To learn how to add meta descriptions in WordPress, it is first important to understand what a Meta tag is and how it can enhance your WordPress blogging experience. Follow this article on how to add meta descriptions in WordPress to learn more about adding to your website.
Many WordPress users will add meta descriptions or meta tags in their WordPress blog to enhance their overall Search Engine Optimization. SEO works by giving WordPress users and website owners a better search engine ranking, which means more web traffic. The word meta actually means “information about.” WordPress uses meta tags to help create and provide a brief and basic description of the post or website. Meta tags will list information about the website including author, keywords, description, copyright, type of document and more. It is also important to keep in mind that when you go with the default WordPress installation, Meta tags will not automatically be included. This is why you will need to learn how to add meta descriptions in WordPress on your own.
How to Add Meta Descriptions in WordPress:
Meta tags are not included in the default system when you first install WordPress, so if you want to reap the benefits of having meta descriptions added to your WordPress blog, you are going to need to add them yourself. Adding meta tags not only provides descriptions to your WordPress blog, but they also provide an easier way for search engine spiders to locate and rank your website. Having a high ranking via search engine is a vital part of attracting new customers and potential clients to your website. This should be the mission of just about any online business or someone that is looking to promote a product or service online to make money. Most of the time the reason WordPress does not automatically generate meta descriptions from your website is because many of the spellings might be incorrect or unrecognized. The meta tags might also be specific to a person or a name, which is also not recognized by WordPress.
In fact, some bloggers and search engines like Google don’t even recognize meta descriptions anymore, which leaves the question are they even still necessary? So many website administrators have previously misused and abused the meta description idea, so they are not as commonly recognized. Because some search engines still do recognize the meta tags in the search engine rankings, it certainly cannot hurt to add in as long as your report the tags truthfully. Remember, the best way to increase your web search rankings is by having quality content. Do not spam your blog full of keywords and meta tags because the site will ultimately get reported by the search engine spider as spam.
When you want to add meta descriptions in WordPress for your site, simply add them to the header.[hp template file located in your WordPress theme. Do so specifically under the head section near the link for the style sheet. You will know it is the right place because at the top you should see DOCTYPE tag and below that you will notice a couple more tags, then the <title> tag. It is below this line that you can add in your meta tags. You should base your meta descriptions on content information, language, author, contact and copyright. This is easy to do and maintain since for the most part they will be the basically the same information on every page of the website. If you want to add more specific tags based on each individual post, an easy way to do this is to add meta descriptions in WordPress through plugins. Using these plugins will allow you to customize each of the meta descriptions. This way you can add certain ones based on a per-post basis.