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This is the fourth part of my SEO for Wordpress series. Previously I wrote about title tags, header tags and filenames.
Even though the meta description tag is less relevant for influencing search results than it was a few years back, it can still play an important role in bringing traffic to your site.
Most search engines put the first 190 characters of your meta description tag below the linked title of your page in their search results. If written in a compelling manner, combined with your title tag it may draw searchers into your site.
If a page doesn’t have a meta description, the search engines will list the text that it finds near the top of the page for a description. By default, meta descriptions are not included in Wordpress, but can be manually included by editing the header.php file.
Dynamic Meta Tags
Now that we are able to add meta tags to our template, we’ll need a way to dynamically add unique keywords and descriptions to each post.
To add a description and other meta tags that are unique we will have to use plugins. There are a number of plugins that allow bloggers to set the description, keywords and other meta tags to be unique in each post by using the Custom Fields in the Write Post Panel. You can find a list of these here.
The meta description tag should look like:
<META name=”description” content=”description goes here”>
All In One SEO Pack
This Internet Marketing Blog uses All in One SEO Pack which allows you to create a unique meta description and meta keywords. It also lets you create a title tag this is different than the title of your post, which comes in handy sometimes.
If you decide to use All In One SEO Pack, make sure that you don’t have meta description and keyword tags already in your header.php file. This will cause your pages to have two sets of meta description and keyword tags. Also, make sure that <?php wp_head(); ?> is placed somewhere between the <head> and </head> tags to ensure that the meta description and keyword tags show up.
More SEO for Wordpress:
SEO for Wordpress Part 1: Title Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 2: Header Tags
SEO for Wordpress Part 3: Filenames
SEO for Wordpress Part 4: Meta Description
SEO for Wordpress Part 5: Duplicate Content
SEO for Wordpress Part 6: Organizing Category Pages
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