Add Meta Description tags for everything

If you authored websites with HTML in the past you probably remember meta keywords tags; these have effectively been rendered useless, as so many people used keywords that weren’t applicable to their site to gain traffic that would have otherwise gone to their competitors. Because of this, Google no longer uses meta keyword tags in web ranking; however, they do still utilize “description” meta tags for results snippets as described in this article.  

It should be obvious by now that you can add a description for every page as well as post in WordPress, and these are really handy as Google will often pick them up to use under your links. One of the often neglected areas in WordPress where site owners forget to add meta description is categories and tags. In your Dashboard, you should be able to find each of them under the Posts sub-heading. Once there, choose _edit _and use the description field to describe it as best you can. There’s a lot of space you can use there, so don’t waste it. Some themes don’t use this field, so when you save the description for the first time, see if you can find it on the website. Even if you can’t see it anywhere, don’t feel you’ve wasted your time; search engine web crawlers will pay attention to every word you use.! From WordPress SEO by Yoast, “The meta description is under 120 characters, however up to 156 characters are available. The available space is shorter than the usual 155 characters because Google will also include the publication date in the snippet.”

Spending a little time to add a description to every page, post, category and tag is just one more place you can make it easier for potential customers to find you.