Add Meta Tags in Word Press by modifying the template, no plugin

Introduction

Here is a brief article about how to add keywords and description meta tags in word press, meta tags that are still important to SEO.

What are meta tags
OK, so you will need to know a little bit of programming to work this out from head to tail, but it isn’t much. First of all, if you found this article then you probably know what are those meta tags used by search engines and if not, here is a link.
For a brief reminder here is a quote:

The word meta means information about. Meta Tags were created early on to provide concise information about a website. Meta tags list information about the web page, such as the author, keywords, description, type of document, copyright, and other core information.

Make this work
When writing a post, below your text area there is a box called Custom Fields, so what would you have to do is add a custom filed named keywords and another named description and fill them up with information about your current post.

If you don’t see the box Custom Fields, then you may be in simple administration of your posts, you will have to go through the following steps:
1. From the Write Post panel, choose Advanced Editing. If you are using the Simple Editing screen, look for a button with Advanced Editing ยป next to the Publish button. Click the button to go to the advanced editing screen.
2. After you have written your post, scroll down to the bottom of the Advanced Editing screen and look for an area titled Custom Fields.
3. To create a new Custom Field called “Currently Reading”, enter the text “Currently Reading” (without the quotes) in the text entry field titled Key.
4. The newly created Key should now be assigned a Value, which in our case is the name of the book currently being read, “Calvin and Hobbes”. Type “Calvin and Hobbes” in the Value field, again without the quotes.
5. Click Add Custom Field button to save this custom information for that post.

So, now you have two information’s about your post, all you have to do next is display the information when someone is inside your post. For this to happen go in wp-admin at Presentation->Theme Editor and here you will edit the header file.

Search in the top of the file for the tag <head> and after it add the following lines of code:

<meta name="description" content="<?php if ( is_home() ) {
                bloginfo(’name’); echo " - "; bloginfo(’description’);
    } else {
                echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true);
    }
    ?>" />
        <meta name="keywords" content="<?php if ( is_home() ) {
                echo "your homepage keywords";
    } else {
                echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true);
    }
    ?>" />
 

Code explained
The code is very simple, you have an if condition: in case we are in home page we fill the description field with the name of your blog and the description of your blog (bloginfo(’name’); echo ” - “; bloginfo(’description’);). otherwise we fill it with the value of the description saved for your current post or page (echo get_post_meta($post->ID, “description”, true);).

The same thing happens with the keywords tag. It is very clear that for the home page you can echo some general information about your site for both the keywords and description meta tags.

This is it, now search engines know more about your site and your posts. Happy writing.


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Peter on March 19th 2007 in Word Press

2 Responses to “Add Meta Tags in Word Press by modifying the template, no plugin”

  1. Alex responded on 25 Apr 2007 at 2:49 pm #

    Thank You

  2. DDDepressionnn responded on 20 Nov 2008 at 8:27 pm #

    There has come winter :(
    It became cold and cloudy!
    Mood very bad :(
    Depression Begins

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