20 Things Wordpress Doesn’t Do Out of the Box

Page 14: Wordpress has no Way to Control Meta Tags or Titles for SEO

A “meta tag” is HTML code that’s place in the “head” of each web page for search engine crawlers to read. Traditionally the two meta tags most used are “keywords” and “description”. While there is WIDE debate about whether keywords are even viable or used by crawlers anymore, it’s generally accepted that every single Wordpress page must have a “description” meta tag. If you don’t have one, the crawer will merely take the first 30-odd words on a page and use that for the description on your search engine listing (Wikipedia entry for meta tag).

The “HTML title” for your page is what you see in the very top bar of your browser anytime you view a web page. This title is what’s used as the “title” of your result when you come up in a search engine. The meta “description” is what follows after that title.

I want you to think of your blog as a business - let’s say “Bob’s Plumbing”. Now think of the search engine as the “Yellow Pages”. If you were “Bob’s Plumbing” you know for a fact that when people need a plumber they’re going to grab the phone book to find someone to call. You know that your advertisement BETTER be good, because who people choose to call first will be based on what they see or read (first impression). In most cases - your search engine listing(s) for your blog are the “first impression” and what the title and description says will determine how many people will click and visit you. Even if you’re on the first page google, who’s going to click on “John’s Blog: Home About Archives Advertise….”?!

A lot of people will say that “Wordpress is great for SEO Out of the Box”. Indeed it is more SEO friendly than many of it’s predecessors, but with the ever changing rules of search engines and issues with duplicate content, you need much finer grained control of the makeup of your blogs pages, titles, and meta tags.

There are two approaches to controlling Meta Tags and Titles in Wordpress - and one is by using individual plugins and another is by using an “all encompassing SEO plugin”. You might use something like the Add-Meta-Tags Wordpress Plugin, or SEO Title Tag for quick fixes to these problems.

For all in one solutions you could use the very popular All in One SEO Pack, but I prefer to use the wpSEO plugin for Wordpress SEO because it has more features and (I believe) it performs much better. The advantage of using one of these plugins is the fact that you can assign what to be used as descriptions for tag and category pages, you home page, archive pages, and much, much, more!

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This post has multiple pages...

1. Page 1: Wordpress Has No Breadcrumbs
2. Page 2 - Wordpress has no Contact Form
3. Page 3 - Most Wordpress Themes have no Archive Index
4. Page 4 - Wordpress Has No Built In Stats
5. Page 5 - Wordpress Has No Sitemap
6. Page 6 - Wordpress Has no Database Tools
7. Page 7 - Wordpress Has No Voting or Polls Tools
8. Page 8 - Wordpress has no "Related Posts" Mechanism
9. Page 9 - You Can't Reply to Comments Without Visiting Post Page
10. Page 10 - Wordpress Comments are "nofollowed" by default
11. Page 11 - Wordpress Has No Way to Append or Add Content to Your RSS Feed
12. Page 12 - Wordpress Has No Way to Enforce URL Preference
13. Page 13 - Wordpress Has No Mechanism for Adding Code to Posts
14. Page 14 - Wordpress Has No Way to Control Meta Tags or Titles for SEO
15. Page 15 - Wordpress Doesn't Log or Notify 404 Not Found Errors
16. Page 16 - Wordpress Doesn't Log What People Search For
17. Page 17 - Wordpress Has No Built-In Translation Capabilities
18. Page 18 - Wordpress Has no Built In Advertising Mechanism
19. Page 19 - Wordpress Has No Monetization Abilities Built-In
20. Page 20 - Wordpress Has No Cache
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Tags: blog-help, guide