Optimising Articles for the Search Engines (Meta Description, Meta tags)

[staffjam]

My sites are doing pretty well in the search engines for the keywords i've chosen, but all of the articles i write or have had written seem to get nowhere.

I've been a bit sloppy with the meta tags and meta descriptions in my SEO panel - is this something i should correct, as do they make a big difference to the search engines?

If so, for the Meta Description - do you just put an excerpt from the article or do you put the keywords you want the article to rank for in there (obviously so it makes sense and not a case of keyword stuffing.)

Any advice on this would be greatly appreciated.

 

[angilina]

I use wordpress in my sites and I always forget to add my own description when I add a post. I am using SEO plugin that includes the first few words of my post as the description of the page. I think that is helpful but if we can write a summary of our posts/article and include that in the description tag, then that will be better.

The title and description tags are important. You should optimize these two tags.