After a brief introduction, I’ll delve right into the code, and show you how to add these meta tags to your pages by modifying the header.php file of your theme.

While the description and keyword meta tags are not as important for search engine optimization (SEO) as they used to be, they are still important. The description is often used verbatim as the wording under a link to your site by many search engines. Keywords may be less important, since search engine now often rely on the content of your pages, but it can be nice to include them for that extra little boost in SEO and as a reminder to yourself of what words you are  trying to optimize a particular page to.

This solution will write out custom keywords and description for all you WordPress pages and individual blog posts. We will make use of the “Custom Fields” area for your posts and pages in the WordPress administration panel. This will allow us to customize each post and page, and the meta information will be readilly visible in the administration panel when we look at a post or page.

The first step is to create two new custom fields, one for the keywords and one for the description. Open your Worpress administration panel and click to edit an existing post or page. Under the Custom Fields area choose “Enter New” and create a field for keywords and a field for the description:

I called mine “seo-description” and “seo-keywords”:

Now, you can go ahead and fill out the meta information for each post and page. I’d suggest only filling out the description and keywords for one post. You can use this one as a test post. Once you see that everything is working correctly, you can go back and fill out the information for all the other pages and posts. Okay, now we’re going to start to add in the code that will make everything display correctly. We’re going to be working witht he “header.php” file of you current theme. So, go ahead and open up the file…. You can check what them you are using in your admin panel. Just click on Appearance >> Themes. Under “Current Theme” there’ll be a line that says, all of this theme’s files are located in, “themes/blah-blah.” Go to that directory and fetch header.php through FTP or just use the built in editor in the admin panel. This is found at Appearance>>Editor. Under “Theme Files” click on “Heder (header.php).” We want our meta information to appear in the header, usually right below the title. The end result we are looking for is something like this:

<title>Your Blogs Title</title>
<meta name="description" content="[your custom description for this page]" /> <meta name="keywords" content="[your custom keywords for this page]" />

Let’s start with the description. First we’ll check whether the page or post has a custom description. If it does, we’ll display that. If it doesn’t we’ll just display your blogs tagline. The trick here is that in WordPress there is a get_post_meta function that you can use to retrieve the custom keyword and description info you put in. If you on your site somewhere where you are showing only a single blog post or a single page this function will work.  Let’s try:

<?php $seodescription = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-description", true); ?>

This will get our meta description, “seo-description” for the post we are displaying and assign it to the variable $seodescription (it’s not good to use variables with hyphens in PHP ). Now we can simply use 

<?php echo $seodescription; ?>

This will print out the custom description. So far our solution is:

<meta name="description" content="<?php $seodescription = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-description", true); echo $seodescription; ?>" />

This is one of the things that is so nice about PHP. You can insert it directly into XHTML wherever you want. The only problem is that we may have a page or post that we haven’t gotten around to adding custom keyword and description meta tags to. The about code will not create an error in this case. It will just print empty quotation marks. This is because the PHP variable $seodescription will be zero if get_post_meta finds nothing. We can make use of this with an if statement. In php an if statement will execute if the condition is not zero, and the if statement will not execute if the condition is zero. In other words

if ( $mynumber = 0 ) { echo "hi!"; } else { echo "bye...";}

Will print “bye…” because the if statement is 0. 0 means false to PHP. So, of course

if ( $mynumber = 8.5 ) { echo "hi!"; } else { echo "bye...";}

Will print “hi!” since the if statement is not 0. Let’s apply this to meta tags. If there is custome meta description, we will display it, and if there is none, we will nothing. It’s not a good idea to put a default description or keywords on pages, since this will make multiple pages have the same description and keywords. This is confusing for search engines, since how can two pages have the same descriptin but different content? We will check if there is a custom description with an if statement. The only tricky part here is that PHP actually goes ahead and assigns a value to the variable inside the if statement. This is because we used “=” which means set equal to. So, here goes:

<?php if ($seodescription = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-description", true)) { ?> <meta name="description" content="<?php echo $seodescription; ?>" /><?php } ?>  

Now we just do the same for the keywords. So for keywords, using the same idea as above we have:

<?php if ($seokeywords = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-keywords", true)) { ?> <meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $seokeywords; ?>" /><?php } ?>

There is one final thing to take care of. If we use this code as is, then on pages that dispaly multiple posts, we’re going to display the description and keywords for just the first post. To get around this we’ll use the WordPress function is_singular() . This function returns true if only one page or post is being displayed and false if not. You can use an else statement to display defualt meta data. This default meta date will only go on pages that show more than one post. Ok, so here we have the whole enchilada starting with the title tag:

<title>CODE-TO-DISPLAY-MY-BLOG-NAME</title>

<?php if ( is_singular() )  

{

if ($seodescription = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-description", true))

{ ?>

<meta name="description" content="<?php echo $seodescription; ?>" /><?php

} ?> <?php 

if ($seokeywords = get_post_meta($post->ID, "seo-keywords", true))

{ ?>

<meta name="keywords" content="<?php echo $seokeywords; ?>" /><?php

}

} ?>

Take a look at this page. Here is what my admin panel looks like for this post:

And here you can see that the meta tags are really displayed in the source page (or you can check in your own browser):

And there we have it, custom keyword and description meta tags for your WordPress theme using no plugins.

Google and other search engines have very complicated ways of figuring out how to order sites in their searches. If only the keywords on the pages themselves mattered, then a useless page that lists only the keyword thousands of times would always be first. So that doesn’t work. What search engines decided is that they would look at who links to a page, and also the outgoing links from a page. It gets complicated since it’s not just the number of pages that link to your page that is important but also their quality in the eyes of the search engine. Links to your page from other pages are called back links. The more of these you have more top ranking sites the better you will do in the eyes of search engines.

In addition to number of links, there are other differences among sites. For example you’ll notice that .edu, .gov, and .org sites often achieve very high rankings. So, if you can get links from any of these type of sites, your page will do very well.

That’s presenting things with the broad brush stroke. Not only are the number and quality of your links important, but as usual, the devil is in the details. Your back links must be from pages that have the same keywords as yours. Additional if you really want good search engine optimization the words in the back links themselves should be your keywords. For example, if you make neon signs, then you want other pages dealing with neon signs to link to you, and you want these links to specifically say “neon signs”….. not your name, or you companies name. No one’s going to search for your name or your companies name when they’re considering the options. If they already know about you and want you to do their neon signs, they’ll just pick up the phone and call. You want people who search for neon signs to see you in the search engines, since they don’t know about you and can give you business.

All of this takes work a lot of effort. You have to know how to get others to point to your page. You have to know who should point to your page. There are many ways of doing this. You can buy, trade, or create links. All of this will take time, money, or both.

Just to illustrate a complication that a good search engine optimization specialist would take into account, consider trading links. This sounds easy, right? You email another site that has you keywords, and you get them to link to you, while you link to them. Not if you’re really good. Since unreciprocated links work better than reciprocated links. After all, the search engines know that anyone can trade links, but not anyone get a link without giving one. So it is ideal to use multiple sites when trading links. They link to yours and you use a different domain name to link to theirs. As you can see, there are many different choices in how to do things. This means that the quality of SEO you get is highly dependent and based on who you deal with.

In addition to these specific individual strategies, you have to have an overall strategy for moving up in the rankings. This is important in order to create a realistic goals.

A common SEO strategy is to move up in the rankings for a very long series of keywords and then gradually increase your rankings for shorter and shorter phrases. For example there may not be much competition for “tennis pros from Rhode Island who are left handed,” so if you happen to be a left handed tennis pro from Rhode Island, you are in luck. You’ll move up in rankings quick. Then you can concentrate on “tennis pros from Rhode Island” Then “tennis pros.” And finally you can show up on the first page of search for the key word “tennis.” A long way down the road. “tennis pros from Rhode Island who are left handed,” shows 7,280 results in Google. “Tennis” has 190,000,000 results. SEO is an ongoing process.

So you see, search engine optimization only begins with your page. Your url, title, alt image tags, h1 headings, etc. are only a small part of the picture. The content of other websites and a cohesive overall strategy will also determine the success of your SEO. This is why the process is more complicated than just paying attention to the content of your pages, but not everyone knows this, and not everyone uses the same strategies and techniques. Make sure you understand what you are purchasing. Do this by asking questions and looking at the details.

The most important thing about a store, besides what it sells, is where it is located. If you pick your location well, customers will pass by your store and you will make lots of money. Contrastingly, people hardly ever randomly chance upon a web page. There really is no such thing as good location for a web page. There is only good visibility, which is how easy your web page is to find. This is where search engine optimization (SEO) comes into play. A good web developer can make your web page visible to the people who are looking for exactly what you are offering.

When people look for web pages they use search engines, links from other web sites, or the referral of friends. So when someone is looking for a website, they are looking for very specific things. They are not just passing by; they are searching for just the right thing.

So, you want to make sure that when a customer is brought to your site from a search engine or a referring site, they find exactly what they are looking for. Unlike the customers of a brick and mortar shop, people looking at web sites will not browse if they do not instantly see what they are looking for. They will not ask or search; they will leave.

This means that a successful website must have very good SEO. SEO is not simply having a good ranking in Google. It is having a good ranking for the words that people type in when looking for the resources your site has to offer.

Having a good ranking in search engines can be done with hard work and detail oriented web design. Finding the correct keywords for your site is part art, since you have to anticipate the words or phrases that people will type into the search enging when looking for sites like yours. A good web developer can help you set up SEO for your site, so that it is visible to the people looking for it.