Here's the meta part of my forum for SEO: Is that right?? Am I doing something wrong? How do I add in the description? When I add in my description after the content=" , my forum gets messed up, so I'm not sure if I'm doing it correctly. Also, I heard that I should remove anything that says "robot_no_index" because its not good. What should I do?
I'm not entirely sure about the coding, however I can offer my opinion on a couple of things... 1. robot_no_index: google that exact phrase, the first result links to a forum where a user has explained it's purpose fairly well. Basically it's used to avoid duplicate content penalties in place of creating a massive robots.txt - exactly how I'm not sure 2. Meta description: If you really want to set on I can't help, but why bother? If a user searches for something that is relevant to the page but not relevant to your description they're less likely to click through. Whereas, if you leave it out, google will grab the most relevant snippet and this would likely increase CTR.
I don't recomment using the title in the description. google for instance will use the title as the blue link text in the result and use the description as the text under that. Meta tags no longer have any effect on how you rank in google, so it is now only important for catching a viewer's attention. therefore you want your title text and your description text to be a little different. other wise it looks redundant. I would make your title something descriptive about the site/forum itself, and the description explaining what it is the forum content is. and no more than around 25 words in the description.
Well, if I understand correctly you're trying to make it so that each page/thread on the forum has it's title/description automatically updated. As Mark said above, google will grab the title and use that for the link so having the description match that is going to hurt you rather than help. What I was saying is that, suppose a thread is titled 'blue widgets', but for one reason or another it's ranking for 'red widgets' - do you want the thread title (blue widgets) being used in the SERPS, or do you want google to automatically look for the most relevant snippet of information, such as a post referring to 'red widgets'. I don't know if that explains it well enough...
When people search "Left 4 Dead Forum" or "Left4Dead Forum" on Google or any other search engine, I want my site to appear in the results. How would I go about doing that?
Name the forum that. for example every ontopic section name it 'Left 4 Dead Forum' I use no meta tage for my forums and it comes up 4th on the first page of google when googling for 'unexplained Mysteries forum'