WordPress users – did you know that when you setup your new WordPress site and begin adding Pages & Posts, they DO NOT contain the description and keywords meta tag data!
WordPress knew that this would be something best handled by Plugin developers, so they left meta tag management OUT on purpose.
Do you know what meta tags are and why they are important? Well, since Google is the monster finder of things on the internet, lets listen to what they say about them.
“Description meta tag provides a short description of the page. In some situations this description is used as a part of the snippet shown in the search results.”
For example, when you search for “aardvark” on Google, you will see a list of search results, like this:
The light gray text under the green web address is your Description Meta Tag!
The blue text is your Title Description Tag.
Lets see what Google says about that.
“While technically not a meta tag, this tag is often used together with the “description”. The contents of this tag are generally shown as the title in search results (and of course in the user’s browser). “
Woah! I didn’t know that Title was not ‘technically’ a meta tag!
I have a tip for you on the Title tag. When I write the Title for a WordPress post, I usually only do it AFTER I compose (and maybe think a bit about) what I have written in the BODY of the post. That way, I can be sure it fits what I have talked about.
Now we know what the Title and Description meta tags are, and how Google uses them. Next time, I’ll talk about a Plugin that will give you automatic Title and Description meta tags!
And, what about that Keywords Meta Tag?