Description Meta Tag Missing – No WordPress Plugin
July 23rd, 2008 | Posted by in SEO FactorsSo, I wrote a post 32 minutes ago, see … (Google search was “international seo smart tips”)
Haven’t found the answer yet, but where or how is this info being grabbed for the description? ” International SEO – Smart Tips · Google Maps – User Generated Content *New · Google Trends & MSN’s …”
I do have a wordpress title plug in and a few other types, but did you know that the default for most WordPress themes is to NOT include a META description? Why you ask? I found this blog to help sort this out and I agree with what Malcolm says. If you have ever built your blog from scratch as I had, you could literally spend days or months building things into it. It was a lot of fun, and as an SEO you learn a lot from the server side, which is also important.
FYI:
Placing this code into your head section of the header bit of your wordpress template. Give it a try!
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php if(is_home()) {echo (’PUT YOUR HOME PAGE DESCRIPTION HERE’);} else {echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “Metadescription”, true);}?>”>
You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 You can leave a response, or trackback.
Thank you super, this is a great post… This is my modification:
‘; } else {}
?>
I here so many different sides to meta tags. Some say they are great other say worthless. I need to know it they’re worth the time
@Keegan – Just to break down each of the tags:
Title Tag (not called Meta, as some peeps do), is vitally important to each of your most valuable pages
Description Meta Tag: Very important to the visitor for conversion purposes into specific landing page. From what I know this tag has no weighting in Google’s Algo, this is purely to help the visitor learn briefly what your page is about, if all your descriptions were same, your visitor would have no way of distinguishing one page from another.
Keywords Meta Tag: This too has little to no effect on Google’s algo, though, I have heard about a year ago of a study that Yahoo does still put some algo emphasis on this tag. For my US based sites, I will, for Yahoo’s sake, just include 1 or 2 primary/secondary keywords for that page only – not the company name 5,000 times and for International sites, I always include the Keywords here, simply because this Meta tag is viewed and has proven to help assist in ranking.
Hope that helps!