Meta Data

[Guest]

I have been working on improving the ability of search engines to find our site on the web by updating and adding meta data. When I do find one of our pages on Google (which is rare), the description is not the description that I put in the meta data. Instead it appears to be a default UNL description: "The University of Nebraska-Lincoln, founded in 1869..."

Out of curiosity, I looked at the source code via the browser and found two sets of meta data. The meta data that I added appears lower down. When I go back to dreamweaver, the first set of meta data is not visible to me. I can only see the meta data that I added.

Have I put the meta data in the wrong place? How can I help the browser find our website and the correct description.

The page I am referring to is www.unl.edu/art.shtml

[saltybeagle]

The default meta data has been included in the templates for a long time, and your issue gave me a reason to investigate the benefits of it.

The default meta tags generally apply to every page under .unl.edu, but I assumed that adding your own tags later on in the editable region of your page would override those defaults.

In the case of www.unl.edu/art/, Google last indexed that page on Feb 10th. I'd be curious to know if the meta tags were added before the 10th or after.

Regardless, meta tags are no longer helpful in improving page rank - at least in all the major search engines.

http://searchenginewatch.com/sereport/a ... hp/2165061

We will discuss this in this afternoon's WDN meeting. Thanks for bringing this up.

[caggens]

I must have forgotten to log in when I posted my question yesterday. Sorry I didn't make it to the meeting.

I believe that I updated the meta data on February 13th.

If meta data isn't used any more, do you have any other suggestions on how I might help search engines index our site?

Thanks,

Christy

[rcrisler1]

Modern search engine indexing techniques have been designed to be hostile to artificial influences on results rankings.

Google, the king of the search engines, uses technology they call PageRank to index and rank sites:

http://www.google.com/technology/

We've had a few issues come up lately, though, where people were concerned that particular pages didn't come up as a result of particular search queries, even though the words in the search query were nowhere to be found on the page. It is important that the words that you would expect your site to be found by actually appear in the text of the page.

I did insert a cheat in the 'Role and Mission' page in the 'About UNL' subsite just today ... it's inline and a hack, though, and I wouldn't advise it as a general rule.

If you scroll to the bottom of http://www.unl.edu/unlpub/special/aboutunl/roleandmission.shtml, and highlight the text after 'continue to Teaching, Research and Service,' you'll see a few keywords.