case the file for the theme to edit is the header file. After the <title> tag add the meta tags. Again, this will provide for site wide meta tags and not page specific ones.

Adding Meta Tags To Blogger.com

The most popular blog service is blogger.com. They generate blogs to be hosted on their site blogspot.com or for your own personal web server. To add the tags using their service log into the blog you want to edit. Click on the template tag and you will see the template code. After the <title> tag add you meta tags.

Note: If you change the blog template in blogger the meta tag changes will be lost.

< SEO - Part 1 | SEO - Part 2.5 >

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