What is metadata and what is it for? –

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The metadata are HTML elements that display information about the website itself that contains them.

They are used by search engines to define the main information of our website (theme, description), so it will be very important that we have it correctly configured.

These meta elements will be found in the head of the web code.

In WordPress, this metadata will be generated automatically. automaticso it will not be necessary to touch the code manually, unless we want to add or remove some special element.

The typical structure of this metadata in code view is as follows:

We are going to review the most common meta elements, we will not see them all:

• Description: contains a brief description about the information contained in the page we are loading.

  It is the most important element for positioning, since Google and other search engines often use it to be displayed in search results.

• Keywords: contains, separated by commas, the keywords related to the content of the page.

  An example could be “cars, sports cars, luxury cars”. Although this tag was important at the time, currently search engines like Google ignore this information, since it used to be used to include data unrelated to the page.

• Author: information about him author of the website. It could be understood as the administrative contact of the web.
• Copyright: information about the copyright of the page.
• Generator: indicates with which tool the page was developedif any specific one has been used.

  For example, a value for this element could be “WordPress”.

• robots: With this tag we can define the actions robots can take of search engines on our website.

  We can use values ​​such as Disallow and Allow in it so that the robots access or not the content of the URLs they find.

All meta tags are optionalso that the page will continue to work correctly even if we don’t have any.

In fact, it is normal that we do not have all of them.

Of course, some are very important to improve the positioning of our website, especially the label description.

Let’s dig a little deeper into it.

Description Tag and Site Title

In WordPress, to define the metadata description we must go in the administration of the web to Settings > General. Here we will find a field, named Short descriptionwhere we must include a summary description of the theme of our website.

This description must have 70 and 156 characters.

For descriptions shorter than 70 characters, it is possible that Google uses another text extracted from the web to be displayed in the search results, which would surely have less relevance.

For descriptions longer than 156 characters, the text would be cut off, which could leave important information from the description missing.

On this same page, we will also see the parameter site title where we must include the title of our web page. It is not a meta tag itself, but it is very important that it is correctly configured, since it is used as Page title in the search results.

A very convenient thing would be to add a different one for each page of our website.

In this way, when showing the results of the different WordPress pages in the search engines, each one would have its own description, informing about the specific content that each page deals with.

To achieve this, we can use the plugin .

Once we have installed and activated it, when we edit a WordPress page or post we will see at the bottom a new box with the title Yoast SEO.

Inside it there is a parameter target description where we can include the specific description of this page. We can also include a custom title in the field SEO Title.

With this, each page will have its own description, which will improve our search engine rankings.

Changing the subject, as a security measure you can hide the Generator tagsince it reports the version of WordPress that we are using, something that can be tricky if we do not have the latest version installed.

Although this data can be hidden with a simple change in the code, there are specific plugins to perform this task, such as .

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Technician with more than 15 years of experience in web support and development. I am currently in charge of caltener.com, a company specialized in WordPress, PrestaShop and Joomla support.

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