
If you have a clear purpose for your website, then you can use that information to create generic meta tags and place these in your header. To add a description, keywords, and other meta tags that are unique to each post or Page generated, you have two choices: you can add them as generic references or you can use plugins. What you need is something to dynamically add keywords and descriptions on a per-post basis. Putting them in the header.php means the information won't change throughout your site. You can add meta tag information such as the content, language, author, contact, and copyright, since these are basically the same on every page of your site.īut what about the 'dynamic' types of information such as description and keywords? This information is unique to every web page on your site. At the top you will see the DOCTYPE tag and below that you will see a couple more tags and then the tag, looking something like this:īelow this line you can add your meta tags. To add meta tags to your site, simply add them to the header.php template file in your WordPress Theme, specifically in the head section near the link for the style sheet. In the Resource section below are some links to more information on meta tags and their impact on search engines. Without a doubt, content is the biggest contributor to search engine page ranking, so if you want to raise your rankings, make sure you have quality content.Ĭovering all the reasons meta tags are and aren't important to search engines is beyond the scope of this article. Furthermore, Google does still use the meta description tag in some situations as part of the snippet of your site displayed in search results. In fact, meta tags may not represent the content of your site, but, it still doesn't hurt your status with search engines if you make use of these little bits of information, and do so truthfully. Some search engines don't use the meta tag information any more because many people abused it. Google no longer uses the meta keyword in search result ranking and they confirm this in their Webmaster Central Blog. As browsers became more sophisticated, they stopped needing a lot of hand holding in order to figure out if your site is in English or Chinese. They used to be more helpful, providing important information to the Internet browser. If you want to supply search engines better information that is more specific to your web pages, you have to add the meta tag data yourself.Ī good question to ask is if meta tags are still necessary. WordPress may do some magical things, but it can't read your mind. Are you seeing the pattern?Īll of this is unique information. The keywords also list words found within that post. The description tag lists a description of the post that is unique to that post. The author and contact information lists a specific person.

It also gives information to the browser to recognize the characters as not being Chinese.

This means that the page will probably feature spellings like "center" instead of "centre" and "humor", not "humour". Specifically, this example sets the character set to be in the English language style as found in the United States, using the ASCII character set. The second tag sets the character set for the page and the third tag sets the language.

In the default installation, WordPress does not include meta tags such as description and keywords.

The most common meta tags examples include: This is an example of a meta tag for description: Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags can be added manually, through changes to the Theme template files or through WordPress Plugins. It is important for website developers to understand that a default installation of WordPress does not contain the description and keywords meta tag data.
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We have more information on how to maximize your meta tag references below. It compares the words within each of these sections and "ranks" the site dependent upon how well the information matches. As a search engine prowls your site, it gathers information from the title, headings, content, and Meta Tags such as description or keywords.
