WordPress blog SEO tip – Maximise SEO ranking

Managing the meta data

Wordpress out of the box allows basic management of the main SEO meta data. To extend the functionality we add our own super-charged version of the All-In-One-SEO Pack. The SEO pack makes it easy to modify the page title and page meta description.

Page Title

This is the No1 SEO element to control. Always make sure that you control the page title. The page title appears in the browser window at the very top of the screen. Search engines use this in the listings and display it in their search results.

Ideally the page title consists only of appropriate keywords and nothing else. To make the text more human readable then we often add a pipe character (|) between the words.

Page Description

This element is NOT used by search engines for ranking purposes. However, most search engines will use this in their search results so it is important. Google does not use the description all the time but we find that it uses it about 80-90% of the time. The rest of the time it will pick up the first piece of text on the page.

By having a good description it will increase your click through rates because the text will be more attractive to people. Ensure that you use a maximum of 156 characters. If you use any more characters Google will truncate the rest. If you can keep your descriptions to 140 characters of less this is even better seeing Google sometimes adds a date to the beginning of the description which is part of the 156 characters it displays.

Changing the meta data and page title

At the bottom of every page and post you will find the meta tags plugin details. Update the details appropriately. Note:  If you can only use see the title for the plugin and no details, just click the title and the section will expand.

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