Today I realized my posts needed proper jargon in the description and keywords meta tags for uber SEO magic. What is the ‘right’ way to do this in WordPress? I found a bunch of plugins and other complicated methods, but I thought there should be an easy way with custom fields. I ended up on a forum post, which was exactly what I was looking for. You just create a couple custom fields: description and keywords, then print out the values of the fields in the header. So I dumped this into my theme’s header.php:
<meta name="description" content="<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true) !='' ) echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true); else bloginfo('description');?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true) != '') echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true); else echo strtolower(get_bloginfo('name'));?>" />
It works on the single post page, but it does not properly display the default on aggregation pages like the front page. This is fixed by adding the is_single() function to the if statements:
<meta name="description" content="<?php if(is_single() && get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true) !='' ) echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true); else echo 'My description';?>" /> <meta name="keywords" content="<?php if(is_single() && get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true) != '') echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true); else echo 'my, keywords, here';?>" />
Yay.
Discuss
um.. genius. i’ve been hunting for this kind of info for two months! thank you thank you. seriously worked like a charm. I just plugged it into my header and bam. all of the other plugins were janky, so I like REAL code!! Thanks so much!!
Thank you for getting me to think. I took your code and augmented the following to allow for “page” posts, spaces and comma.
<meta name="description" content="ID, "description", true)) echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true)); ?>ID, "description", true)) { echo ' '; } ?>My base description." />
<meta name="keywords" content="my, base, keywordsID, "keywords", true)) { echo ', '; } ?>ID, "keywords", true)) echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true)); ?>" />
Let’s try this again,… Thank you for getting me to think. I took your code and augmented the following to allow for “page” posts, spaces and comma.
<meta name=”description” content=”ID, “description”, true)) echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “description”, true)); ?>ID, “description”, true)) { echo ‘ ‘; } ?>My base description.” />
<meta name=”keywords” content=”my, base, keywordsID, “keywords”, true)) { echo ‘, ‘; } ?>ID, “keywords”, true)) echo(get_post_meta($post->ID, “keywords”, true)); ?>” />
hi. i have no php knowledge. can you help me changing my header.php to have meta description and keywords, on pages, through custom fields, like you are telling here?
thank you
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