How do I add meta tags to my Ning site?

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Permalink Reply by SUp.biz, COO on June 25, 2008 at 10:02pm

The only way to add a meta tag to your network is with full access to your network's source code.

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Permalink Reply by TheMaster on June 25, 2008 at 10:05pm

I would not worry about meta tags. They are a relic from search engine past. Use your keywords on the actual "tags" at the bottom of each forum and blog post. Along with using the keyword string in the title and the meat of the body, you should be fine.

It is not worth the mess of digging around the source code for something that will only make a .001% difference.

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Permalink Reply by Anita Cohen-Williams on July 1, 2008 at 3:04pm

Sorry, I completely disagree. Meta tags are still in use today. In fact, the larger search engines use the description meta tag for the snippet seen in the organic results, and the title tags as well. Smaller search engines use the keywords tags as well.

Your description on the text of the website will be fine for now until the new redesign of Ning is put into place. For your site, I recommend placing a paragraph of text under your welcome sentence. The "Thanks for Visiting..." paragraph is a graphic and the search engines cannot see it.

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Shugg on June 25, 2008 at 10:26pm

Thanks guys, this is helpful. I feel like I'm having to learn all of this as I go. Another question: my page name and the names of the notes (pages) I have linked to my main page also serve as tags right? So if my site is Triangle TRACKS and I have a note that is called "Sports & Recreation TRACKS" or "Museum TRACKS" the sports/recreation/museum tags could get picked up in Google searches, right?

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Permalink Reply by TheMaster on June 25, 2008 at 10:34pm

All of that will get picked up by the search engines. Keep in mind, that unless you are a PR7+ website with 10s of thousands of inbound links, that having words like that alone on your page will not get you significant search traffic.

If you have not already read The 10 Commandments of SEO, then I highly recommend you start there to build your SEO strategy.

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Shugg on June 25, 2008 at 11:00pm

Great advice, thanks!

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Permalink Reply by Anita Cohen-Williams on July 1, 2008 at 3:00pm

Elizabeth,

After much research at Ning, I discovered that there are plans to include ways of dealing with the meta tags on the home page in the next redesign (planned for this month apparently).

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Permalink Reply by Elizabeth Shugg on July 1, 2008 at 6:36pm

Thanks Anita. I look forward to the new Ning redesign. I will probably replace the graphic with text, but I really don't like the fact that Ning only offers a few fonts to choose from for each template. Is there anyway to bypass that, so I can put fonts on the site that are not included in the template package?

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