Use Wordpress custom fields for your meta tags

Apr 12 2009

Today I realized my posts needed proper jargon in the description and keywords meta tags for uber SEO magic. What is the ‘right’ way to do this in WordPress? I found a bunch of plugins and other complicated methods, but I thought there should be an easy way with custom fields. I ended up on a forum post, which was exactly what I was looking for. You just create a couple custom fields: description and keywords, then print out the values of the fields in the header. So I dumped this into my theme’s header.php:

<meta name="description" content="<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true) !='' ) echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true); else bloginfo('description');?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php if(get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true) != '') echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true); else echo strtolower(get_bloginfo('name'));?>" />

It works on the single post page, but it does not properly display the default on aggregation pages like the front page. This is fixed by adding the is_single() function to the if statements:

<meta name="description" content="<?php if(is_single() && get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true) !='' ) echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "description", true); else echo 'My description';?>" />
<meta name="keywords" content="<?php if(is_single() && get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true) != '') echo get_post_meta($post->ID, "keywords", true); else echo 'my, keywords, here';?>" />

Yay.