If you're new here, you may want to subscribe to my RSS feed. Thanks for visiting!

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

If you’re looking for a straight forward SEO Plugin, then this is my #1 pick: All In One SEO Pack

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