Quote from: ganeshXL at May 02, 2008, 03:28 AM
Even if you’re using meta keywords + descriptions, I’d suggest you create two template variables - instead of using the in-built meta tab.
You can then use the practical @INHERIT to set some default values (from the parent doc) and only override it when necessary.
http://modxcms.com/template-variables.html
http://modxcms.com/inherit-binding.html
for keywords, yes, but for meta descriptions, you are better of having unique ones for each page (where practical of course...). I write unique meta descriptions manually for pages that compete heavily on core keywords for a site; for other pages, you could probably just let the search engine choose what it thinks is most appropriate from the content itself, or create a script to select some text from the main content and actually insert it into the meta description (I see a lot of big sites like newspapers doing this).
Even Google’s Webmaster tools recently added a feature to allow webmasters to check for duplicate content, and meta description is one of the areas they check (they took the idea from Aaron Wall at seobook.com who had a tool that did the same thing, check for dupe content etc).
Check out this, may also be of interest:
http://www.highrankings.com/serp-descriptions
So, while as a previous poster mentioned the importance of h1 etc, and that is true, I still wouldn’t ignore meta description for seo and more importantly, for "conversion" (in this case, "conversion" is getting a web user to click *your* link in the organic search results). Controlling what is shown as the description of your site in the SERPs allows you to use this area to pull a visitor in to your domain.
MODX Staff