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I have a website (ASP.NET MVC) which has its contents mainly in Sinhala language. So the search engines will list my site only when someone searches for Sinhala words. But,I need to list my site's pages in search results when searched with appropriate English words too. So I'm planning to save HTML meta tags (in English) in database and load them dynamically with appropriate page contents.

Will loading the meta tags dynamically affect the site adversely?

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Almost every database driven website loads meta tags dynamically, WordPress is an example. The Title, Descriptions and Keyword meta tags can be set and stored in the database. Google doesn't care where you load the meta tags from. The do not use meta keywords in their algorithm though. Meta description and title they also may change based on search query to provide better results than what you've set for the page. The only reason to store them in your database is to be able to easily manage them through a form in your backend.

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  • You could explain much better than what I have tried to touch upon in my answer :) I think he meant dynamically generated more than loaded though
    – milo5b
    Aug 6, 2012 at 17:30
  • When viewing rich snippets in Google it actually doesn't show a description, and they say The excerpt from the page will show up here. The reason we can't show text from your webpage is because the text depends on the query the user types. excerpt being the description meta
    – Anagio
    Aug 6, 2012 at 18:21
  • sorry, I've meant that you did explain it better :) I've re-read my comment and it sounded as a critic instead of a compliment! I know that google takes the excerpt from different sources, even ODP if needed, and uses the appropriate one based on the query. I was just saying that when we talked about dynamically loaded we probably meant dynamically generated instead.
    – milo5b
    Aug 6, 2012 at 18:42
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Meta Tags are not considered as a ranking signal by Google and most of the top search engines. However, meta description might increase your Click Through Rate if used appropriately.

Also, unless you have a lot of similar pages, it's usually not needed to load meta tags dynamically. (for example, if you have a blog meta tags will depend on each article, and different articles would have different meta tags, defeating the purpose of loading meta tags dynamically - even if it could be loaded from database, its not necessarily dynamically generated. On the other hand, if you have a website that sells lots of product which are very similar, but differ on brands and features, you could load dynamically the main body of the meta tags with different features based on the items)

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  • Thanks for the answer... How to solve mentioned language problem (list my search content (Sinhala) for searches in (English) keywords)? Can you please clarify on that?
    – Nalaka526
    Aug 6, 2012 at 3:33
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    I am afraid you will need to have content written in English if you want to come up for English language searches. You could have 2 different versions of your site, with possibly 1 different sections for each language ( en.myste.com, sin.mysite.com or mysite.com/en/, mysite.com/sin/ or mysite.com and mysite.lk - whatever suits you best). You'd need to look out for a few things when implementing localisation, but overall it wouldn't be so difficult. Hope this helps
    – milo5b
    Aug 6, 2012 at 8:21
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I don't think this will work. Google does (IMO) review the meta tags and it can affect your position (I'm still on my own with this theory :) ) but, only by relating the tags to the content of your site.

If you don't have English words / phrases on your site then I don't think you will succeed in English. It seems like you need an English site as well!

EDIT as per milo suggestion in your original post

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