Add Keywords and Description meta tags

I don’t know what xfish is, but there are several ways to include meta tag information, though few search engines actually “use” the information any more since it has been abused. In developing my WordPress site, I haven’t put my meta tags back in and my page ranking has actually gone UP – I knew they weren’t being used much, but I didn’t believe it. Now I do.

Of all the meta tags you can use, keywords are the ones that are still of some value. There are several plugins you can use to put keywords in your site, so check https://www.wp-plugins.net to find one that suits your needs. I personally like Jerome’s keywords plugin but you can choose your own.

Now, a word of warning. If these plugins are deactivated for any reason, and the tag that calls out the info in the header for the keywords is still there, your site may choke and you will get a line error. They work great, but only when activated, so this is a minor nusiance.

Okay, as for the rest, there is also a very easy solution, if it is important to you to have this information in your header. Open the header.php template file in the Theme you are using. In the normal place where you would have this meta information, type it in.

Instead of the information being specific to your individual web page content, make it specific to your site. So if your site is about growing flowers, make the description tag read something that groups all the information together like:

<meta name="description" content="The art of growing flowers website covers a wide range of plant and flower growing techniques including weed management, fertilizers, pruning, planting, as well as growing seasonal and annual flowers, flowering herbs, and wildflowers." />

You can even put in keywords without using a plugin setting the keywords list to reflect the content of the site in general.

If you want more information on search engines and how they work, what they see, and don’t see, and how to really rise up in the search engine rankings, I recommend you visit https://www.searchenginewatch.com and https://selfpromotion.com/ for more.

Thank you for your help and links, I knew about searchenginewatch as I also do SEO. While it is true that description tags certainly don’t carry the weight they use to, google ignors it, yahoo doesn’t. Keyword tags are still very much looked at. In fact yahoo still places a lot of weight in them, google not as much. I would still suggest using both these tags optimized for each page. There are other more important factors to consider with google, but this is not the place to get in that. Search engine watch along with every other SEO and search engine related site all still use these tags, you just can’t go crazy with them : )

Your post was very helpful and I downloaded jerome’s plug-in. I will play with it later, will probably have more questions too. But for now I just manually added these tags in my header.php

Regards

I have Jerome’s Keywords plugin working on my site (https://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress). I got some extra help from the developer by posting comments on Vapourtrails.ca. There were some errors in his documentation and he provided some PHP coding clarification for this non-programmer. My cosmos page, which is linked to every blog entry and includes my categories (I call them topics), is at https://www.davidmattison.ca/wordpress/?page_id=1147

Is there a way to automatically add a custom description field to the write page like jerome’s adds keywords automatically?

Is there a way to automatically add a custom description field to the write page like jerome’s adds keywords automatically?

Sorry, had to repost.

I looked at jeromes plugin and then one of my programers said that the same features was already part of W.Bloggar, which we use to post content to our custoemrs blogs… is this true? i like the use of W.Bloggar as i don’t have to log on to my customers blogs to post content, and it has more options and features……but i confess, i am new to seo for blogs… so any input would be helpful!

S