How to Add Different Meta Tags for Different Posts in Blogger

This is one of the questions I get very frequently.

One trick of the trade used by all developers is to save a back-up. This way, if you can't undo your changes, for whatever reason, you can still revert to the original. After saving a back-up to your harddrive find the following piece of code: all-head-content

(In Windows do a CTRL F)

It will take you to the following:

<b:include data='blog' name='all-head-content'/>

Just after the above code add the following.

1. Tell Blogger which page you want to give the unique meta tags.
2. If you want to use the META Description Tag describe your content in a sentence or two.
3. If you want to use the META Keyword Tag put in your keywords and separate them with a comma.

<b:if cond='data:blog.url == "http://yoursite.blogspot.com/someYear/someMonth/fileName.html"'>

<meta content='How to add different meta tags for different posts' name='description'/>

<meta content='meta tags, blogger' name='keywords'/>
</b:if>

You can repeat this step as often as you want to.

It is my opinion that using these tags is not worth the effort. Ten years ago, yes, they were useful. Today, after all the abuse by SEOs, these tags are close to useless.

Google Does Not Use Keyword Meta Tags

Nothing is easier to convince a client that Google does not use the keyword meta tag in its ranking than hearing it straight from the source.

Q: Does Google ever use the "keywords" meta tag in its web search ranking?
A: In a word, no. ... Our web search ... disregards keyword metatags completely. They simply don't have any effect in our search ranking at present

Meta-Tag Generators, Which is the best?

Readers of this blog know that I've been saying, for a long time, that META tags are not very useful and, for the most part, not worth your time. Do not waste your time and money developing META tag generators. META tags will not help you get your site ranked higher.

The only value of META tags is that accurate META tag information may help in clickthrough. Google and other SEs will sometimes display the META description in their results page.

See Meta Tags and Title Tags

Who uses Meta Tags in Search Ranking

As far as I know Yahoo is the only major search engine that still supports the META keywords tag. The question that must be asked is: how high in their algorithm to they place the META tags in comparision to words in the title, body, anchor text, etc...?

We know that the META keyword tag is still being indexed and used in Yahoo's site description. For that reason and that alone it would make sense to KEEP the field (as well as META description) if, and only if, your CMS already has it built in; and you have default keywords and descriptions so employees do not have to waste time with them.

All in all, while these META tags don't hurt, they don't particularly help either. If they are automatically entered fine. Don't remove them. I don't see a ROI should you need employees to spend any time deciding on values for either of these tags.

Meta Tags and Title Tags

There is no magic bullet in getting your site to be ranked higher. It is doubtful that either the keyword or description tag helps with any major search engine. The tags were abused by spammers to such a point that, as far as page ranking is concerned, they are ignored. There is still some debate as to the value of title tags in page ranking. That tag, as with the meta tags are also being abused.

The value in the tags come, if at all, in the higher clickthrough from the search pages.

Content Management Systems cannot write useful META and TITLE tags without input from the user. Google and the other search engines start to ignore the META and TITLE descriptions when too many pages display the same information. Your CMS can be modified to help in the creation of these descriptions based upon directory information and other information given to the system. But even the most well-thought out system requires someone to tweak the final result.