As a search engine prowls your site, it gathers information from the title, headings, content, and Meta Tags such as description or keywords. It compares the words within each of these sections and “ranks” the site dependent upon how well the information matches. We have more information on how to maximize your meta tag references below.
It is important for website developers to understand that a default installation of WordPress does not contain the description and keywords meta tag data. Meta tags can be added manually, through changes to the Theme template files or through WordPress Plugins.
What are Meta Tags?
The word meta means information about. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information.
This is an example of a meta tag for description:
<meta name=”description” content=”This is the
description sentence or short paragraph about
the article or post.” />
The most common meta tags examples include:
<meta name=”resource-type” content=”document” />
<meta http-equiv=”content-type” content=”text/html; charset=US-ASCII” />
<meta http-equiv=”content-language” content=”en-us” />
<meta http-equiv=”author” content=”Harriet Smith” />
<meta http-equiv=”contact” content=”harrietsmith@harrietsmith.us” />
<meta name=”copyright” content=”Copyright (c)1997-2004
Harriet Smith. All Rights Reserved.” />
<meta name=”description” content=”Story about my dog
giving birth to puppies.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”stories, tales, harriet, smith,
harriet smith, storytelling, day, life, dog, birth, puppies, happy” />
Why Are Meta Tags Missing?
In the default installation, WordPress does not include meta tags such as description and keywords. Why? Well, let’s look at the above tags.
The second and third tags set the language and character set for the page. This example sets the character set to be in the English language style as found in the United States, using the ASCII character set. This means that the page will probably feature spellings like “center” instead of “centre” and “humor” not “humour”. It also gives information to the browser to recognize the characters as not being Chinese.
The author and contact information lists a specific person. The description tag lists a description of the post that is unique to that post. The keywords also list words found within that post. Are you seeing the pattern?
All of this is unique information. WordPress may do some magical things, but it can’t read your mind. If you want to supply search engines better information that is more specific to your web pages, you have to add the meta tag data yourself.
Are Meta Tags Necessary?
A good question to ask is if meta tags are still necessary. They used to be more helpful, providing important information to the Internet browser. As browsers became more sophisticated, they stopped needing a lot of hand holding in order to figure out if your site is in English or Chinese.
Some search engines don’t use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site. But, it still doesn’t hurt your status with search engines if you make use of these little bits of information, and do so truthfully.
Without a doubt, content is the biggest contributor to search engine page ranking, so if you want to raise your rankings, make sure you have quality content.
Keywords meta tags, on the other hand, are still used by some search engines to categorize and rank your website. Those engines compare the keywords with the content, giving you “points” for having your keywords match your content. Keywords are one of the most important meta tags you can add to your WordPress site.
Covering all the reasons meta tags are and aren’t important to search engines is beyond the scope of this article.
Putting Meta Tags Back In:
To add meta tags to your site, simply add them to the header.php template file in your WordPress Theme, specifically in the head section near the link for the style sheet. At the top you will see the DOCTYPE tag and below that you will see a couple more tags and then the tag, looking something like this:
<title><?php bloginfo(‘name’); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title />
Below this line you can add your meta tags. You can add meta tag information such as the content, language, author, contact, and copyright, since these are basically the same on every page of your site.
But what about the ‘dynamic’ types of information such as description and keywords? This information is unique to every web page on your site. Putting them in the header.php means the information won’t change throughout your site.
What you need is something to dynamically add keywords and descriptions on a per-post basis. To add a description, keywords, and other meta tags that are unique to each post or Page generated, you have two choices: you can add them as generic references or you can use plugins.
Using Meta Tag Plugins
There are several Plugins that allow the blog administrator to set the keywords, description, and other meta tags to be unique on each post.
Using Meta Tag Plugins allows you to customize each of your meta tags, and to choose the ones you want to add, or not, on a per-post basis. This allows your meta information to better describe each page.
— From WordPress —
