SEO for Wordpress: The META Tag Problem

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Posted on January 30, 2009 under SEO, Wordpress

Blog Posts from Addicott Web About Wordpress

Earlier this week I wrote about some simple steps that you can take to help bolster SEO on your website. But the one thing I didn’t mention is that when you build your website in content management systems such as Wordpress, some of these steps become more difficult to implement.

While there are many other advantages to building a website in Wordpress, when it comes to SEO, Wordpress is lacking in a few areas. I’d like to talk about one of those problems in particular: the inability to customize the META description and META keyword tags in the basic Wordpress installation.

Optimizing META Tags in Wordpress

So why is it not possible to customize the META tags on a Wordpress website? It has to do with the META tags being located within the website’s header.

Websites that are built in a way where each page of content is a separate file make it easy to customize the META tags on the different pages. The header areas appear on every single page, and are each totally independent of one another.

But when a website is built in a system such as Wordpress, that won’t work. Wordpress uses only a few pages to display the page and post content, and all of those files reference the exact same header file. So with the basic installation of Wordpress, there is only one header area throughout the entire website that you could customize.

Are you beginning to see the problem yet?

When you use Wordpress right out of the box, yes, you are able to manually go into the header file and insert your optimized META description and META keyword tags into the coding. But that only solves the problem on the macro level. If you want to optimize on the micro level on every piece of content on your website, this becomes a more significant problem.

What’s the solution?

Whenever there is a problem in Wordpress there is a plugin available to solve it, and this is no exception. The All-in-One SEO plugin allows you to write your own custom META description and META keywords tags on each and every page or post on your website.

Once you install it, the plugin will add a field called “All in One SEO Pack” onto the “Create” and “Edit” screens for all pages or posts. Just fill in that field with your optimized META description and META keyword tags, and when you publish your content, you’re good to go!

(Incidentally, this plugin is the most popular and downloaded plugin available for Wordpress – so it’s something that a large number of people are successfully using and recommend.)

I just installed this plugin on this website, but have yet to go through my pages and blog posts and customize each the META tags for each one. I’m still debating whether it is worth it to customize every single blog post I’ve written, or whether I should only focus on categories or the most popular things I’ve written. No matter what I decide though, I think in the long-run it is worth taking the time to do.

While we’re in the header…

There is one other thing I want to mention quickly while we’re talking about the header, and that’s the ability to customize your title tags for SEO purposes.

Title tags also go in the header, and face the some limitations in Wordpress that the META tags do. You could manually go into the header coding and set them to display the name of your page/post along with some keywords. The problem with doing it that way is that apart from the name of the page/post, the remainder of the title tag will be uniform across everything on your website.

If you want to have a greater degree of control over the title tags and would like to make the title tag more relevant to the content on the page, there are two plugins that allow you to do that:

Which one you use depends on whether you think that optimizing META tags is worth spending the time on.

A lot of SEO professionals think that the search engines don’t give as much value to META tags as they used to. In the early days of search, websites used to stuff their META keyword tags with a ton of keywords or keyword combinations in the hope that the search engines grasped onto some of them and directed traffic to the website. So those professionals say that the search engines learned from that, and stopped weighing those META tags as much in their search algorithms.

Whether SEO professionals are right about that is still up for debate. If you agree with the idea that META tags don’t carry much weight anymore, then you might not want to spend the additional time optimizing those tags throughout your website. And if you don’t have the need for it, then why install the all-in-one plugin when you could get by with the SEO Title Tag plugin instead.

The only downside to using the Title Tag plugin only is that you still need a META description on the pages of your website, because that is what is displayed on the search engine results page. So you would have to go into the header file manually and add in one.

Thoughts?

If you’ve used either one of the plugins mentioned above to optimize the META tags on your website, have they helped your search engine rankings? Do you think it’s worth taking the time to create custom tags for each page on your website or blog, or are there other SEO elements that should have a higher priority?

Share your comments using the form below!

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4 Comments

  1. Reply
    Matt wrote on September 10, 2009:

    So, If I use the All In One SEO Plugin on my site, can I then remove the meta tags that came with my theme header?

    Posted at 11:07 pm

    • Reply
      Addicott Web wrote on September 11, 2009:

      That’s correct, yes – the plugin will automatically add in the meta tags.

      Posted at 9:37 am

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