meta description question

[paulsra]

can someone please tell me how to change meta description in pages to suit the pages content,(preferably dynamically!) all pages seem to show the
<meta name="Description" content=""> as the site default (site description in admin main settings).


is this even sopposed to happen?

im not using any mods with ver 3.1. i cant use the seo mod caus its windows server.

also, with the categories setup, the 'description' field, is the meta description for category pages, but i dont want that text to
show on the TOP categories.php, below the category name.

i hope this makes sense

thanks

Paul

[paulsra]

anyone got any ideas about this?

[Maffo]

If you have the developers edition you can overwrite the $description variable for the pages where you want a dynamic description.

Open the page you wish to edit, pull the relevant info from your database and assign it as your description.

You an use this for your title as well

[paulsra]

thanks Maffo,do you think this is worth doing?

also, what do you think about the categories description field?

from what iv read, i think the "meta description" is a worthwile tag from an SEO point of view?


thanks
Paul

[Maffo]

I always optimise wherever I can.

Is it worth the hassle of doing? Depends on how well your ranking is for used dirtbikes

[civ]

Well Google is now notifying us via google.com/webmasters of pages that have duplicate meta descriptions, so that's enough for me!

[cheesegrits]

I'm currently working on a little hack to automate keyword and description tags on category pages. It builds the lists based on the titles of the category you are on, plus any cats in the breadcrumb, and all immediate children of the cat you are on.

For the keywords, it strips duplicates, strips a configurable list of "filler" words (and, the, etc) and creates a comma separated keyword list. For descriptions it just appends each title with a comma. In both cases it prepends a global phrase you can define, and postpends anything it finds in the category specific description or keywords.

So for instance, in our top level Pets category, it shows:

<meta name="Keywords" content="alabama,classifieds,pets,birds,cats,dogs,livestock,reptiles,other,fish,horses,lost,found,pet,supplies,rabbits,shelter,animals,small,furry,sale,give,away" />
<meta name="Description" content="Alabama Classifieds Ads for categories Pets, Birds, Cats, Dogs, Livestock, Reptiles, Other Pets, Fish, Horses, Lost & Found, Pet Supplies, Rabbits, Shelter Animals, Small & Furry Animals" />

The "sale,give,away" is defined in the keywords for the Pets category, but not in the Description. If you drill down to the Shelter Animals page:

<meta name="Keywords" content="alabama,classifieds,pets,shelter,animals,cats,dogs,andalusia" />
<meta name="Description" content="Alabama Classifieds Ads for categories Pets, Shelter Animals, Shelter Cats, Shelter Dogs, Andalusia" />

The "Andalusia" is in both the cat description and keywords (this is a special category only the Andalusia city shelter can post in).

I'm not a big Google or page ranking expert (in fact I pretty much know nothing about this stuff, although I'm trying to learn as fast as I can!), but it seems to me that these are pretty accurate keywords and descriptions for a classified category page?

Anyone got any suggestions of how it might be improved, or any misunderstandings I may have about how Google and friends use these meta thingamajigs? One thing I do need to check is the maximum length for these things.

OBTW, if it looks like I'm going about it the right way, I'm more than happy to post the code here. Unfortunately there is no convenient hook, so it's a code edit - but it's all one chunk, and goes (almost) right at the end of category.php. No extra db lookups, it grabs what it needs from existing variables.

-- hugh

[HotAir]

Hugh,

That's great - any possibility of sharing the code you came up with?

Thanks,
Jim