Missing Meta Description Tag - Wordpress Tag

[petewinter]

I am going through my crawl diagonostics issues and I have lots of "Missing Meta Description Tags". However when I look at the url's they are Wordpress Tags, which do not have a meta description.

Shall I just ignore these errors or should I find a way to add a meta description? Is it important?

[jonnyholt]

You can also add meta descriptions to the tags individually in WP.  Just go to "Posts" > 
"Tags" and then edit each tag to have a meta description.

On a side note, in a wordpress site, it is really not a good idea to index your "Tag Pages".  Sure 3 years ago you would have wanted to because Search Engines put more value on how many pages your website has.  In 2013 it has a number of negative consequences that Google especially doesn't approve of.  First it adds a ton of pages to your site too quickly - Google likes things to grow at a common rate.  (If you have a team of 30 people blogging 5 blogs a day Google will see that and be ok with more tags, but if your adding one blog a day and 25 pages are being created thats a problem)  Second, if you add one blog and give it 5 new tags that have never been used before, Google will see 5 new pages with the exact same content on it.  You will see these errors on you SEOmoz Campaign report.  Lastly, its hard to control the meta descriptors though easier with a SEO program.

Leaving out your Tags but indexing your Categories may be a better option, but of course that draws the question, why use tags at all right?  Well in the search engine world, its best to create for the user and not the search engine.  So tags are used to help the user find other articles or blogs like the one they have landed on.  In the last 5 years, tags were about creating huge amounts of pages but now days you have to weigh the good over the bad.

-this is my opinion and not that of SEOmoz.-

[Mark_Ginsberg]

You can create a template for the titles and metadescriptions of the tags also in Yoast - go to the section of titles, and then in the taxonomies section, you can create a template for titles and meta descriptions. Scroll down to the bottom of the page - you'll see what you can dynamically insert in your template text.

[petewinter]

Thanks for your reply. Funny you mention the yoast seo plugin. I installed it earlier today. Your right it is good.

I do want meta descriptions on my tags as they are getting picked up by search engines. Do you know how I can add them in Wordpress as I can find the option?

[honestabejosh]

I just want to back up Mark Ginsberg's suggestion to you.  I currently manage several WP sites and I would not do without Yoast on any of the.  Not saying there is not other good SEO plugins available, but Yoast is straight forward, yet powerful.  WP without an SEO plugin can be a mess, and limiting what is allowed to index will certainly help you by leaps and bounds.

[Mark_Ginsberg]

If you're finding these tags are missing meta descriptions, that means they are pages that don't have meta descriptions. This points to a larger issue - do you want each page being created by Wordpress for each tag you use to be indexed by the search engines? Are these high quality pages you'd want a user to land on? Do they provide value? If not, you don't want them to be indexed. You can use a Wordpress plugin to control indexation of these tag pages - Yoast's SEO plugin, http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/, besides for being awesome, will control this for you. Install and then go the indexation section, and from there, you can control what is indexed and set the tags to not be indexed.

You can do lots of other stuff with the plugin, and I definitely recommend installing it either way.

Hope this helps and let me know if you have any issues with it.