Automating Boring Title and Meta Tags
We all know how much dealing with the title and meta tags are on sites. It does not matter if the site is big or small or if you are a white hat or a black hat. They just plain stink, but we can’t ignore them all together, and we certainly can not hard code them right into your template as duplicates.
Well, the answer lies in how you store this information in your CMS or custom database. Earlier today Rand over at the SEOmoz blog posted an articled titled Choosing the Right CMS Platform for Your Website, and #1 (Title Tags) and #3 (Meta Tags) are both at the top of his list of factors in choosing a CMS.
For arguments sake, lets assume you have free reign to set them up however you want (most sites and clients I have worked with do). Here are a couple options:
- Have fields called: title_tag, meta_keywords, meta_description
This is the most obvious choice as it is a completely customizable area where you can punch in whatever fits you fancy for each and every page. This really allows for unique content, but you might run into big problems with an eCommerce site for example that may have 10,000 product pages.
- Have fields called: kw1, kw2, kw3, etc.
Have a finite set of keyword fields (up to 6 maybe) for each page. The advantage of this is that you can use combination of static and dynamic parts to build these tags. Another big advantage is that you can leverage these same keywords in other places. For example, you can pull these fields to vary the anchor text for internal backlinks coming into the pages using these same fields. The disadvantage of course is that all of your tags probably have the same footprint (Title: keyword1, keyword2 at mysite.com), which gets pretty ugly when you are trying to generate meta descriptions that vary. Using madlib style replacement might work.
Which of these methods do you use, or do you use a different method all together? I have tried both methods, and neither seems to be a perfect solution. But, one thing is for sure, either way is much easier to manage then hard coding it.
- Jim
