Should I include A Description Tag for an article page
-
Hi, I am wondering if i should include a description tag for an article page where the news on that page will change around five times a day.
I am not sure if to fill a description in for local news or to leave it blank so the search engines pick up the latest local news and then the next day they show the latest local news again in the search engines instead of having a static description of the news page.
any help would be great
-
No problem, my advice further to this is also to try and get your site included into Google news as this is going to be one of your best traffic sources for local news.
-
thanks for this. i will follow your advice.
-
I'd agree with James.
I'd use the description and title of the news page to clearly communicate the kind of news that's going to be presented so that visitors are going to have a good understanding of what to expect when they land on your news page.
I would leave the news articles to speak for themselves instead of having to compete with the news page.
If it's local news then I'd make sure that the area covered was also clear.
You've got to think about this from the users perspective. There will be people looking out for particular news stories that interest them, so they'll be attracted by the individual article that engages them. Others, will be looking a little more broadly for news in their area, or around their topic and it's these searches that your news index page can target.
I'd also make sure that the content on my main news index had clear calls to action to help people subscribe to my news feed -RSS, mailing lists etc . (and on all the article pages too).
You can get a lot of one-touch traffic to news pages. You need to make an effort to find ways to get them coming back.
-
I would agree with James and say put a description tag. In addition to what he says, remember that Google choose what text to display in the description based upon the words in the query. So if the query matches something more relevant to a recent article, they will likely ignore your description tag and show a snippet of the article instead.
-Dan
-
To be honest I would put a fixed description on the page even if it changes 5 times a day.
You can have a description which is targeted to the news page and also a title which is targeted to the news page, rather than a random news story from that day.
In my eyes having a fixed description is a better strategy.
Another thing you can look at doing is if your site is added via Google news you can obtain Google news site links for the latest news, this is more of an advanced strategy, more information here:
http://jamesnorquay.com/google-news-additional-site-links-feed/
(only a limited number of sites have this)
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Removing a canonical tag from Pagination pages
Hello, Currently on our site we have the rel=prev/next markup for pagination along with a self pointing canonical via the Yoast Plugin. However, on page 2 of our paginated series, (there's only 2 pages currently), the canonical points to page one, rather than page 2. My understanding is that if you use a canonical on paginated pages it should point to a viewall page as opposed to page one. I also believe that you don't need to use both a canonical and the rel=prev/next markup, one or the other will do. As we use the markup I wanted to get rid of the canonical, would this be correct? For those who use the Yoast Plugin have you managed to get that to work? Thanks!
Technical SEO | | jessicarcf0 -
Is a canonical tag the best solution for multiple search listing pages in a site?
I have a site where dozens of page listings are showing in my report with a parameter showing the page number for the listings. Is the best solution to canonical these page listings back a core page (all-products)? Or, do I change my site configuration in Webmasters to ignore "page" parameters? What's the solution? Example URL 1- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=84 Example URL 2- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=85 Example URL 3- http://mydomain.com/products/all-products?page=86 Thanks in advance for your direction.
Technical SEO | | JoshKimber0 -
Rel canonical for partner sites - product pages only or also homepage and other key pages?
Hello there Our main site is www.arenaflowers.com. We also run a number of partner sites (eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/). We've relcanonical'd the products on the partner site back to the main (arenaflowers.com) site. eg: http://flowershop.cancerresearchuk.org/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013 rel canonicals back to: http://www.arenaflowers.com/flowers/tutti_frutti_es_2013). My question: Should we also relcanonical the homepage and other key pages on partner sites back to the main arenaflowers website too? The content is similar but not identical. We don't want our partner sites to be outranking the original (as is the case on kw flower delivery for example). (NB this situation may be complicated by the fact we appear to have an unnatural link penalty on af.com (and when we did an upgrade a while back, the af.com site fell out of the index altogether due to some issues with our move to AWS.) We're getting professional SEO advice on this but wondered what the Moz community's thoughts were.. Cheers, Will
Technical SEO | | ArenaFlowers.com0 -
How to determine which pages are not indexed
Is there a way to determine which pages of a website are not being indexed by the search engines? I know Google Webmasters has a sitemap area where it tells you how many urls have been submitted and how many are indexed out of those submitted. However, it doesn't necessarily show which urls aren't being indexed.
Technical SEO | | priceseo1 -
If my home page never shows up in SERPS but other pages do, does that mean Google is penalizing me?
So my website I do local SEO for, xyz.com is finally getting better on some keywords (Thanks SEOMOZ) But only pages that are like this xyz.com/better_widgets_ or xyz.com/mousetrap_removals Is Google penalizing me possibly for some duplicate content websites I have out there (working on, I know I know it is bad)...
Technical SEO | | greenhornet770 -
Help with Places Pages
How can we get our Google Place page to rank higher, and how can we then keep it there instead of seeing it bounce around? We seem to have trouble getting a decent ranking for our places page even though out website ranks well on Google for geographical phrases?
Technical SEO | | onlinechester0 -
Home Page .index.htm and .com Duplicate Page Content/Title
I have been whittling away at the duplicate content on my clients' sites, thanks to SEOmoz's pro report, and have been getting push back from the account manager at register.com (the site was built here and the owner doesn't want to move it). He says these are the exact same page and he can't access one to redirect to the other. Any suggestions? The SEOmoz report says there is duplicate content on both these urls: Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/index.htm Durango Mountain Biking | Durango Mountain Resort - Cascade Village http://www.cascadevillagehotel.com/ Your help is greatly appreciated! Sheryl
Technical SEO | | TOMMarketingLtd.0 -
Title Tag Wordpress
I need to know how can I personalize the title tag individually in my categories?
Technical SEO | | nafera20