google search results

[sarisisop]

His info:vauxhallmodified.com shows
"Latest Threads. whos in the west mids are... Last Post: miss tink. Today 12:39 AM » Replies: 1 » Views: 20. new member · Last Post: miss tink. Yesterday 10:14 ..."

That would obviously keep changing. the same search for the one at the top of vauxhall forum search shows
"The Vauxhall Owners Network is a large online community offering free help for your Vauxhall, Holden or Opel. Free to sign up with the paid club option to attend ..."

I know what I would rather have to describe my site, yes content is king but I know having a description has helped my site.

would you suggest having the words "vauxhall forum" in my site description?

My forum is about psoriasis and this has a huge results in a search. so I decided to go for "Psoriasis Forum" I added this in headerinclude

<meta name="Keywords" content="psoriasis, psoriatic arhtritis, psoriasis help forum, psoriasis pictures, psoriasis cream, psoriasis uk, fumaderm,  what is psoriasis, psoriasis cure, stelara, enbrel, humira, remicade, dovonex, dovobet, methotrexate, psorisis"/>
<meta name="Description" content="A friendly online Psoriasis forum with a good mix of Psoriasis
 sufferers, and regular news. Never be alone, come and talk to others who understand."/>

I'm now on page 1 Google UK in second place just below a forum that pays for ads. Before adding the code above I was on page 5 for "Psoriasis Forum"

Be careful and try to get it right first time, I changed one word in my description and went back to page 20 for a few weeks before coming back up to page 1.

where in the header template should i place it top or bottom?

I put mine in Ungrouped Templates > Headerinclude > after this part.

<link rel="alternate" type="application/rss+xml" title="{$lang->latest_threads} (RSS 2.0)" href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/syndication.php" />
<link rel="alternate" type="application/atom+xml" title="{$lang->latest_threads} (Atom 1.0)" href="{$mybb->settings['bburl']}/syndication.php?type=atom1.0" />

[Nathan Malcolm]

That's not good for SEO. Duplicate meta tags = bad.

The index is the main page. That's what users are going to land on, and that's where you want to describe your site.

[Crayo]

Tags mean nothing Nathan, duplicate tags USED to be a bad thing. They're not used to rank sites at all now by Google.

Description - despite what some users have said in this thread - is important.

[sarisisop]

I've only had my own forum for about 9 months, and I'm no expert. All I know is it worked for me, and when I changed the description I dropped of the searches. I'm now happy with page 1 on Google Yahoo and Bing when people search for "Psoriasis Forum" So I will leave both Keywords and Description there as it can't be doing any harm.

Cheers.

[CRAIG@VM]

I've only had my own forum for about 9 months, and I'm no expert. All I know is it worked for me, and when I changed the description I dropped of the searches. I'm now happy with page 1 on Google Yahoo and Bing when people search for "Psoriasis Forum" So I will leave both Keywords and Description there as it can't be doing any harm.

Cheers.

well ive done what you said but put the meta tags on the portal as thats the pages you land on for my site and ive changed my site description to include the words vauxhall forum its gotta be worth a try

[Tom K.]

Description - despite what some users have said in this thread - is important.

I don't see how. Apart from making your search result look pretty it does nothing. Google has become wise to these tags and simply ignores them. It bases it's results on content of the page as a whole, not a webmaster specified tag. If it used any webmaster specified tag, I would simply see what was "trending" this month and fill my description with it.

google has, for a long time now, disregarded meta keyword and meta description tags because they just can't be trusted. It's like those videos on youtube where they have 50 unrelated tags in, simply because those tags are popular.

[Crayo]

3rd time. Tags mean nothing.

Edit: Description does (from what I know) get recorded. When I made minor edits to my description I noticed better results. Unless Google has stated it's not important (like they have with tags) then it's better to be safe than sorry.

[Tom K.]

Yes, google has said it is not important:
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.c...a-tag.html

Even though we sometimes use the description meta tag for the snippets we show, we still don't use the description meta tag in our ranking.

[Crayo]

Fair enough, I missed that. It's still affected me unless it was just a major coincidence. At least descriptions serve a purpose, tags are pointless but people still refuse to believe that in this thread.

[sarisisop]

I've only had my own forum for about 9 months, and I'm no expert. All I know is it worked for me, and when I changed the description I dropped of the searches. I'm now happy with page 1 on Google Yahoo and Bing when people search for "Psoriasis Forum" So I will leave both Keywords and Description there as it can't be doing any harm.

Cheers.

well ive done what you said but put the meta tags on the portal as thats the pages you land on for my site and ive changed my site description to include the words vauxhall forum its gotta be worth a try

Good luck, On a side note I noticed your title is "VAUXHALL MODIFIED FORUM" if you search for those words you come out top. it may be worth changing it to "Vauxhall Forum" depending on what you think your audience would search for, this would also help you compete with other Vauxhall Forums out there.