This is part two in the “Wordpress SEO For Beginners” series. If you haven’t read the first part on SEO permalinks, I heartily suggest you do at some time.
After the URL, one of the next things that a search engine will see when crawling your page is the meta tags. Meta tags come in several different types, but the three I’m going to focus on are the “title” tag, the “description” tag, and the “keywords” tag.
But before I delve any further, I should point out that the “keywords” tag has very little SEO value. The “description” tag isn’t worth all that much either, but I will point out its importance in just a little bit. First, let’s talk about the “title” tag.
The title tag is the most important of the meta tags, and it can literally make a huge impact on the ranking of your website or webpage. WordPress themes will commonly use the title of your individual posts or pages as the content for your meta title tag. This is important to keep in mind, because if you use some cute or ironic title to an article you publish that uses words that are not associated with the content of your article then you are really starting off at a disadvantage.
WordPress title tags in action
Let’s say that you wrote an article about dog flea remedies that is chock full of great information. Since the core topic of your article is on “dog flea remedies” you should really apply those words in your title. Something along the lines of “5 All Natural Dog Flea Remedies” or “Dog Flea Remedies Under $20”. Search engines give a lot of consideration in how they rank a site according to what is in the title tag so be sure to get your keywords in there if possible.
On the other hand, if you were to title the above article with something like “Keep Your Dog From Scratching!” you haven’t really incorporated your core content in your title. It may be somewhat related to your topic, but it doesn’t lead the search engines as well as it could.
WordPress description tags
The “description” tag does just what it says: it describes the content of the page. The major search engines don’t place a lot of value on this tag, but I find that most of the value from this tag comes from the human element.
When you view the search results in a search engine, say Google for example, you will see their ranked results in a certain format. First, the title of the page is listed. This is supplied from the title tag. Below that you’ll see a short bit of text describing the webpage. That is most often supplied directly from the description tag.
If you (or your blog theme) do not supply information for this tag, then search engines will generally fill in this information automatically from some of the first text that it crawls on your site. I prefer to make the decision myself on what goes in that tag, and I recommend the same for everyone else.
I prefer providing the text for the description tag because I want to control what the search user sees. If I want a description that better explains the page, then I can choose what it says. You can easily make this short bit of displayed text more inviting that lures people into clicking over to your webpage than what can be scraped by a searchbot.
WordPress keywords tag
Like I said in the beginning, this tag is all but worthless. The major search engines disregard this information, but there are many of the smaller search engines that don’t. For this reason, I still suggest employing this tag on blogs.
The keywords tag has a history of being abused by people, where they would just stuff this tag full of every word imaginable, whether it was related to the page’s content or not. Search engines became wise to this trick and that’s why many search engines today disregard this tag’s information in ranking pages.
When you use this tag, enter in words or terms that define what your article’s content is about. It helps if the word is in your article as well. You don’t have to go overboard on this; I rarely use more than 6 or 7 keywords, if even that many.
How to enter meta tag information
Some blog themes add the ability to easily enter meta information to your blog articles. Most do not. There are many plugins available for this and one of the most popular is the All In One SEO Pack. This plugin does more than just allow the user to enter meta information, but for the sake of brevity this is all I will discuss about it.
All In One SEO Pack meta tags info
Somewhere below the post text box on the “add a new post” page you should see what is pictured above. Here you can enter the appropriate information for the “title”, “description” and “keyword” tags. Don’t worry if you leave the title area blank; WordPress will just use the title of your article which should be just fine.
Final notes on meta tags
Based on value, the title tag is very important, the description tag is of moderate importance, and the keywords tag can be almost disregarded. If your WordPress theme doesn’t give you the ability to enter meta information get a plugin that does.
Be sure to check in soon as the next step is optimizing your blog layout!
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