Link Building

Ok, Justin Timberlake may be bringing sexy back, but I’m bringing meta tags back. Before you start leaving comments about how irrelevant meta tags are, just know that I do agree. I don’t know if all search engines agree though.

WordPress may indeed be the absolute best blogging platform and CMS available, but theme designers often miss crucial elements that allow your WordPress blog to be fully SEO’d.

In order to add effective meta tags to your WordPress blog, open up your header.php (or whatever the header file is called) for the theme you’re currently using. You can open it up from the WordPress admin panel, or download it via FTP and edit it that way.

The header is where the following code will go.

So with that in mind, here is the way I’ve constructed my meta tags for this blog:

Don’t forget to put < and > on the ends of the meta tags before inserting them into the header file.

meta name="description" content="Make Money Online with Brandon Hopkins" /
The description is arguably the only important meta tag still being used by many search engines.

meta http-equiv="author" content="Brandon Hopkins" /
Do search engines care who the author is?

meta http-equiv="contact" content="brandonchopkins@gmail.com" /
I’m sure this is just spam food, but Gmail takes care of spam for me.

meta name="keywords" content="make, money, online, brandon hopkins" /
Some keywords for search engines to know what your site is about.

Here is my secret advice. It will work for your description and possibly your keywords, depending on how you structure your titles.
meta name="description" content="< ?php the_title(); ?>" /

This will take the description and add whatever the title of your post is. Just take a look at the page source for this post (Apple+U for FF Mac users).

See how the meta description of this post matches the post title…awesome. More descriptive words, but more importantly, we’re reducing the amount of duplicate content that every blog has. You now have unique meta description tags for every page on your site!

Let me know if you have any meta tag secrets!

In a recent post by Glen Stansberry at ProBlogger, Glen talks about blogging’s most underused feature, setting up future posts.

For two of my blogs I actually use that feature pretty often. Every so often something spurs me to start writing for one of these sites, and once I’ve posted 3 posts that day, I start using the future posts option. I schedule one post every day until I run out of steam. Once the steam subsides I usually have 3-5 days worth of posts.

For me, the most underused WordPress feature is definitely the post slug. The post slug allows you to set the URL for each post, regardless of what the post title is. Here is an example.

This post is titled, “My Most Underused WordPress Feature – Post Slug”. However I know that most people are going to search for those exact words. Those are words for the readers. For my post slug I want something that is for Google and other bloggers who might link to this post.

My post slug is, “how-to-use-wordpress-post-slug”. So as you are reading this post, look up at the URL. You should see, “https://www.brandon-hopkins.com/how-to-use-wordpress-post-slug“.

The reason I did this is because every little bit of SEO helps. Google will see the url and when someone searches for “How do I use WordPress post slug”, or “WordPress Post Slug uses”, or “How to post slug” they’ll find this post.

There are many other ways to use a post slug. Post slugs are especially wonderful if you post short titles without any keywords, or you post really long titles that mess up your url structure.

Can you imagine seeing this URL on a blog:

https://www.brandon-hopkins.com/my-most-underused-wordpress-

feature-post-slug-how-to-create-post-slugs-and-the-most-

effective-ways-to-use-them/

Pretty ridiculous. But when using post slugs I can make that URL anything I want.