Question About Metadata

Something I've always been curious about...

Joomla has a lot of places to enter metadata. Each article has metadata, the category (at least in K2) has metadata and the menu item has metadata. I take the time to write unique descriptions for each of these, but in the back of my mind I feel like it's a waste, because surely only one of the three will be seen by the search engine.

So what I'm wondering is...is it really a waste of time to enter metadata in all of these areas, or is simply doing it in articles enough (or perhaps articles + menu item but not categories)?

Hi,
1) <meta name="keywords" content="..... ------> waste of time
2) <meta name="description" content=".... -----> sometimes Google still uses this info during showing search result

More important is good quality & unique : content and titles and alt for images. It really works and will be in future.

p.s.
You should also use additional plugin which will add Canonical Url for each article - read about it and install plugin

I've just noticed something unusual that is related to this subject.

Every article on my site has unique meta data filled out. Every K2 category has unique meta data. Every menu item has unique meta data. With three descriptions available, you would assume google would find one of them, but the description on all of my indexed pages reads:

Menu icons: You can define icons for first level menu items. To use it please go to the menu items manager and in Mega menu plugin please · Cappuccino ...

What's really weird is I can not find that text anywhere on my site.

Or maybe that is something that got indexed with some info from the demo, like before I had a chance to write my own descriptions.

I'm just posting a follow up here in case anyone is ever checking this thread in the future. Do not even consider adding the metadata to the menu items unless you want to have duplicate descriptions, because the articles will use the menu item description/keywords rather than the ones you enter on the article. Google Webmaster Tools is showing me as having over 1,000 duplicate descriptions and this was the cause of the problem.

Some times modules and paginations create extra duplicate url - unfortunately. The more complex the website the more difficult it is to watch - manage all generated links.