A normal HTML document that includes META tags which is inside in header tag elements. Meta tags elements are used to provide the information of your document. And also it is also used to provide the information for search engines like describing your document. In SEO world, keywords (is not sure) and description meta elements are probably effective tools to boost in search engine for your web pages.

<meta name=”description” content=”A description meta tags is to describe the content of your web page” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords, keyword, keyword1, keywords2″ />

Normally, Wordress doesn’t include the keywords and description META tags elements for our blog. So, what are the ways that include those meta tags in our blog in order to optimize search engine result using those META tags elements ? There are two ways to do.

  1. Edit the template file manually (normally header.php) in current theme
  2. Use one of those Meta Plugins
    • Add Meta Tags
    • All in One SEO Pack
    • Another Wordpress Meta Plugin
    • AutoMeta

1. Editing the template file

If you’re familiar with HTML coding, I’m sure that it is not a difficult to change the codes. First, look up header.php in your theme folder. You’ll see something like this.

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC “-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN” “http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd”>

<html xmlns=”http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml”>

<head profile=”http://gmpg.org/xfn/11″>

<meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”<?php bloginfo(‘html_type’); ?>; charset=<?php bloginfo(‘charset’); ?>” />

…

…

Put the keywords and description (concerned with your site) meta tag between <head> and </head>

<meta name=”description” content=”A description meta tags is to describe the content of your web page” />

<meta name=”keywords” content=”keywords, keyword, keyword1, keywords2″ />

Many leading SEO forums and tutorials said that keywords are now either bit useful or useless for optimizing search engine. However description is still useful. Here one of those

The reason why meta tags used to be so important was because they were relied on by search engines to build a profile of a web page. The keywords meta data was used extensively for example. Nowadays however, most search engines use the actual content of the page itself, rendering most meta data useless beyond conveying information to someone who is physically reading the HTML. [HTML Dog]

37 leaders in search engine optimization concluded in April 2007 that the relevance of having your keywords in the meta attribute keywords is little to none [Wikipedia]

Far too many people new to search engine optimization obsess with the meta keywords tag. FEW crawlers support it. For those that do, it MIGHT! MAYBE! PERHAPS! POSSIBLY! BUT WITH NO GUARANTEE! help improve the ranking of your page. It also may very well do nothing for your page at all. In fact, repeat a particular word too often in a meta keywords tag and you could actually harm your page’s chances of ranking well. Because of this, I strongly suggest that those new to search engine optimization not even worry about the tag at all. [Search Engine Watch]

2. Using Meta Tags Plugins

2.1. Add Meta Tags Plugin

Add Meta Tags adds the description and Keywords tags to your blog’s frong page and to each individual posts, pages and category archives. In individual posts, it adds the excerpt content of your post for description and categories for keyword. I’m still using it for this blog. (Recommend)

2.2. All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack adds the description and keywords tags as Add Meta Tags plugin does. But it support for customizing title for individual post and it can integrate with Ultimate Tag Warrior tags. Sound cool! I should give it try. (Recommend)

2.3. Another Wordpress Meta Plugin

Another Wordpress Meta Plugin lets you define META keywords and description for every post and page (easily from the edit/create page). In addition, you can define a global description that will be used for your front (index) page. For categories, the category description is used as META description whenever possible. Your post keywords can be inserted as Technorati-style tags automatically.

2.4. Auto Meta

Auto Meta Automatically generates and publishes Technorati Tags and Meta Keywords based on the content of your post (it utilises the MySQL full text index for word scoring). Once generated, tags can be hand-finished to ensure pertinence.

The result of using Meta plugins

11 web sites for web designer

Do you have any experience with Meta tags ? What it can effect Search Engines ? Any plugins you want to suggest which are not mentioned above ?

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