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An improvement to Wordpress themes is installing a META Description Tag plugin. Currently the Wordpress theme I am using, provided by Derek Punsalan , is optimized for search engines, but there are a few additional things that can still be done as he also describe in the ReadMe file of the theme.
It may happen that Search Engines see the content as duplicate if the content at two different URLs for example appears to be substantially similar. So some pages may be filtered when the Search Engine is serving the results, or even it may happen that some websites or pages aren’t indexed at all by search engines, or that a Search Engine Crawling Program stop indexing them.
Therefore without a unique META Description Tag on each of our posts we are hampering our Search Engine traffic. To solve this problem after we have succesfully installed our WordPress theme we can download from this link a META Description Tag plugin which is very easy to install. The URL contains all the instructions.
For my theme it’s very simple, I only had to download the .zip file, extract the head-meta-desc.php file, upload it to my wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate Head META Description under Plugins in my WordPress.
Basically this plugin outputs a brief summary of a post or Page (the first N words, where N is defined in the plugin and we can modify it), a description of the category if on category pages, and the tagline of the blog on any other page.
This plugin adds XHTML META tags to your WordPress blog. The addition of the META tags is fully automatic , but it also includes all those features a SEO-concerned publisher would need in order to have total control over those meta tags.
The features at a glance
The following list outlines how and where META tags are added to a WordPress blog by this plugin. Please note that this list does not provide all the details you need to know about how to customize the added metatags. Its purpose is to provide a general idea of what this plugin supports. For detailed info, proceed to the next section.
- Front Page
- Automatically.
- Customization is possible from the plugin’s configuration panel.
- Single Posts
- Automatically. (On WordPress v2.3 or newer tags are also used in addition to the post’s categories)
- Customization of the “description” META tag:
- either via custom excerpt
- or via custom field (note that this overrides the custom excerpt).
- Customization of the “keywords” META tag via custom field only.
- Static Pages
- No automatic generation of meta tags.
- Customization is possible with custom fields like it can be done in posts.
- Category Archive Pages
- The description of the category, if set, is used for the description META tag. The name of the category is always used at the keywords metatag.
- META Tags on all pages
- It is now possible to set any other META tag, which does not require any computation, to be added to all blog page
Download | md5sum: 5af014831dd0f6d097771fdf05114e92
META Description Wordpress Plugins for SEO
Search engine optimization helps to increase site traffic by getting higher search engine rankings. The META description tag has been shown of value in white hat SEO techniques. It is essential you have different page specific META description tags for each page on your site (Do not use the same description for all posts).
Wordpress by default has no META description tags for individual posts. I tried the Head Meta Description wordpress plugin that provides an
automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the query-type. I easily configured it to display the first 20 words excerpt of the article as the description. It worked effectively and is very useful to automatically add a dynamic description to each page.
Problem: It is agreed that the META Description tag should be representative of the page it describes, after all that is the whole idea. But when you decide to extract the excerpt of the first 20 words, the resulting description may be nothing related to the page concerned. A mismatch of the post content and the META tag may actually reduce the sense it make to search engines and reduce the search rankings.
Solution: So if you decide to use these plugins, it is a good idea to change your writing style such that the target keywords are at the start of the article. Include the main content in those 20 words so that the description makes sense.
You can edit the number of words to show in the description from 20 to any number you like via the plugin editor. I tried 40 words too, but many of my older posts did not have the targeted content in the first few words and made no sense (and I did not have the courage to edit thousands of posts to fix this). Now I am consciously trying to get the content synopsis in the post excerpt.
WP plugin: Head META Description
Lazy WordPress plugin posting time! Another of my did it but for some reason didn’t release it plugins, Head Meta Description provides an automatic meta description tag for your blog, inserting a dynamic description depending on the query-type (i.e. page you’re on). Some search engines are supposed to love this tag, so I guess we should, too.
Ooh ooh, get ready for brain-numbing install instructions:: download the zip file and extract head-meta-desc.php from it, upload this to your wp-content/plugins/ directory, and activate Head META Description under Plugins in WordPress. Phew! If your theme already calls the wp_head() plugin hook from the <head> element, the plugin will work right off. If not, add this on its own line (before the closing </head> tag) in the header of your theme, typically in the header.php template:
<?php wp_head(); ?>The plugin outputs a brief summary of a post’s or Page’s excerpt (the first # words of it, # defined in the $post_desc_length user-configurable variable described below), a category’s description when on category pages, and the blog’s tagline when on any other page or query-type. You can also set your own default description (through the $default_blog_desc variable), as well as override post and Page descriptions with a custom field (the $custom_desc_key variable defines the key; your custom field value would be the description for that post or Page).
Head META Description provides four user-configurable variables. These are:
$default_blog_desc
Setting this overrides the use of the tagline (Options > General in WordPress) for the default description on your blog. If you don’t use the tagline, edit this line. Default value is ” (empty).
$post_desc_length
Length of the description in words for post and Page descriptions (the first # words of the excerpt, or post content). Default value is 20.
$post_use_excerpt
This tells the plugin to use the excerpt for description on posts, if one exists. Set this to 0 (zero) to force post content as description. Default is 1.
$custom_desc_key
Name of the custom field key used to override post or Page excerpts for descriptions. Default is description.
You can change these variables by editing the plugin file online through the plugin editor (Plugins > Plugin Editor, then select the plugin file), or offline in a text editor.
Meta Robots WordPress plugin
There’s no easy way to add meta robots tags to WordPress pages, unless of course, when you install this plugin.
How to use the Robots Meta Plugin from Joost de Valk on Vimeo.
This plugin makes it possible (and very easy) to:
- Prevent indexing of your search result pages, while still allowing the search engines to follow the links on them, by adding noindex,follow robots meta tags.
- Prevent indexing of the subpages to your homepage, by adding a noindex,follow.
- Prevent indexing of your login, register and admin pages by adding noindex robots meta tags.
- Add noodp an noydir meta robots tags, allowing you to opt out of DMOZ and Yahoo! Directory descriptions.
- Prevent Yahoo! and Google from indexing your feeds by adding a meta tag to their head-section.
- Disable author and date-based archives.
- Nofollow the category listings on single posts and pages to prevent PageRank leakage.
- Nofollow outbound links on your frontpage.
- Nofollow tag links.
- Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess from within your WordPress.
- Add robots meta tags to individual posts and pages.
- Verify your site with Google Webmaster Tools and Yahoo! Site Explorer.
- In WordPress 2.3 and up:
- Prevent indexing of just your comment feeds.
- Enforce a trailing slash on archive and tag pages.
Unique meta description and meta keyword tags in your Wordpress themes
Here is the meta description PHP with both category and tag pages included (and updated again to make them more than one word and to include monthly archives):
<meta name="description" content=
"<?php
if(is_home()) {echo ('Malcolm Coles: His blog for his reviews, so you can find him, and other stuff that takes his fancy.');}
else {if(is_category()) {echo category_description();}
else {if(is_tag()) {echo '-tag archive page for this blog' . single_tag_title();}
else {if(is_month()) {echo ' archive page for this blog' . the_time('F, Y');}
else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "Metadescription", true);}}}}?>">
please may i have a sample mailed to my box. thanks.