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How do I specify description/keywords in 2 languages?
Can I have a pair of description meta tag as shown below? Would my tags be viewed as spam?
<meta name="description" lang="zh" content="">
<meta name="description" lang="en" content="">
I don't think the two description tags will be recognized by the engines. Ditto with keywords meta tags. I don't know whether they'd be seen as spam, but I don't think they'd help you.
Meta tags should be page specific... ie, unique to the page they're on... and therefore if you have pages in different languages, you would have the tags in the language appropriate to the page, with content focussing only on those words and phrases that the page specifically targets.
If the page is in two languages (probably not a good idea), your description should probably be very short, with one language following the other.
In general, the keyword meta tag is not very useful as a competitive ranking tool. Yahoo has said that they do look at it in their new algo... and Google has said they "reserve the right to use" the keywords meta... but I've never seen a page rank because of meta tag content. Some of my best performing sites don't have meta keyword tags at all.
The title is a very important page element. It is not technically a meta tag, but some think it is, so for clarity I'm making that distinction. There's a thread on titles in this forum right now that might be helpful.
Also, it's generally a good idea to use site search and/or Google to search WebmasterWorld for information before posting. There's lot's on meta tags.
Thanks for replying :)
Actually my site is in Chinese only, but I need to cater for Google AdSense, as it doesn't support Chinese yet. I added in the English description and keywords, so that it would know what to generate.
Guess that I'll just combine the 2 languages' descriptions and keywords.
Thanks again :)
Actually my site is in Chinese only, but I need to cater for Google AdSense, as it doesn't support Chinese yet. I added in the English description and keywords, so that it would know what to generate.
yeetien - I think you'd be wasting your time. While, as I said, Google reserves the right to use the keywords meta, in fact they do not use it. I'm not familiar with the relevance factors for AdSense, but I'm assuming they're basically the same as the search relevance factors.
Therefore, I don't think keywords and description would buy you any AdSense relevance at all. You need to be concerned with title, inbound link text, on page content, etc etc. Again, look at the titles thread...
Building the Perfect Page - Part II - The Basics
Developing an effective <title> element.
[webmasterworld.com...]
... and also this link, mentioned in the above thread:
Brett's quick rank point system
[webmasterworld.com...]
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