Making Sure Every Post Has a Proper Description Tag
This is a follow up to my All in One SEO Pack for Wordpress. The free Wordpress plugin allows you to control the title, description and keywords META tags for every post you write. Without it, your description and keywords is the same as your blog tagline. Google will either list that or whatever it finds near the top of your page if you’re missing the META information.
To better illustrate this point, I thought I would show you a Google listing example from a blog not using the All in One SEO pack and compare this to a blog that is using the plugin (namely, mine). Let’s begin with my good friend Stephen Fung. His blog is not using All in One SEO.
Google Results Without All in One SEO
Using the Google site command, we can get a list of all the pages Google has indexed for Stephen Fung. Notice that all the page titles are different, which is good. However, all the descriptions are the same, which is bad. While it’s possible to figure out what the page is about from the page title, it helps more if the description talks a bit about what the page is about.
The above illustrate why it’s extremely important to have a really descriptive page title. If your description META tag isn’t set then the searcher has only your title to figure out what your page is about.
Google Results With All in One SEO
With All in One SEO, you can enter a description META tag (and keywords) for each post. If you don’t want to take the time to update a thousand old blog posts, the plugin will take the first 25 words of your post and use that as the description META tag. The results is every single page on your blog will have a unique description. You can see that from the site results from my blog.
You can read more about the All in One SEO Pack for Wordpress here.
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- Posted in Make Money Online, The Net, Wordpress
- 58 comments what's your take?
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This plugin works great, Thanks John
It’s a great plugin indeed and definitely worth using. I’ve been using it myself for the past few weeks and found it to improve the way my site is indexed dramatically.
When it comes to SEO, you really have to try everything.
Yes, very nice work indeed – thx! Nothing like hand-tweakin’ ‘em ole keywords.
Wordpress always has something new to offer as far as plugins go; I’m totally impressed.
I really have to let blogger go and start working with Wordpress.
That pluggin is more valuable than having SEO lesson’s with the so called gurus (as i read one of this days on a SEO forum:”IF you can’t blog, teach SEO”).
John, you sure can blog and do some fine SEO.
Beijinho(kiss)
Viva Portugal!
Viva!
Beijinho
Wow, that looks kinda cool. I’ll be installing that today! Thanks.
Wordpress is the best in my opinion. And plugins like this definitely show why!
No kidding. Wordpress (and particularly the plugins) make creating a valuable source of information easy.
Blogger is getting most of the love for best blogging host in the Bloggers Choice Awards though.
Yeah, I don’t see how that works …
I suppose if Wordpress.org offered free hosting (not Wordpress.com) and allowed to display Adsense or other advertising services it would easily win the Bloggers Choice Awards.
Oooh nice, I’m gonna go grab that plugin, thanks for the post about it ^^
That’s really powerful! Thanks John… May I buy you a beer?
PayPal is showing me this error… I have to do it later.. so sorry about it.
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I am done! I must say I have learnt a lot from John… I thought it’s a norm to have so many comments until I saw other blogs…
I did too. Once you find a great source of information you stick with it and support the owner.
Yeah, these are like … forums now. Haha
wow excellent plugin, too bad I am not using wordpress -_-
Ever thought about switching teams? Every day I am more convinced that Wordpress offers more to its users.
You should definitely switch to Wordpress
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Hey John,
are you still doing the linkbacks for reviews?
Thanks
Simon
Very good tip, I dont like it also when I see thousands of pages indexed but all the same description.
Agreed — it does optimize the user’s search experience alright.
Yeah, I don’t like looking at my site in Google now.
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Well, I got something to do on July 4th now
What plugin are you using for the social bookmarking sites? digg and whatnot…
Good question.
I use a plugin that has the buttons instead of the text, it’s called wp-sociable. Enjoy
.
Thanks for this post. I started using Wordpress for my personal blog last week and wasn’t aware that it created such crappy description tags. I’ll install this plugin tomorrow
I’m going to move to wordpress!
I bet a lot of JC readers have done the same thing. Wordpress does offer a lot of very useful customizations, doesn’t it.
That’s odd… I don’t have ALL IN ONE SEO pack and I still get different descriptions for each page…
Same here. I simply have no reference to the description Meta tag and I’m getting different snippets for all my pages.
I don’t know what Stephen did, but he’s got a whole other problem
It depends greatly on the theme you’re running. Most Wordpress theme will just load the tagline for the description and keyword META tags.
Hi John
Just a quick note.
There is no “E” in makeing.
Thanks
Blessed
Just got my theme SEO optimized thanks to one of my friends, so I will need to start doing this!
Hello,
I need some wordpress help and if anyone knows, please leave a reply.
My page is loaded all from once. You wait for few seconds and 99% is loaded.
How can I make some load order or load sequence?
1. main content with text and header
2. left sidebar
3. right sidebar
4 …everything else..
This is just one example of load order list.
Thanks…
This is an excellent plug in.. Can’t believe I’m not already using it.
Gonna have to look into this one, thanks again John. It’s just more work for poor Stephen anyways
Will do….
Indeed thats a really lovely plugin, i have heard about it long time ago, but never really thought to install that plugin as i found it to be pretty heavy for my wordpress. Instead i used another plugin called Head Meta tags, the thing is that this head meta tags will use the description of the categories, but as far as it regards the posts..it will use the first 25 words too and it does all automatically. Of course having a plugin where you can use different description for each post would be much better.
SEO, could you elaborate on what you mean by “heavy”? Did it result in slow load times? I’ve got it installed on my testing site and it seems fine, but there are only a couple of posts there.
Rhetorical question: Why is the functionality of this plugin not a stock part of Wordpress? That would rule.
Thanks, good tip!
Wow I like this plugin, it’s great! Thanks!
John,
I bought a beer. I have just started a blog for a new project based on Wordpress and these seo tips will help a lot.
I will make a multilingual blog, Portuguese and English, and i am using the Polyglot plugin.
THANKS!
Jaime
A good exercise is to view your source (In IE, it’s Page.. view source) and take a CLOSE look on how each page looks in the meta name=”description” and meta name=”keywords” section.
that’s definitely a must.
It’s a habit I formed not too long ago. I am not the best person to ask about these things, but when I view the source it gives me some clarity.
It’s a good plugin for wordpress…is there any plugin for blogger sites.
Ah…that is the perennial question. I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Blogger didn’t have anything like this plugin.
I have try this plugin…It very great and thanks john
The Wordpress plugin is a good one than this with more options!
It sure does look messy when you dont use the plugin.
It’s beyond messy; it’s actually more like monotonous and unhelpful.
Yes, totally agree! I can’t believe how messed up everything looks …
Is it OK if you have dynamic pages to have META keywords and description also copied somwhere in the text? Would this be considered as a spam?
Good plugin. I use it myself.