Permalinks & Easy Meta Description Tag Wordpress Blog

Your currently reading part two of “Permalinks – How to set up a wordpress blog”.
Click here for part one – Permalinks & Seo for blogs

Simple Wordpress Plugin & Blog Hack For Better Seo

The second part of setting up my blogs is to add a simple but effective plug-in for wordpress as well as also installing a wordpress hack that will simply add a meta description to your blog posts automatically without having to fill in the field (located in the advanced post page). While some have commented that this is hack is not really need as wordpress already take care of these things it is not really true. Understand that I use this hack to easily have my meta description created for me based on the contents of a regular post.

1) Auto Except Plug-in For Wordpress (search wordpress.org for “auto excerpt plug-in”)
Traditionally when you post to your blog you will not get an auto excerpt which is vital for people who will pick up your site via rss. This simple little plugin simply takes the first 50 characters (I changed it to 150) and posts them to the excerpt tab.

2) Installing Simple Hack For Automated Meta Descriptions
This simple hack takes a posts “excerpt” and places it in the meta description, meaning all you need to do is fill out the main post and you have a excerpt and a meta description! Their are several elements you will want to think about with this plugin / hack. The most important thing to realize is that your meta description will be the same as the first few words in your post. What I do is to think about the post as a whole and try to include several keywords that make sense for the post. Sometimes it is hard to get the right keywords into a post within so many words but It seams to work out fine most of the time.

To install this hack simply open up header.php in your “theme folder” located in:

wp-content/themes/your theme

Place this code between the <head> tag and the <title> tag:

<?php if(is_single()) :
get_posts(’numberposts=1′);
foreach ($posts as $post) :
$excerpt = $post->post_excerpt;
endforeach;
?>
<meta name=”description” content=”<?php echo htmlentities($excerpt); ?>” />
<?php endif; ?>

Don’t forget that this hack only works if the auto excerpt is active and working. I found this hack in a RI post and have used it ever since and it works very nicely

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