Posted by michele

July 11, 2008

This is a quick guide to add dynamic meta description and keyword to each different url of our WordPress blog, very useful to SEO users.

Open your header.php file from your theme directory and put this code into:

Meta Content Description

<meta name="description" content="
<?php if (have_posts() && is_single() OR is_page()):while(have_posts()):the_post();
$out_excerpt = str_replace(array("\r\n", "\r", "\n"), "", get_the_excerpt());
echo apply_filters('the_excerpt_rss', $out_excerpt);
endwhile;
elseif(is_category() OR is_tag()):
if(is_category()):
echo "Posts related to Category:
".ucfirst(single_cat_title("", FALSE));
elseif(is_tag()):
echo "Posts related to Tag:
".ucfirst(single_tag_title("", FALSE));
endif;
else: ?>
ADD HERE YOUR DEFAULT DESCRIPTION
<?php endif; ?>" />

Meta Content Keywords

<meta name="keywords" content="
<?php
$tags = get_tags(array('orderby' => 'count', 'order' => 'DESC'));
$xt = 1;
foreach ($tags as $tag) {
if ($xt <= 20) {
echo $tag->name.", ";
}
$xt++;
}
?>ADD, HERE, YOUR, STATIC, KEYWORDS" />

Tags: code, google, php, programming, search engine, seo, theme, wordpress

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29 Responses to “WordPress: Dynamic Meta Description and Keywords howto”

Graphic Design Tutorials
19:01 on June 30th, 2010
Hi, good post, thanks.

If I visit a website I get attracted by a soothing design, this actually instills the confidence in me to turn more pages from the site.
Nicolas Ritoux
22:22 on June 21st, 2010
Thanks so much! That works great.
weidhas
17:01 on June 3rd, 2010
thx 4 the post ;)
morestar
19:17 on May 4th, 2010
I’m trying to use Facebook’s new Like Button feature on my site and it’s working pretty good but when adding a few more pieces of Facebook Like meta data to the post pages I found I would do well with adding the description as well in the following format:

When I add your code into single.php with conditional statements (post page?) the following shows up in the HTML Source:

Help????
Add dynamic description and keywords meta tags in Wordpress | WithExample
15:49 on April 16th, 2010
[...] Add dynamic description and keywords meta tags in WordPress April 16, 2010 | Posted by admin (online) http://www.michelem.org/2008/07/11/wordpress-dynamic-meta-description-and-keywords-howto/ [...]
david
00:04 on March 20th, 2010
oops the code didn’t paste, lets see if this works:

content=”
asdf”
david
00:03 on March 20th, 2010
Great stuff, thanks for the tips, just one question, in the meta description tag there is a newline after the content parameter like this:

Is it possible to remove that newline? Just curious, I’m guessing it’s got something to do with the str_replace but I’m not sure

Thanks!
Capucine
14:02 on December 8th, 2009
It worked great for one of my blogs (WordPress 2.7.1), but not for the other one, using WordPress 2.0.5 (I know it’s old, but I am frightened of upgrading and crashing my whole site).

Do you have a similar script for these “old” WP versions ?

Thanks !

Sylvie
wordpresswell.com
06:16 on November 17th, 2009
very useful, thanks kindly
Simone
12:40 on October 1st, 2009
Very useful thank you!
myukaht
19:34 on May 31st, 2009
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Jessi Hance
07:15 on May 31st, 2009
Lovely! Now I don’t need the Add Meta Description plugin—which works great, but I like being able to minimize the number of plugins on my blog.
C Jones
02:14 on April 5th, 2009
Does anyone know where I can find free online virus scanners?
Ben PC
07:56 on March 3rd, 2009
sorry, that didn’t come through right – I mean ‘ and &#8217 etc.
Ben PC
07:53 on March 3rd, 2009
Oh, Austin Web Design – just thinking, rather than removing them, might it not be better to convert single and double quotes to their character entities? (i.e. ‘ ’ etc.)?
Ben PC
07:43 on March 3rd, 2009
Thanks very much for this Michele. I realised this morning that all my pages had the same meta description and hence my site looked pretty stupid in Google – with your code snippet above I have now easily fixed this. Very much appreciated.

One change I have made: your code above removes all newlines, but I have changed this to replace them with a space.

get_the_excerpt replaces any s in your content with newlines (via a call to strip_tags). If you simply remove the newlines, then you end up with sentences that run straight into one another without a space.Like this.Which is ugly.

(Most of my pages start with a one-line paragraph, so this was particularly relevant to me).

For anyone else interested, I changed:

str_replace(array(“\r\n”, “\r”, “\n”), “”, get_the_excerpt());

to:

str_replace(array(“\r\n”, “\r”, “\n”), ” “, get_the_excerpt());

thanks again – very much appreciated
Austin Web Design
02:10 on January 30th, 2009
Michele, this is a great resource. I added single and double quotes to the list of replaced characters in the excerpt. I also took out the “[...]” at the end of the excerpt.

Thanks so much.
Webmaster Forum
06:33 on December 8th, 2008
wonderful code. thanks for the share.
axxo
15:50 on November 23rd, 2008
thanks man for this , really need it . check my website http://www.axxomovies.org