It’s been said that meta keywords and description tags are dead. Where as I’d agree with the keywords tag, the descriptions tag I’m no longer convinced is dead. Actually, it’s quite important; especially for blogs.

If you use the site: command in Google, and look at Google’s descriptions (aka snippits) for a blog, you may notice some indexing issues. Usually one of two things happens. Either your blog description is generic and includes things like the date and categories, or your blog’s description is exactly the same. The second one will probably land a lot of your pages in the supplemental index.

If you check out Matt Cutt’s blog, you’ll notice that the descriptions start with the date followed by time, categories and then the first few words of his post.

Check out SEOMoz’s blog and you’ll see that most blog posts are showing up as supplementary results as all the descriptions are exactly the same “BLOG CATEGORIES. Advertising, Promotions & Public Relations Online · Analytics, Tracking & Measurement · Ask.com · Blogging & Social Tagging · Google …”

One of the downsides to a blog is the ability to easily assign meta keywords and descriptions to each blog post. I have done some research and found with a simple and fantastic plugin called HeadSpace 2.

HeadSpace 2 has two different ways of creating meta descriptions and keywords.

1) For those of us who feel we don’t have enough time, there is the automatic way. HeadSpace 2 can put an excerpt of your post in the description tag and the categories associated with the post in the keywords tag.

2) For those of us who need control, there is the manual way. Once installed each post now comes with a meta description and meta keyword box on the posting screen. Simply fill those two out and HeadSpace 2 will do the rest.

Either way is probably better than having none at all and much better than having the description or keyword tag the same on all pages.

Get HeadSpace 2

[tags]headspace, meta, description, keywords[/tags]