How to edit meta description per topic?

[James--]

How to edit the <meta description=""> per topic? And how can we change the meta description for the homepage?

[Account Abandoned]

There is no current option for this

But then again, would it be used by everyone much? That is just extra stuff to fill out...

[MrPhil]

It sort of does that already. The meta description is the Topic title. If that's not satisfactory, you can always manually edit the page template to put some boilerplate text ahead of, after, or instead of the title. If you want something else, that can't be assembled from data at hand, are you planning to ask the topic starter to enter some descriptive text?

[Biology Forums]

The last time I checked, meta tags were useless

[James--]

@Shawn Thanks. If it should be possible to give every page a clear description, then I would use it. People who care about their SEO should use it, I think Yes, it is a whole lot extra work to fill out a meta description for every topic, I agree. It would be nice if SMF would auto-generate a good meta description.

@mrPhill I see. Well that's at least a description, not the best it could be, but it is something. No, I wouldn't want to ask the topicstarter to enter some descriptive text, but it would be nice if the mods or admins can change a description for each topic with the help of a mod or something. Otherwise, it may be an option to auto-generate a meta-description based on the first sentences of the topic.

@shuban huh? Meta descriptions aren't useless. It provides a nice description of a topic or board which can be seen by people in search results. It gives the searcher an answer to their question: "is this the information i'm looking for"?

The meta-keyword tag is useless. This meta tag is not important for Google SEO anymore.

If you create a good meta description, people will click your search results earlier because they have a better understanding of what the page is about and if it provides an answer to their question.

If that leads to a better CTR (click-through-rate) in search results (most of the times, it will) - Google will give that page a higher position on the search result page - No joke.

Thanks everyone.

[Biology Forums]

@Shawn Thanks. If it should be possible to give every page a clear description, then I would use it. People who care about their SEO should use it, I think Yes, it is a whole lot extra work to fill out a meta description for every topic, I agree. It would be nice if SMF would auto-generate a good meta description.

@mrPhill I see. Well that's at least a description, not the best it could be, but it is something. No, I wouldn't want to ask the topicstarter to enter some descriptive text, but it would be nice if the mods or admins can change a description for each topic with the help of a mod or something. Otherwise, it may be an option to auto-generate a meta-description based on the first sentences of the topic.

@shuban huh? Meta descriptions aren't useless. It provides a nice description of a topic or board which can be seen by people in search results. It gives the searcher an answer to their question: "is this the information i'm looking for"?

The meta-keyword tag is useless. This meta tag is not important for Google SEO anymore.

If you create a good meta description, people will click your search results earlier because they have a better understanding of what the page is about and if it provides an answer to their question.

If that leads to a better CTR (click-through-rate) in search results (most of the times, it will) - Google will give that page a higher position on the search result page - No joke.

Thanks everyone.

Sorry, I meant "keywords" are useless nowadays.

[SimpleGost]

Sorry for opening a old topic.
How I can change meta description from title of the topic to first message of the topic?
Like vBulletin and Wordpress does.

[MrPhil]

A description tag that includes a "teaser" (first 100 characters or whatever) from the body (plus perhaps the title) sounds like it would be useful. Have you searched for "teaser" on this forum? There's a limit on how many characters the description tag can support, so you would have to trim down the post (as well as strip out BBCode and HTML tags).