Adding Meta Keywords & Meta Description To Your Blog

We all want to find an audience for our blogs, and finding your site in search results is the best way for new readers to find your site. One way to improve the chances of your blog being found by the right audience via an online search is by adding the right meta tags to your blog.

The meta elements included in your blog are utilized by search engines to better categorize your site in search listings. Adding meta keywords and meta description to your blog and posts is good for search engine optimization (SEO). While the meta elements will not be visible on your site, the page source which is crawled by search bots includes the meta tags similar to:

<meta name="keywords" content="apple tarts, fourth of july, holiday, treats" />
<meta name="description" content="A how to guide for making apple tarts for your Fourth Of July celebration." />

If you are curious about the technical details of meta elements, see the Wikipedia article.

Typepad makes it easy for you to add meta keywords and meta descriptions to your blog and posts with the available SEO tools.

To set the meta keywords and description for your entire site, go to Settings > SEO. The Meta Keywords should be words or short phrases which describe your blog's content. Separate the words and phrases by commas; no quotes are needed to define phrases.

For the Meta Description, enter a short description of your blog in a paragraph format.

Do not include HTML, formatting, or special characters in the Meta Keywords or Meta Description fields.

The Meta Keywords and Meta Description will be used on all index pages of your site.

For individual posts, the meta tags included on the individual post pages is pulled from the Keywords and Excerpt fields. When composing your post, scroll down to the Keywords field and enter words or phrases separated by commas which best describe the content of your post. If you leave the Keywords field blank, the Meta Keywords set for your entire site will be used on the individual post instead.

For the meta description, enter a brief paragraph which describes the content of the post in the Excerpt field. If you leave the Excerpt field blank, the first couple lines of the post body will be used as the meta description.

Just like the Meta Keywords and Meta Description for your blog, do not include HTML, formatting, or special characters in the Keywords or Excerpt fields.

With the right meta elements in place, your blog is more likely to show up in search results relevant to your blog's content.

Want more help with optimizing your blog for search engines? Check out the SEO Advanced Tune-Up service!