This website is using masterpage style. The question is where is the correct location to place the description about the site so that search engines can show it when someone is searching for it. For instance, if you google "myspace", it will come up with the website address and the description of the site as results.
Any ideas anyone?
Thanks.
you put your website description in a META Description tag in the head of your home page. If your using Master pages and the master page holds the <head> tags then you put it in there.
mcm
mcmcomasp:
you put your website description in a META Description tag in the head of your home page. If your using Master pages and the master page holds the <head> tags then you put it in there.
mcm
Hi mcm, that was what I thought too but not quite so. Myspace.com has exactly what you suggested; however, the discription that Google displays as a search result did not match the meta data in the head section of their mainpage. I believe the description must be placed somewhere else but I couldn't find it.
In a web standards book they said you can optimize your site for web pages, by puttin your title in <h1> tags and your description in <h2> tags and sections of your site with <h3> tags.
Seems to have worked for me in the past.
ok couple things.
1. What exactly is the description of the myspace page you get in google. And is it a MAIN myspace page or a users page. Users CAN override the default description tags and i THINK that Google bots crawl the individual myspace pages as individual web sites so they may not get the myspace "master" tags.
Another thing regarding Heading tags. SEO optimization does recommend that you include not only descriptions but "relavant" key phrases in header tags, this improves what is called page relevancy and keyword density. This is used as ONE part of a MANY part formula used by a google bot to rank a page.
Basically keyword density is determined by comparing the number of times a keyword or "key phrase" (more correct SEO term) is used on the page thats being ranked. So if your keywords were "engine" but you never used the word engine in your page you would get a lower ranking in natural search results. When you inlcude the key phrases in the <h> tags it makes the bot think its a "bit" more relavant. Now i say a "bit" because it is a very minor increase in the rank your page gets. The most important things to keep in mind when Optimizing your site for SEO natrual results are:
1. Use Key phrases and make sure they are relavant to the page
2. Include the key phrases in normal html copy on the page (H tags are good but just having it somewhere is pretty much the same)
3. Do NOT repeat keywords.
4. DO NOT use noise keywords (of, the, this, a, an, etc)
5. Make sure you have a robots.txt file or a META robots tag and make damn sure your page is ACCESSIBLE by a CRAWLABLE path (this means at least ONE other page on the internet HAS to link to it)
6. Also relavant links to your page from other pages on other sites will greatly help your ranking.
But i DIGRESS, this is not a thread about SEO optomization but i did have the MSN Live Search reps and the google guys in my office last week so its fresh. As for the DESCRIPTION tag in your master page. just because google does not see it "yet" does not mean its not working. It takes time to re-crawl pages, and maybe it just hasn't gotten around to it yet.
if you can post what it DOES say it may help. Also i THINK you can place META tags OUTSIDE of the head tag. you can try them in content!
You can do one other thing as well. if you DO NOT include a META Description tag you can include a hidden DIV that contains a description of your site. As long as it is the first element after the <body> tag it should get picked up as the Description of the site.
hth,
mcm
Thanks for the help, gentlemen. Mcm, I didn't know it would be this complicated. If you are interested more in detail then do a google on "myspace" and see if you can locate their website description via "view source" of their main page. That's all I was trying to know. Nothing more. I don't think it is appropriate to post the search results here because it seems like I am advertising for them. I am thinking maybe the description is hidden under their default.aspx startup page? It seems to me that google bots pickup words from the startup page of websites.
Google gets some of it's descriptions from off-site sources like DMOZ, etc.
Thanks for the info., TH.
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