Meta Tag Includes

Hi,

I have a question relating to Meta tags and the head document.

I am trying to develop a way in which to use an include to allow me to place the Meta data in a separate file and then use the include to place in the head tag. I have tried this using an HTML file with the Meta tags in the file but Google does not seem to be able to pick this up on the site map verify stage.

Can you help — tell me where I'm going wrong?

Many thanks,

Ned

Jill's Response

Hi Ned,

I have a couple of comments about what you are trying to do:

1. If you're talking about the Meta keywords tag, then it really doesn't matter what you do, whether you even use it, stuff it, include it, or simply don't bother with it. The information contained in that tag isn't going to help your site to show up for keyword phrases that are important to you.

2. If you're talking about Title tags and/or Meta description tags, these tags are important, and placing them in includes is not a good idea. I'm assuming that by putting them in includes, you're planning for each page of the site to use the exact same tags. If so, you definitely don't want to do that.

Every page of your site should contain unique information, and your Title tags and Meta description tags should be unique to each of them. Therefore, I wouldn't recommend using an include for this purpose.

That said, if you'd like more info on how to use server-side includes, there's a good tutorial here:

Introduction to Server Side Includes

Jill

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