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Your auto meta tags need some work


7SiN

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I believe this is one part of the reasons why IPB forums rank so bad. I'm lucky enough to have millions of backlinks where that kind of overrides the poor SEO construction. One thing I feel that needs a lil attention and better output is the auto-meta tags.

So let's take this thread for example once I post it. The meta tags will look something like this:
keywords: Your, auto, meta, tags, need, some, work, believe, one, part, reasons, why, IPB, forums
description: I believe this is one part of the reasons why IPB forums rank so bad. I'm lucky enough to have millions of backlinks where that kind of overrides the poor SEO construction...

Roughly speaking, that's probably what it will look like. Why not do something smarter. People make titles for a reason and most of us are not ranking for single word searches but more so with long tail. Why not make the meta tags output different. Something like:
keywords: Your auto meta tags need some work, Your, auto, meta, tags, need, some, work, believe, one, part, reasons, why, IPB, forums
description: Your auto meta tags need some work. I believe this is one part of the reasons why IPB forums rank so bad. I'm lucky enough to have millions of backlinks where that kind...

That way in the keywords, you have your title in the meta keywords a long with your single keywords you guys already output. On top of that, you repeat your title in the description, which helps describe the thread as most people's first sentence doesn't quite do the description justice and that way you actually have something in there that does describe it (as titles tend to describe what the page is typically about).

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Repeating the title in the description might be beneficial, except that's already searched and displayed as the, well, title--and doing that will reduce how much additional text can be included, quite possibly hurting SEO as a result.

As for keywords, (1) there's a limit on how many and how long they can be; (2) most search engines ignore them anyway.

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Repeating the title in the description might be beneficial, except that's already searched and displayed as the, well, title--and doing that will reduce how much additional text can be included, quite possibly hurting SEO as a result.



As for keywords, (1) there's a limit on how many and how long they can be; (2) most search engines ignore them anyway.



Wrong. Bing, which has been increasing it's market by 30% in the last quarter HEAVILY uses them. Google still uses them but doesn't use them as a key factor like it did about 10-15 years ago. Yes there is a limit to each of them, but starting it out with the title of the thread, since that SHOULD be your main key words (and not just the individual words) only makes sense to have it auto add to your meta tags. As I stated above, most forum sites will not be ranking for individual keywords which is how IPS has it set up. We are all ranking in SERPs with minimal of 2 keywords up to 6 keywords most likely. It does not make any sense what-so-freakin-ever to keep doing the meta keywords they way they are doing it.

I know in vB utilizing vBSEO I was able to set my description as something like the following:
Your auto meta tags need some work posted in IP.Board is about I believe this is one part of the reasons why IPB forums rank so bad...

Now, it may not make the most sense and I don't believe that was my exact set up but it's something similar. It doesn't have to make sense. It has to have enough keywords in there to show relevance to searches. When people see search results, they want to see a lot of bolded words in their description without typically reading it. The way they have it set up now will now bold very many words bc most members blab on about themselves or something stupid in the first few sentences. At least the way I just posted above will repeat the title which is going to be what shows up in the results, then you want the description to be relevant and bolded so repeating the title works, and to top it off, saying what section it is in probably will help even further bc the posts are related to that and the searcher may be looking for something for that section name.

E.g. Person search "High jump glitch Halo 2"
On my site, someone posts "High jump glitch" in my Halo 2 section. For one, title tags are not optimized in IPB either so I'll make a lil exert about it here. Title tag should look like:
High jump glitch - Halo 2. Then the description will be like "High jump glitch posted in our Halo 2 section is about I just figured out how to do the high jump glitch on...", then the keywords should look like "high jump glitch, high, jump, glitch" (and now that I think about it, it should include the name of the section as well, which is what I had with vBSEO, so it should look more like "high jump glitch halo 2, high jump glitch, high, jump, glitch".

This can cause a MUCH HIGHER relevance in search results, more bolded words, which when you read about search result psychology, that's mainly what people look for. In fact, the actually subconsciously look for an arrow design but we can't quite do that with the tools we have. And since you bring up the "limit" on how many you can have, well more times than not, these automated keywords don't even reach the 250 character limit for keywords. Plus the fact you can just cut if off when it reaches ~250 to make sure you don't cut off any keywords in mid-word. As for the description, it being 150 character limit...you just cut it off and add ... at the end to show the sentence wasn't done.

Either way, you guys can continue to have faecesty results, I'm going to look into making this more automated for my site bc editing 400,000+ threads doesn't appeal to me (not like I would edit that many but the idea of having to pick and choose between so many threads to manually edit is daunting).
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  • 3 weeks later...

I have been following a lot of SEO threads, especially from members who switched from VB to IPB, as we are planning to switch in some time. So quite naturally cannot wait to see the improvements in IPSEO by Matt.

I also have one suggestion regarding long tail searches. I noticed one mod on XF and Wordpress which updates the page with the search terms which were used to reach that particular page. This apparently helps the search engines by increasing the relevance of that page for those keywords.

Is it currently possible through a mod on IPS? Can it be built in?

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I have been following a lot of SEO threads, especially from members who switched from VB to IPB, as we are planning to switch in some time. So quite naturally cannot wait to see the improvements in IPSEO by Matt.



I also have one suggestion regarding long tail searches. I noticed one mod on XF and Wordpress which updates the page with the search terms which were used to reach that particular page. This apparently helps the search engines by increasing the relevance of that page for those keywords.



Is it currently possible through a mod on IPS? Can it be built in?



Which mod is that?
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  • Management

Sadly, the days of fetching keywords via a referrer from Google are numbered: http://www.seomoz.or...iteboard-friday

They push the https version of Google for all Google+ signed in users which means the only keywords you're going to fetch are "Not provided".

Already "not provided" is the most used keyword for our stats by some margin. It's going to make optimising keywords for SEO very hard in the near future.

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Sadly, the days of fetching keywords via a referrer from Google are numbered:

http://www.seomoz.or...iteboard-friday

They push the https version of Google for all Google+ signed in users which means the only keywords you're going to fetch are "Not provided".



Already "not provided" is the most used keyword for our stats by some margin. It's going to make optimising keywords for SEO very hard in the near future.



.....thats useful of them..... NOT..... thanks google.
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Sadly, the days of fetching keywords via a referrer from Google are numbered:

http://www.seomoz.or...iteboard-friday

They push the https version of Google for all Google+ signed in users which means the only keywords you're going to fetch are "Not provided".



Already "not provided" is the most used keyword for our stats by some margin. It's going to make optimising keywords for SEO very hard in the near future.



I see this move as the first move by Google and think they are going to start doing more things like this. I mean, I believe they claimed that it's for privacy reasons. I call BS! Privacy for keywords? Really...what can webmasters gather from seeing keywords being used to get to their site...against people? We can't link people to these keywords. These keywords help us to know we are on the right track. I predict in the future Google will be offering a paid service for those who want to know what keywords people use to get to their site...that's my guess as of right now as I see that as the only reason for making this stupid move.
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I see this move as the first move by Google and think they are going to start doing more things like this. I mean, I believe they claimed that it's for privacy reasons. I call BS! Privacy for keywords? Really...what can webmasters gather from seeing keywords being used to get to their site...against people? We can't link people to these keywords. These keywords help us to know we are on the right track. I predict in the future Google will be offering a paid service for those who want to know what keywords people use to get to their site...that's my guess as of right now as I see that as the only reason for making this stupid move.




no not just privacy but protect from bad boys i.e. those who over optimize their sites for specific keywords. You see some keywords can earn you $30 per click and it just not fair for the rest of us (and for advertisers) to compete with websites like these.
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That's untrue because Adwords users can see the keyword performance if I read the articles right a few weeks ago. I've been under a rock for 2 weeks so if things have changed since then...then I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what I read.

Plus, how does blocking that information in GA tell you what the high performing keywords are or give you any sort of info for things like that? If you are trying to game the system, you are still going to game it even if you don't know the performance of the keywords. People know the high paying ones so they are going to do all the backlinking and what not that will bring people to their site and rank their site higher for those keywords.

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That's untrue because Adwords users can see the keyword performance if I read the articles right a few weeks ago. I've been under a rock for 2 weeks so if things have changed since then...then I'm wrong, but I'm pretty sure that's what I read.



Plus, how does blocking that information in GA tell you what the high performing keywords are or give you any sort of info for things like that? If you are trying to game the system, you are still going to game it even if you don't know the performance of the keywords. People know the high paying ones so they are going to do all the backlinking and what not that will bring people to their site and rank their site higher for those keywords.




No you didn't get what I meant. let me give an example.

I wanna make money online. I do my homework and find out that keywords related to car insurance comparison earn you lots and lots of money per click. so I design a website and fill it with articles that are rich with car insurance comparison related keywords. Then I set back and see which keywords I'm getting from google and update my articles accordingly.

In such case I don't have a website designed for users but rather a space filler for some ads.
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