Improve Your WordPress SEO – Add The Meta Description Tag
By default, many WordPress themes do not display the description tag – this isn’t ideal as search engines place quite a bit of emphasis on this tag and if it’s optimized for good keywords (i.e. ones with a good amount of daily traffic that have less competition) it can help with your ranking.
There are three easy ways in which you can add the description tag to your WordPress theme.
1. Update Your Header.php File
The first approach is to manually update your header.php file – copy and paste the following code between the <head> and </head> tags:
<?php if ((is_front_page()) || (is_home())) { ?> <meta name="description" content="[Add Your Description For The Home Page Here]" /> <?php } elseif (is_single()) { ?> <meta name="description" content="<?php the_excerpt();?>"/> <?php } ?>
This piece of code will firstly check which type of page is being viewed – if it is the home page or your front page, it will add the description that you manually type in. However, if it is a blog post, it will add the excerpt for the post instead.
2. Add A Custom Field
Another simple approach is to add a custom field – to do this you initially need to edit your header.php file again and add the following line between the <head> and </head> tag:
<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description') ?>" />
Then, when creating a new blog post, you need to add a custom field with a name of “description” and the contents of your description.
You can also go back and do this for old blog posts that have already been posted – this can help improve their chances of getting some Google juice!
3. Install The All in One SEO Pack
The final approach is to install the All in One SEO Pack plugin which easily enables you to add a title, description, and some tags to each of your posts. This is a very useful plugin especially if you’d prefer not to get your hands dirty and mess around with the code.
Once you’ve installed and activated the plugin, it will add the following box to your blog post creation page:
You then just need to fill in your title for the post, the description, and some keywords related to the post.
Conclusion
So, that’s it! On another note, it’s always worth doing some keyword research for each post that you write, so that you can incorporate some good keywords into both your content and into these different meta tags.
This extra bit of effort can often pay off nicely as it will potentially help your post rank better in the search engines which should increase your chances of receiving more traffic to your site.
It only takes a few minutes to do, but it’s well worth getting into the habit!
