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The site I work for uses a "templating engine" to create html pages on the fly. The templating engine assembles the header, body, and some kind of footer from various places to make up the viewable page. The headers are pulled from a central file that needs to load with every page view. It's not really practical to have individual page <title> and <meta> tags because the site is large and this centralized file would become so large that it would slow down the site from loading. It's an ecommerce site, so that's obviously not good. So as a result, we have basically one <title> and one <meta> tag set for the entire site (most pages have the same title and meta tags).
I know this isn't ideal, especially regarding the title tag. I also know the meta tags are not that important (especially the keyword tag), but I'd like to get a description tag listed for each page. I'm wondering if it might be possible to put the meta description tag in the body section of each page and still get credit from google and other spider-based indexes. I know it's supposed to be in the <head> section of the page, but I wanted to know if it would also work if placed in <body>. The tag doesn't affect the viewable page, so maybe it would work.
This isn't an attempt to spam, just a work-around to address the site architecture.
Does anyone have any thoughts on this?
Welcome to wmw!
The meta tags will likely be ignored if they are placed in the body, and will cause your
pages to fail validation.
The Title and Description tags are fairly important, and worth an architecture change, IMHO.
How about several canned "Title and Description" snippets that can be included using server-
side includes on each (or a few) pages? Having a good title and description is crucial to
the visibility of the pages on search engines, and therefore to the success of the site.
HTH,
Jim
For instance, have a "products" header, and a "services" header, etc. With this method, you can have at least unique tags for the home page and those 2nd level sections.
Works for us...
:)
