Need help with getting your WordPress website or WordPress blog noticed by the search engine? WordPress Meta Tags may help. Read this article to discover what WordPress meta tags are and what they can do for your WordPress blog or website.
What Is a Meta Tag?
Meta means “going above” or operating at a higher level of description. In web design, it is used of information that comments on other information, classifying it or categorizing it. Webmasters use mega tags to succinctly communicate information about their websites to search engines. Search engines use the tags in comparison to the site content to rank the site.
Since systems ignore meta tags that they cannot process, a webmaster can provide meta tags for different systems without worries. They are framed by <head> at the beginning and </head> at the end. Meta tags may be created in two styles: HTML and XHTML. HTML tags do not require an end tag, but in XHTML, meta tags must be closed properly.
Google, for example, understands the following meta tags:
- Descriptions that may include post publication date, author, byline, etc. as part of a page description
- Titles
- Instructions to Robots including prevent the Google bot from indexing the page, following links on the page, archiving the page, or including the page image in search results
- No-translation Request
- Site verification to prove that you own the site for the use of Google Webmaster tools
- Content Type
Meta Tags in the WordPress Environment
The basic installation of WordPress does not contain meta tags for description or keywords. While WordPress can figure out information like language, character set, and contact information—the content of other tags—from the content you post, it can’t divine the description or keywords, so you have to add them yourself. There are two ways to add them:
- manually
- through plug-ins
However, WordPress advises that the use of meta tags may not be of very much importance currently, and that quality content is much more significant. They point out that there are keyword meta tags, but as of September, 2009, Google didn’t use them. Depending on how important other search engines are to you, you may wish to use them anyway. They explain that search engines no longer need to be told all the information in tags because they’ve gotten smarter.
Nevertheless, you can put in meta tags through the .php template file that is in your WordPress theme, placing them below the self-generated title tag, but using only the information that is common to all pages on your site. So only a description that applied to all pages of the site should be included in this location. Keywords can be treated similarly.
If you wish to place unique meta tags on each page, there are plugins for that. If you are interested, you can search the Plugin Directory using “Meta Tag” as your search term. As with any plugin search, be sure that the plugin is appropriate for your version of WordPress, and if applicable, that it is supported, and positively reviewed by other users.
Source
google.com
w3schools.com
googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com
codex.wordpress.org