If you keep on blogging you sure want that people read it. In that case early or later you will be interested in SEO basics.

Site Meta-information

One of the important aspects of is properly made page for the search engine optimization point of view. I don’t want to cover all these points in this article, if interested, you can read Wordpress SEO - The Beginners Guide by Joost de Valk, which is good introduction in the theme. I just want to cover one of the aspects of good page and that is Meta-information.

Every page of your blog has to provide title attribute and meta attribute keywords and maybe even meta description, which helps Search engines to better “understand” what is on that page. Unfortunately there is no adequate support for meta description by default in Wordpress. So we need a Plug-In again.

HeadSpace2

The HeadSpace2 PlugIn homepage is one of the popular in that field. The installation is easy, no template hacks are needed, copy and activate as usual. The configuration is done in “options” -menu. It may be helpful to read the description and concepts on the Plug-In homepage, before starting configuration.

There are four main configuration tabs:

  • Page Settings (shown on image)
  • Modules
  • Options
  • Import

Page Settings

Crucial are Page Settings, that are default settings for different parts of Wordpress like Archives pages, post pages, main page and so on.

In Page Settings dialog it is possibly to configure default tags for all of them, of cause with support of predefined variables. It is possibly that you have to play a little bit around until you get desired effects.

But before you start check your templates header file. Inspect how title is created. It is crucial because some template authors use wireds things for creating titles. You are well advised to use something like this:

<title>

<?php wp_title(' ');> <?php if(wp_title(' ', false)) { echo ' : '; } ?><php bloginfo('name'); >;

</title>

This, will enable by default right presentation in title, first the title of Post then Blog name separated with “:” like on my blog. Works fine without Headspace2 PlugIn ant with it. By usage with Headspace2 use empty string as separator in the configuration of “page title” in the Modules Dialog.

Modules

Modules has two sections, top and bottom. Top section allows you to define the presentation of meta tag description fields in Post and Pages Editors and also in the Page Settings dialog. And that are so called Page Modules. Here is also “page title” module which is mentioned before.

In the bottom you can find the Site Module configuration. Most of the modules are some Statistic analyzers like Google analytics, but what i found interesting is Google section targeting module. Google targeting allows you to demarcate google adsense relevant html body area of your blog,

Warnings

Be careful with the modules, i have switched something wrong there, and that broke the output of that site, so only admit are worked well. therefore I didn’t notice anything fore more than ten ours. You may be notified strange downtime of my site in the last week?