Meta tags are a great way to let the search engine spiders know, in a nutshell, what exactly your individual blog posts are about.  Meta tags can be added to each of your blog posts, and there is a quick and easy way to do this with Wordpress, through the use of a Wordpress plug-in.

Unfortunately, when you first install Wordpress, it isn’t set up to include meta tags within your posts and pages.  However, I came across a website which provides a free Wordpress plug-in, which when installed will automatically include the fields (meta name=”description”) and (meta name=”keywords”) within the source code of your blog posts.  Here is the link to the page which provides the plug-in, owned by a gentleman named George Notaras.  George, if you’re reading this, thank you for developing this plug-in, I’m sure I’m not the only person who is eternally grateful!

 

Add Meta Tags Wordpress Plug-In

 

Once you’ve downloaded, extracted and installed the plug-in to your Wordpress account, activate it from your Wordpress control panel, and if you wanted to, simply forget about it, that is it!  Each of your blog posts will now contain the (meta name=”description”) and (meta name=”keywords”) fields within the source code for each post.  You can view the source code by going to any of your blog posts, then (if you’re using IE7) click on ‘Page’ then ‘View Source’.

The first sentence of your blog post will automatically be used for the meta name=”description” section of the meta tags field.  For the meta name=”keywords” field, your blog post category and the tags you assigned to the blog post will be used.  This can be customized if you’d like to change the phrases used for the meta tag fields, and more information on how to do this is kindly provided by George on his site.  From my point of view, I have already assigned tags to each of my blog posts anyway, so once I’d installed his Wordpress plug-in, I was finished, as my tags now appear within the meta name=”keywords” section of the source code.

For my static home page, I had to add my tags within the ‘Manage - Pages’ section of the Wordpress control panel.  These then appeared within the source code for my home page.  Within the ‘Custom Fields’ section, I also had to add a new ‘key’, called ‘description’, and the ‘value’ which is the first sentence which appears on my home page.

So if you’re looking to use meta tags with Wordpress, I have absolutely no problems recommending George’s Meta Tags Wordpress Plug-In.

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