RE: meta data - templates

Hi Iggy,

Thanks for your question. I hope you enjoyed the Dreamweaver training.

You can use META tags to optimise your page. But these days, it is widely believed that Search Engines pay these little attention in ranking your page, as any person can just stuff the META tags with keyterms to get a better ranking.

To make your META tags editable on each page using a template, simply put an Editable Region around your META tags. (Insert -> Template Objects -> Editable region) - menus may differ in different versions of Dreamweaver.

Real optimisation is all about things like:
- the content on your page
- how many times a keyterm appears on your page
- the general topic of your page and site (ie. if you have a 200 page site about cats, and you have a whole page dedicated to tractors, search engines are likely to pick up on this, and direct people looking for tractor information to a site solely about tractors)
- how many links are coming in to your page/site, and the text that is used in the link, and the rank of the pages linking in

My rule of thumb would be to make a web site (preferably niche topic) and be the #1 site on that topic. Lots of pages, lots of good content that people want to read and share. Make sharing easy for visitors. This way, the search engines will see you as #1 too, and consequently you will rank higher in the Search Engine Result Pages.

Web site optimisation is a completely separate area to web site design, although some parts overlap. There are companies out there that deal just in web site optimisation, which shows it's importance and complexity.

If this answer resolves your query, please mark the question as 'resolved' (see below). Otherwise, please post a follow-up response to this post, and I will assist you further.

Regards, Rich

RE: meta data - templates

Hi Iggy,

Oh right, sorry.

Umm, yes you can use the menu Insert -> HTML -> Head Tags -> Meta, and that will just bring up the dialogue box for you to create the name and value of your choice (or choose from the preset tags in the Head tags menu.

Apart from that, you can just edit the code in Code view (or Code and Design, split screen).

Find your current HEAD or meta tags, copy and paste a meta tag and replace with your desired name and value.

Is that what you mean? I don't think it can get any simpler than that.

A more complex way would be to have a database of terms you want to promote. Then use server-side scripting such as PHP, ASP, Perl or other CGI language to link a term to a particular page (filename). Then when the page is generated, it pulls the term or description from your database and shows it on the page.

Kind regards,
Rich