No Comments Written by Robert on July 30, 2008 – 3:29 am

Along with Web page title tags, Web page description tags also play a role in the on-page optimization process. Much like the WordPress Title Tag plug-in, the WordPress Description Tag plug-in allows you to fully customize the meta description tag of each page of your WordPress Web site.

This can be used to constantly tweak title tags of Web pages that are already ranking well in an effort to boost organic click-through rates, or CTR s. If you already have an immense number of Web pages, you can use this plug-in to automatically generate meta description tags for each one of your Web pages. However, you should put the time, thought, and effort into creating your own meta tags if at all possible;

The default “out of the box” version of WordPress does not systematically optimize description meta tags. However, WordPress description tag plug-ins that enable you to easily optimize description meta tags are available.

Although keyword and description meta tags are not considered as important as they were in the past, using them is still a good habit to have, and they may eventually be weighed more heavily in the future. Of these tags, the meta description tag has retained the largest value. Often, this tag appears as the short description snippet in the search-engine results for your Web page.

The Add Meta Tags WordPress plugin provides several options for you to optimize your meta tags. The first option is to allow the Add Meta Tags plugin to automatically populate the description tag for you. Although this option automates the description tag, it is not ideal because it pulls an excerpt of content from the page that may or may not be representative of the page as your description.

If you prefer to have more control, the second option allows you to define a custom description meta tag for every page of your Web site. Although this can be a tedious task if you already have hundreds of pages, it is a rather small addition if you are just starting out and are planning ahead

Adding a custom description to your Web pages should take only a few seconds. A slightly more advanced use of the Add Meta Tags plugin is to rework the description tags of Web pages that are already ranking well. If the description meta tag is correctly appearing as the two-line description in the search-engine result for your Web page, adjusting the description can have an impact on your click-through rate from that listing. This requires continuous testing, but the testing pays off in the form of more traffic when you find the optimal description.

In addition to providing optimization options for your meta description tags, the Add Meta Tags plug-in for WordPress allows you to optimize your meta keyword tags. The meta keywords tag is worth far less than it used to be, but is still used for data retrieval by Yahoo and may be considered by other search engines. The keyword tag is a good place to include common synonyms or abbreviations that may seem awkward or out of place in your actual body text. However, do not expect this addition to make more than a minimal impact on your Web site performance in the search engines.

If you are going to tweak the description meta tag of a page, make sure you keep a copy of your previous descriptions so you can easily switch back if you notice a drop in the click-through rate. Constant testing also makes the process of writing descriptions for new pages much easier. Try to use your target keyword and its common variations at least once in your description. The keyword appears in bold in the search-engine results and hopefully catches the surfer’s eye. The more attractive your title and description are, the more clicks you receive from your rankings.