Add Custom Title, Description and Keyword Meta Tags to Word Press Blogs

You may or may not have noticed, but most of the First Page Fitness blog entries (the actual posts, not the blog itself) have been in the supplemental results on Google for awhile. This is because in trying to fix one problem, I created another and have only just now gotten around to fixing it.

Rather than bore you with the details, let’s just say I did not have the code in my Word Press blog template in order to create custom Titles and meta tags for each post. Now I do. And you should too. Here’s why:

Google has a very bad habit of sending pages to the supplemental index if they share are title, description and keyword meta tags, or if they share a title and do not possess description and keyword meta tags. It is a byproduct of their fight against duplicate content. But there are ways around the issue as it pertains to Word Press blogs.

How to Add Customized Titles, Keyword Meta Tags and Meta Descriptions to Your WP Blog Posts

1. Open the index.php file inside the folder of the theme you are using.
2. Find the Title, Keyword and Description tags.
3. Delete them.
4. Replace them with this:

Be sure to replace “Your Blog Title” in both instances with… your blog title.

Be sure to replace “keyword1, keyword2, keyword3″ with… your three most important keywords.

Now the home page of your blog should just be “Your Blog Title”, while the post pages should be “Your Blog Title > Title of Post”. The description should be “Your Blog Title blog entry titled: Title of Post” and the keywords should be “Title of Post, Keyword1, Keyword2, Keyword3.

That will be customized enough to keep you out of the dreaded supplemental index, yet automated and standardized enough to make life easy and achieve better search engine rankings.

There is more than one way to skin a cat, of course, so if this method doesn’t suit your needs, consider making your keyword meta tags populate from your category tags, or doing away with your Blog Title and just showing the post title. For instance, we have decided to show the “Blog Title” after the “Post Title” whereas in the code snippet above it appears first. Either way, your home page should jus show the Blog Title because there will be no post title to display in front of it. Makes sense?

We here at First Page Fitness do offer blog customization services as part of our website design package or a la carte. Would you like your health and fitness blog to match the design of your website? Drop us a line. We can help!

Now on to some housecleaning that should help pull us out of the supplemental index a few days faster…

Hey Googlebot – Check Out THIS PAGE!