SEO - Meta Tag Tutorials For Blogger and Wordpress
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There is something driving me absolutely crazy… and it’s about YOUR blog!
As I’m touring around the world wide web via Entrecard, and adding blogs to my favorite bookmarks list, there’s one thing that is striking me over and over and over again, and that is that very, very few blogs have descriptions in their meta info!
Some of you may have absolutely no clue what I’m referring to, and that’s ok… because I’m about to explain it all in plain english, and help you out by providing several short tutorials on how to fix this problem in two of the most popular blogging platforms - Wordpress & Blogger.
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are HTML codes that are inserted into the header on a web page, after the title tag.
The meta description tag and the meta keywords tag are not seen by users. Instead, the main purpose of these tags is to provide meta document data to user agents, such as search engines. For search engine optimization (SEO) purposes, meta tags are used in the search engine results:
In the above example taken from a Google search, you can see the Title (in blue), and the meta tag description (highlighted in yellow). Without a description tag, the search engines will scan your website or blog and use the first block of text that it comes across as your description. Often times, this will actually be your navigation menu or some other text that won’t make much sense as a description of your site.
Adding Meta Tags in Blogger:
From your dashboard, select Layout - as shown in the image below.
From the Layout menu, click on Edit HTML.
You will then be brought to a page that contains code similar to the image below. This is actually the template code that is displaying all the graphics etc. on your blog. To add in your meta tag information, look for the line in the code that starts with <title> (as highlighted in yellow below).
Once you’ve located the <title> tag (which is actually the tag that the search engines pull the title of your blog or website from), you’ll want to add in the following code, right beneath the title tag:
DESCRIPTION HERE: This is where you should insert a brief description about your blog. Keep it to 150 characters or less (more than that and the search engines will ignore them anyway). Try to put several keywords in the description, yet still make it readable - and don’t overload with keywords, or it will look like spam.
KEYWORDS HERE: Enter several of your keywords. Again, don’t overload with keywords as it will look spammy.
AUTHOR NAME HERE: This should be your name, business name or even blog name. Note that this tag isn’t nearly as important as the other two, but it is a nice little addition :)
Once you’ve completed that, save your changes. Congratulations! You’ve now improved your SEO just by taking 5 minutes to make sure your tags are there!
Adding Meta Tags In Wordpress:
There are a few ways that we can do this. First, I’ll begin with the “hard” way, and that is by editing your template, and from there we’ll move onto some very cool plugins that will improve your SEO big time.
*Note - these instruction use Wordpress 2.5*
Log into your dashboard, and click on Design.
From the Design menu, click on Theme Editor
Once the Theme Editor is open, look towards the right side where you will see a list of all the files that make up your theme. The file that you need to click on will be called Header (header.php).
You’ll then see the left side of the screen where all the code is change, and it will bring up the code for the Header file. Towards the top of the code, look for the <title> tag, which may be similar to the code highlighted in yellow below.
Directly after the <title> tag, you can enter in your meta tags, as highlighted in yellow below.
Save the file, and you’re done, but….
If you know anything about SEO at all, then you should know that by entering in the meta tags in the header will act as the description and keywords for your entire site. This isn’t the best thing really, as each page and each post should actually have it’s own set of meta tags, as each page and post has it’s own content. Yes, the content may all be on the same topic, but just like regular websites, each page and each post should be considered as a doorway page into your site.
To fix that, and make sure that every post has it’s own meta information, there are several awesome plugins that can be utilized.
The first one is the absolute ultimate - but may take some time for you to feel comfortable with: HeadSpace2
HeadSpace is modular in nature and provides a full set of modules
that allow you to configure your site exactly as you want and without
requiring several conflicting plugins - everything is contained within
one consistent interface. These modules include:
- Page-specific modules that can be applied to posts, pages, categories, archives, search pages, 404 pages, and the home page!
- Page titles - SEO optimized titles
- Tags and keywords are auto-suggested using a smart algorithm or via Yahoo - full WordPress 2.3 tagging support
- Page-specific plugins - have plugins that run only on specific pages!
- Theme-specific plugins - change your site theme on specific pages!
- Description - what appears in search engine listing
- More text - change the ‘more text’ for each post
- JavaScript & CSS - add JavaScript or CSS files to a post
- No index - configure whether a page is indexed by search engines
- Site name & description
- RSS name & description
- Anything else you want - HeadSpace allows custom meta-data
- Site-wide modules:
- Configure auto-formatting (wpautop), auto-fancy quotes, and auto-clickable links
- Tracking codes for Google Analytics (new & old code), Crazy Egg, StatCounter, 103bees, and Mint, with the ability to not track registered users
- Google section targeting
- Expanded RPC support (provides tags in blogging tools such as Ecto)
- First Time Visitor - display a special message to visitors when they first visit your site (based upon idea by Seth Godin)
- Disable Widgets
If you’re looking for a straight forward SEO Plugin, then this is my #1 pick: All In One SEO Pack
Some features:
- Automatically optimizes your titles for search engines
- Generates META tags automatically
- Avoids the typical duplicate content found on Wordpress blogs
- For Wordpress 2.3 you don’t even have to look at the options, it works out-of-the-box. Just install.
- You can override any title and set any META description and any META keywords you want.
- You can fine-tune everything
- Backward-Compatibility with many other plugins, like Auto Meta, Ultimate Tag Warrior and others.
And finally, I highly recommend using the Site Map Generator! This plugin is awesome, and does all the work for you :)
Tags: metatags, blogger, wordpress, SEO
Thanks for the wordpress plugin recommendations
Kevins last blog post..Getting your Google Ranking Back
Hope you find them useful Kevin :)
Thanks for the post
This post is useful for the students and owner of the enterprises who don’t know about the meta tags.
Great article Dianne, some of the resources, plugins etc I knew about and some I didn’t! So thanks for letting us know about them all.
Melodys last blog post..Watkins Lady’s Twitter Updates for 2008-06-19
Thanks sem experts & Melody! It’s really been bothering me as to how many sites out there aren’t using meta tags - though I know there will always be controversy ;)
Thanks so much for posting this info! I am going to work on this tomorrow.
This is awesome! It was easy to undertand and I just hope I did it right!!
Thanks!
Thank you! I hope I didn’t mess it up. :)
Thanks for great post! It was bothering me as well, those meta tags.
I tried to put meta in my http://www.tricksofblogging.blogspot.com but this message came
“Your template could not be parsed as it is not well-formed. Please make sure all XML elements are closed properly.
XML error message: Element type “meta” must be followed by either attribute specifications, “>” or “/>”.”
Can you help please?
Hi Dana, it sounds like you may not have added the meta tags correctly.
It should look something like this:
Let me know if that helps!
i tried to put meta tag in my word press blog but ididnot find theme editor
Hi Mohamed - what version of WordPress are you using? You should just have to log into your dashboard, click on Design, and then on Theme Editor.. let me know if you still can’t find it and I’ll see what else I can do to help you out.
Hi, hope you and your kids and husband are o.k. I have seen your site and I appreciate your willingness to guide others. I would request you to visit my site and advise me how to make best use of “all in one SEO for wordpress”
Thanking you with regards.
Hi everyone,
Do I need to create meta Tag each time I am posting the article??
Hi Gokhiel,
When using the wordpress plugin Headspace, you’ll see a new HeadSpace box underneath your post that will allow you to add all of the appropriate meta-data for your new blog post.
They make life quick and easy (but don’t look at the source code on this site as I haven’t fixed it yet LOL).
Cheers!
Great Article. Nice to know for wordpress.
Joes last blog post..Survey Savvy: The Referrals
You can use PHP, as you have done with the title, to get control over your meta tags without using wordpress plugins.
malcs last blog post..How to avoid duplicate meta descriptions in pages 2 and higher of the Wordpress loop
My meta tag link no work as I left out http. Sigh. Try that one …
Hello Dianne,
I need your help. I ran my blog thru a Meta Tag Analyzer and received the following:
(1)Keywords found in the IMG Alt tags: Keyword - Times Found.
This is text found in the ‘alt’ tag from the images. For web pages with a lot of images those tags are important **(for best results try to name them after your primary keywords).**
(2)Keywords found in the Anchor tags: Keyword - Times Found.
These are text links on your web page (include the ‘alt’ text from images in the links).
These become more important by many search engines **(for best results try to name them after your primary keywords**
I am a complete newbie, and would like to know where to place the IMG Alt Tags and Anchor Tags on the html page. Would like something similar to your instructions on Meta Tags for Description for Blogs.
Your help will be appreciated.
Thanks,
Maurice.
Maurice Jacobs last blog post..Thirsty plants send ‘text’ thanks to Israeli invention
Hi Maurice.. give me a day or two and I’ll write up something that should help you out :)))
Thanks Dianne.
Maurice Jacobs last blog post..Vitamins for the Brain, Improve Memory
great tips , i used it in my blog
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