Comment on WordPress SEO Tutorial by SEO Dave.

WordPress SEO The Stallion theme automatically generates a meta description tag for blog posts and static pages (doesn’t create them for archive pages) from the pages/posts excerpts.

If you build an excerpt for a post (when you create a post there’s an excerpt box, it’s part of core WordPress) it will use that excerpt. If you don’t create an excerpt it will use the first X number of characters (X can be set via Stallion) from the post.

If you aren’t manually writing ad like excerpts (I’m too busy to write them for thousands of posts) I would suggest not bothering with a meta description tag at all. Major search engines (Google) doesn’t use the meta description for ranking purposes (it has NO SEO value), it’s only value is in click through rates from Google search results, if you write awesome ad like excerpts AND Google uses them (Google doesn’t always use your meta description), you MIGHT increase the number of clicks relative to if you used the automated description Google generates on it’s own.

So if you don’t write excerpts that are awesome ads there’s not a lot to gain using the Stallion excerpts as it’s just the first few lines of a post and probably not written like an ad.

There’s no such thing as a meta title tag :-), the title of a page isn’t a meta tag, it’s an element (title element): pet peeve of mine when ‘SEO experts’ call it a meta tag, they should know better :-)

Anyway, the title element is very important and Stallion is set to show the perfect SEO title element as long as you name your posts, pages, categories, tags etc… with SEO in mind.

If you name a category Forex Exchange : “Category one” it’s not going to rank for anything related to Forex Exchange, name a post “Something Strange Happened to me this Morning” when the post is about how you used Astrology to make money from the Forex exchange, it’s not going to rank well for relevant Forex/Astrology SERPs.

As long as you title everything with SEO in mind (which you should anyway) there’s not a lot to be gained using the title element features of WordPress SEO plugins with Stallion. There is a benefit to those plugins title elements IF you are using a WordPress theme with the standard title element setup (Name of Site : Title of Post) and you don’t know how to edit the theme to remove the “Name of Site” part. All my WordPress themes have that part of the title element removed, so not much to gain from a second place to add a title.

David

Update: Stallion 7.* has custom meta tags as well.