Herewith, the final tip in this short series on optimizing your WordPress blog for search engines - to be continued….

Tip 3 - Head Meta Description

Some search engines - Google included - tend to use the HTML meta description value on your page as the basis for the summary text in an entry on a result page. If you don’t have a value for the meta description tag, just about anything goes.

The Head META Description plugin will automatically take the first n-number of words from your blog post or page, and dynamically create a meta description value for you, resulting in a nice, cleanly formatted intro to the post. It can mean the difference between random gobbly-gook and clean, readable text.

This plugin allows you to set the number of words that will be pulled into the description. I tend to leave it at the default of 20 words.

Remember that the quicker a reader can ascertain the contents of a page in a search engine listing, the better they’ll be able to determine whether the content is what they’re seeking or not. Not only that, but if you don’t use a plugin like this, the descriptions of your blog post and page entries in search engines may all begin with the same string of characters, which increases the risk that it will be treated as “similar” content and not necessarily offered to as many searchers as you’d like to think.

Disclaimer

If you are using a Wordpress.com hosted blog (rather than an installed version of the stand-alone open source software), I can’t tell you whether you can use any of these features in this series. But last time I checked, it didn’t support external plugins, so tips 2 and 3 might not be available to you.