Best META Fields to Include on New Site

[NiallSmith]

I am in the process of transitioning sites to a Drupal CMS and am curious to know what META information to provide on each of the new site pages. Currently, this is the set-up I plan on using:

My questions to the community are:

1. whether or not I've added all pertinent information, and
2. if there's anything I'm overlooking

[Jinx14678]

Are useless, and I think were always "An Old Wives Tale" that they worked (or at least within the past 4 -5 years give or take) (index, follow is default unless specified noindex, nofollow or by other means robots.txt ect..)

is disregarded by Google, but there are still bots out there that accept i believe

Pragma and site verification are for you to decide -

Pragma just tells the individual browser not to cache, and site verification is just for Google Webmaster Tools - which can be done many ways. (.txt, DNS Zone ect..)

Some others are Author, Publisher and Canonical - but especially in the case of canonical - if you do not do it correctly it can really mess with Bots.

Hope this helps

Extra info on Author and Canonical

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/authorship-google-plus-link-building

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/canonical-url-tag-the-most-important-advancement-in-seo-practices-since-sitemaps

[JustinTaylor88]

Agree with Shane on meta robots and revisit

SEOMoz recommend that the keywords tag isn't used as it serves no SEO value, all it does is tell competitors the keywords you are trying to rank on

If you are active on Facebook, you might also want to consider using

as it gives analytics for referral traffic

https://developers.facebook.com/docs/insights/

[Catalyste]

I would say since Google may show this one in search results which gives you a little control on what users will see when this page is triggered by a Search.

Limit it to 160 characters. Beside that, no that much ...Meta where so abused over the past.

Maybe you should also start to think on implementing Rich snippets if you have time :

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=99170

[NiallSmith]

Catalyste,

Yes, this is something that I will need to implement. With that, I also wanted to ask you, if we fore-go implementing 'rich snippets' and 'authorship' fields in the BETA is that going to create more problems for development down the line?

More specifically, if we decide to hold off implementing authorship/rich snippets until we launch the actual production site for visitors/customers, will this create more problems than just implementing this stuff now?

Likewise, are there any additional suggestions you'd make for a news organization's site?