Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

the home page has all of the description tag and meta tags, bt the other three pages do not.

Do all of the pages of the website need these?

aaronserrands
www.weworkyouplay.net


-------------------------

Aaron Burnett Owner of We Work You Play

Errand Service
Errand Service Blog

Not required but recommended. The description tag is what will be displayed beneath your site name in a search result; if you don`t include the tag, the engine will just pull text from the page and display that instead.

-------------------------

M Hall
Website Critique Community
International Society of Curmudgeons

Every one of your web pages should have a unique (to the others) title and description which is relevant to each page`s content.

While not all search engine use the description tag, Google does.

~Roland

-------------------------

Web Design | Best Beef Jerky | ecommerce articles | Follow vwebworld on Twitter

One thing to keep in mind is that the search engines view every page as a separate entity. So you can`t just set up your meta tags on your home page and expect them to be applied to every other page on your site.

This is where it`s really handy to have a CMS system...even wordpress...that can do some of the work for you.


-------------------------

Check out my blog: Upstarter.net: the simple habits of successful entrepreneurs

And my startup: ChatSpring Live Chat Software for Sales and Customer Service

It`s debatable if the meta tags even do anything for you ... but if you want to use them, do use them on every page.
Personally, I`d focus harder on the content than the meta tags.

 I have heard a lot of guys saying Meta Keywords tag is useless, but first time heard that the use of  (all?) meta tags is debatable. What about the `description` part? how would search engines describe the web pages without it? Okay, there is no hard and fast rule that Google or any other engine would ONLY rely on content in `description` tag.

But smart optimisers tend to squeeze in most relevant site summary incorporating primary keywords in their `description` tag.Basically you are suggesting search engines what`s the best summary of your page. So invariably best optimised sites tend to get their `desricption` part picked by search engines, rather than random chunk from <p on the web page. Its too risky to leave out a badly written `description` tag. I`d rather have nothing there and write strong page copy, as Nikole says, but then you`d have to rely on search engines`s to pick what chunks they pick.

No, what it gives you is the summary of the text you were searching for, in context.

The title comes from the title tag, and then the bit under is from the context you were searching.

Nikole, you have to at times disagree for the sake of it!

Ok, If you ask me? I think that each page should have it`s own meta tags whether it`s keywords or Description. From my experience, your meta tags are only useful if you know how to use them correctly.
For example staying within the limits of what is considered exceptional. Now what is exceptional? Well staying within the limits for example: Don`t use stop works in your title, Staying within the 167 characters [including white-spaces] in your keywords and keeping it under 155 words in the description.
But of course not everyone follows the rules, the first thing someone does when adding keywords to their web site`s is: using redundancy in the words, for example "car dealer, affordable car dealer, cheap car dealer" why not use: "afordable, cheap, car dealer" although the words are separated, the search engines are still going to look for the keywords, affordable, cheap and car dealer.... So do you need the meta tags? Yes, if you are using Organic Submissions, and No if you are using paid submission "Google Adwords".... Depends on your strategy.... and how much you know about SEO


-------------------------

Edgar Monroy
Web Developer / Owner / Consultant
When starting your own business the need to "know-how" is greater than money!
http://www.nuevolution.net