hey guys, Im still a nwwbie to this webdesign stuff but anyways just a quick question. Im using dreamweaver 8 to build my site. Im learning how to use meta tags to promote my website and increase my online visability. My question is that I cannot edit individual meta tags for individual pages becasue it is locked in by my template. In other words all my pages have the exact same meta tag description, title, keywords etc..... I tried highlighting the meta code in the template and changed it to an edible region but this does not work. Any feed back would be aprreciated. Thanks.

If you switch the the code view and click inside the header tag you can then add the meta tags.

yeah try it in the code or split view and you can see the metas on the top most part...

For SEO to be effective the title element (it is NOT a meta element) MUST be different for every page and describe the page content. It is also useful though not essential to have the description different for each page as well.

Chris

I don't entirely agree with what you're saying here and would like to elaborate why...

Using a unique description for each page.

I did this for a client recently and found that the Search Engine Results (SER) were actually starting to display some of the other pages on the site. That is... providing the following have individual content...

<title> *** SOMETHING UNIQUE *** </title>
<meta name="description" content=" *** SOMETHING UNIQUE *** ">
<meta name="keywords" content=" *** SOMETHING UNIQUE *** ">

Therefore, IMHO I would always suggest unique content for each page with each having content specific to the title, description and keywords.

What do you think...?

Therefore, IMHO I would always suggest unique content for each page with each having content specific to the title, description and keywords.

Sure, If they can all be made to match the page content so much the better, as I said for the meta desc, useful but not essential. The SEs are pretty good at pulling snippets from the page
meta keywords is not even that useful for SEM/SEO for the main search engines, but it does no harm having it there, provided it does reflect the page content and maybe the mispellings, synonyms etc (just in case)

Agreed.

I think even would advocate "Content is King"

Originally Posted by worldy

hey guys, Im still a nwwbie to this webdesign stuff but anyways just a quick question. Im using dreamweaver 8 to build my site. Im learning how to use meta tags to promote my website and increase my online visability. My question is that I cannot edit individual meta tags for individual pages becasue it is locked in by my template. In other words all my pages have the exact same meta tag description, title, keywords etc..... I tried highlighting the meta code in the template and changed it to an edible region but this does not work. Any feed back would be aprreciated. Thanks.

Do not add the meta tags to the template, add them to each page separately instead, then they will not be locked.