Some Brisbane Guy

Adding meta tags to your WordPress blog is a fantastic idea and one that I have overlooked until now. But a bit of a nudge from this scruffy little fella woke me up to the lack of meta tags on my blog — it seems like WordPress isn’t into meta tags out of the box, and I wasn’t happy.

Me, googling and coding up my meta tag change!

Matt’s nudge was actually that I should add a meta description tag so that the search engines show an alluring chunk of text beneath my link, instead of the current crap excerpt from that ridiculous post about Brisbane finally getting rain.

So I decided that I need to have my meta description text to be the same as my blog subtitle, known as the “description” to the WordPress application itself. I decided, for now, to go for this:

“Or, 101 ways to improve your social life! And that’s ironclad!”

Who’s not going to click when they read that?

Naturally I was doing a task, so the first step is to google how to do it. I googled for WordPress meta tags and found this Codex article about how to add meta tags to WordPress. It’s pretty easy really. You just need to edit the header.php file of your WordPress theme to include a meta description tag that has the value you want, in my case the text above.

So here’s the code I inserted into the header.php file of my WordPress theme. It uses the bloginfo template tag to display the blog’s description, as you may peruse below:


<meta name="description" content="<?php bloginfo('description'); ?>" />


So, now I just need to wait for the search engines to update their listings and I will be swimming amongst a traffic bonanza. Booya, thanks Matty!