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!
You really hit the nail on the head with this post…or 20 nails…
The funny thing is that everything you talked about here – are all things that i use on every blog. The comment form, the 2 sitemaps, the search log, some kind of stats, super cache, etc.
I’ve often wondered why a lot of these things don’t get built in.
Looks like the feed notations on commentluv didn’t work. delete the other one please.
Great resource you have compiled here. I think most people are aware of about half of these problems and the plugins to fix them, but this lays it all out.
Thanks!
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On the breadcrumb thing, were you not tempted to put JTPratt or some keywords or something instead of ‘home’ …? Would this not be better from SEO point of view?
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looking for the same plugin for a long time…thanks alot
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no really, because navigation for users always trumps SEO….
Do you still recommend wpSEO? This post was some time ago and things change fast. Is it still better than All In One or PlatinumSEO. I’ve tried AIO and Plat. Haven’t tried wpSEO. I can’t see a whole lot of difference, but I don’t have enough experience to know which performs better.
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I use wpSEO on all the sites that I had it on, but now (the newer version) requires a paid license. So now I use All in one SEO on new sites I setup.
I just switched to platinum SEO because of the automatic 301 redirects when you change your links. I wanted to change the way I structured my links but thought it would be a pain to do it myself – well, I tried the platinum SEO plugin – changed the permalinks and checked my pages indexed in google and they all showed the new link structure. Don’t know how it did that but I’m sold.
I think from SEO standpoint, not having a sitemap means you aren’t realizing your full potential with search engine crawl and having maximum number of entries indexed.
Good tips on HTML tags and SEO for blogs! I have a WordPress blog bolted onto my “Plumbing” site and used an overlay template to make it look a little more unique. If you click on my name you will see the home page and can navigate to my blog by clicking on the “Comments” link at the bottom of the page.
Caution:
Do not get sucked into the SEO blog plug-in that Jeff Johnson promotes. It has a link back to his stuff in the footer of the blog. That link makes your blog look unprofessional I think. The best SEO overlay for WordPress is Semi-o-Logic. It’s an expensive upgrade, but worth the money if you’re serious about SEO for your blog.
I don’t know if WordPress reads your blog, but several of these have been added to the basic installation now.
Some really nice points.. WordPress comments are nofollowed by default and it doesn’t give us any option to turn them do follow. No built in advertising system and Statistics is a big hole.
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I’ve done two things: I wrote a php script to set a number of WordPress options — like my permalinks to the values I always use. Secondly, I have a checklist and always install the Comment Luv, Keyword Luv, Top Commenters and DoFollow every time I install WordPress on a domain.