How to basic page information to a web page (meta tags)?

Hi my name is Dan and in this video we’re going to look at basic page details now there are two of them, one’s called the title and one’s called the description and you should do this when you create every page.

Now what are they? They’re the things that Google lists when it lists your site so you absolutely need to have them per page. So if I go out to Google and I look at “creative agency”, skip the ads, lets go down to these guys here. So, this is whats considered the title. Everything in blue. And this down here is called the description and you add that physically to every page and when Google lists you and ranks you in its engine it will use both your title and your description to display to the audience so they’re quite important. A lot of people when they’re new especially in Dreamweaver, they’ll use ‘untitled document’, so if I go into Dreamweaver here and I go to properties and you can see down here it’s called Untitled Document, that what would be listed here and you will never get a ranking if you’ve got a page called ‘untitled document’ so as you’re going and building your pages make sure you give it a page title and a description. So let’s do that. It’s really easy.

Have nothing selected and you’ll have your document title down here. Now there’s an art to naming your page. We’re going to call ours “Bring Your Own Laptop” and maybe “ - Adobe Training”. So there’s my title and that what’s going to list in blue. Now I need to add my description. It’s called a meta description. To add the meta description, it’s under insert and under HTML, there’s one in here called description. Great, now the description remember is that second part in Google, this is descriptive text of the page. It has to be unique for every page. Just like the title so if you’ve got 100 pages you’re going to have 100 page titles and 100 meta descriptions. It can be a little painful when you’re writing all of these outs, but they are a necessity. In terms of what you should write in the description - this is kind of where you get to do your sales pitch. Now Google will clip you off at about 180 characters so don’t write it too long.

Now I’ve got one that I’ve written already so don’t make it too long. Click ‘OK’ and the weird thing is that your page hasn’t changed at all so it’s just, if we’re in our index page, under source code, click split view, if I scroll up to the top here you can see there’s my description. Where is my title, there it is there. So in-between the open and close of the title, there it is there. There is my description and you can go through and edit it in code view if you like afterwards, its up to you. Or you can do it down here, it doesn’t really matter. But, remember that every page needs a page title, or a page description. Now lets check out on Google, just to remind ourselves. This up here is the page title and this is the description.

You can see with longer ones, the longer title it gets cut off, it’s better to have a short, to the point title and the same with the meta description, if it gets too long, can you see Google decides to cut it off. It’s a little bit arbitrary about where it cuts it off, it’s pretty close around the 180 mark.

Before we go I just wanted to quickly point out that body is everything you see, this little thing here, don’t delete it. This is our jQuery and we need it, I’m going to push it to the bottom just make sure he’s always there, if you’re having problems with your site later on, things aren’t working that should, it could have been that you’ve broken this or deleted it by accident, just leave him down the bottom and ignore him in the website will work.

Okay that’s to add basic page details, page title and meta description and you should do this for every page on your dreamweaver site.