There’s a good post about WordPress’s permalink structure on the SEObullshit blog. Which led me to reread the WordPress codex about Meta tags in WordPress. I realise it’s put together by volunteers. But maybe if you ever read that page, add the word not to every sentence …
Howler 1: Keywords are important
What WordPress says:
Keywords meta tags, on the other hand, are still used by Google and other important search engines to categorize and rank your website. Those engines compare the keywords with the content, giving you “points” for having your keywords match your content. Keywords are one of the most important meta tags you can add to your WordPress site.
This kind of conflicts with the official Google line:
“Google doesn’t use the “keywords” meta tag in our web search ranking.”
Howler 2: Use the same meta description on every page
I won’t quote the full advice. But it involves adding the same meta description to every page:
With these generic description meta tags, [your] website would be accurately described and that should please just about any search engine.
Which kind of conflicts with Google’s official advice:
Differentiate the descriptions for different pages. Using identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site isn’t very helpful when individual pages appear in the web results. … Wherever possible, create descriptions that accurately describe the specific page. Use site-level descriptions on the main home page or other aggregation pages, and use page-level descriptions everywhere else. If you don’t have time to create a description for every single page, try to prioritize your content: At the very least, create a description for the critical URLs like your home page and popular pages.
To sum up
- Don’t pay attention to WordPress’s advice.
- Don’t bother with keywords.
- Do bother with meta descriptions.
- Do follow my advice to easily add unique meta descriptions to every wordpress post / page.
That’s it!
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