By Richard UK on

Can anyone tell me if it's possible to put the META TITLE tags individually into each page? A lot of CMS seem to take the META TITLE tag from the main H1 title in the copy (from what I can see).

I want this facility as this is because the META TITLE tag can be search engine friendly whilst the main H1 title can stay human friendly.

Thanks!

Comments

Steven’s picture

Steven commented

The big search engines do not look at meta tags anymore, and instead use the actual content (i.e. they look at <h1> as well). Instead, try focusing on having Clean URLs. You can use path.module to get much friendlier URLs than "node/view": try adding a path alias for a node with its title in it. Google loves this sort of stuff.

ergophobe’s picture

ergophobe commented

I know this is an ancient topic, but when I searched Google on "drupal title tag" this is what came up and, I believe, Steven reiterates a common over-generalization that comes up again and again.

Thanks to Robert Douglass, you can make custom titles in the title tag in the meta information section of the page (the title tag is a meta tag BTW). I haven't tried it yet, but it looks like his Page Title module does just the trick (4.6+).

http://drupal.org/project/page_title

On the other issue.
Steven is right, that SEs do not use meta keyword and description tags for ranking and relevance. Spammers ruined them for that purpose long ago.

Meta keyword tags are probably nearly useless. Meta title and description tags are still very important.

* the meta title tag will often be used as the page title displayed in the SERPs. Sometimes you might want your H1 to be something catchy and obscure, but you want your title tag to be something descriptive so that when the page does come up in the SERPs, the poor searcher looking for useful information knows that your page corresponds to his needs. It's not so much about being SE-friendly versus user-friendly, as much as it is about being user-friendly in two different contexts - on the page and in the SERPs.

* the meta description tag is trickier. If you have a description and the search matches your page through semantic indexing, but does not actually match specific terms on your page, then the SEs will list your description. If the search is a long-tail search that hits obscure phrases in your page, the SE results will be excerpts. Somewhere is a middle ground where the SE decides whether or not to use your description or to use its extracts.

*Finally, the title tag and some other meta tags are real or de facto standards and having them written correctly now means that you don't have to go back and do them if it turns out that they become important in some new search engine or as-yet undeveloped user interface for the web.

PS - don't go to *my* site looking for evidence, since I don't actually take the time to practice what I preach. Some day!

Yosemite Explorer - hiking and climbing in Yosemite (drupal)

ShErbO’s picture

ShErbO commented

The Nodewords Module allows you to edit META tags for each node seperately,, but it doesn't have the "META TITLE" tag specifically. But it has META Keywords, Description, copyright etc...

http://www.2knowmyself.com - The Ultimate Source for Self-Understanding and Personal Development.

cmsproducer’s picture

cmsproducer commented

While the necessity of a dedicated meta-title field is questionable,
If you want to have that field, just add it as a text field using CCK, and then write that field into your page tpl file.
i.e write something like this in the page.tpl.php or in content-type specific tpl files

<name="title" value="<?php print ($node->field_chosen_fied_name[0]['value']); ?>" />

jacobadam’s picture

jacobadam commented

Dont use meta tag on each page. Better to set on Home page.

Mikko1’s picture

Mikko1 commented

The individual title tags for each page are VERY important for search engine visibility. It's SEO basics, just google for more information.