Optimizing your Movable Type 4 blog ready for SEO

The default movable type 4 template does not display title, meta descriptions and meta keywords at the HTML header. This can be frustrating to some SEO freaks out there, although meta tags are not too important compared to the page content but its nice to see your descriptions in included in the search engines result page and not some random text.

I have modified my header template to use the meta descriptions based on the page content. lots of MTIf tags are needed. If you are familiar with Movable Type Tags this will be easier for you.

Here is my new title, meta description and meta keyword tag from the header template in movable type.

<MTIf name="entry_template">
  <title><$MTGetVar name="page_title"$> - <$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$></title>
  <MTElse>
    <MTIf name="main_index">
    <title><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$></title>
    <meta name="description" content="<$MTBlogDescription$>" />
    <MTElse>
    <title><$MTBlogName encode_html="1"$>: <$MTGetVar name="page_title"$></title>
    <MTIfArchiveType type="Individual">
    <meta name="description" content="<$MTEntryExcerpt$>" />
    <meta name="keywords" content="<$MTEntryKeywords$>">
    <MTElse>
      <MTIfArchiveType type="Category">
      <meta name="description" content="<$MTCategoryDescription$>" />
      </MTIfArchiveType>
    <MTElse>
      <MTIfArchiveType like="(Yearly|Monthly|Weekly|Daily)">
      <meta name="description" content="<$MTArchiveTitle$> archive containing <$MTArchiveCount$> entries from <$MTArchiveDate$> to <$MTArchiveDateEnd$>." />
       </MTIfArchiveType>
     </MTIfArchiveType> 
   </MTIf>
</MTIf>

This is a work in progress I am still experimenting on how i could optimize it and display meta keyword in the headers as well.

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