Managing meta data for pages – in search of tagging, “meta” and not (part 15)

Having gone through all the variety of WordPress plug-ins, stunned and confused by the breadth of options I coralled all the stakeholders into one room, showed them a few features and asked “So… what exactly do you want?”

Guess what – there were surprises! (thank God everyone was in the same room)

Since we were using an external expert to take care of SEO, a requirement emerged to provide a simple way to precisely define title, keywords and (maybe) descriptons for Pages (only) on a page-by-page basis.

Why only Pages, not Posts? – because posts go out of date quickly and are not worth the effort needed for the perfect SEO. Your basic “turn tags and categories intometa keywords” approach is more than sufficient. Now, Pages, they stick around for a long time…

Most WordPress plug-ins focus on Posts (no surprise here, it’s a blogging platform first and a micro-CMS second). I really did ot want to confuse the users by giving them the option to re-define keywords for Posts and telling them not to use it. “Use it here, but do not use it there” is generally a great way to ask for trouble.

So, I did two things:

1) I took the wonderful HeadSpace 2 plug-in and chopped it down till it handled Pages only. All I had to do was comment out a few lines. This toook care of keywords and description meta tags. But not of the <title> tag.
2) Since “SEO Title Tag” was a bit too particular for my taste, I wrote a small plug-in of my own, “Title Override”. It seems to be workin, so I am making itavailable here. Enjoy!