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Features

How it works

Add-Meta-Tags (referred to as AMT hereafter) adds metadata to your web site. This metadata contains information about the content, the author, the publisher, the media files, which have been attached to your content, and even about some of the embedded media (see the details about this feature in the relevant section below).

Metadata refers to information that describes the content in a machine-friendly way. Search engines and other online services use this metadata to better understand your content. Keep in mind that metadata itself neither automatically makes your blog rank better nor makes your content more useful. For this to happen the content is still required to meet various quality standards. However, the presence of accurate and adequate metadata gives search engines and other services the chance to make less guesses about your content, index and categorize it better and, eventually, deliver it to an audience that finds it useful. Good metadata facilitates this process and thus plays a significant role in achieving better rankings. This is what the Add-Meta-Tags plugin does.

Add-Meta-Tags automatically generates metadata for your content.

Main Features

The main features of the plugin include:

  • Generation of basic meta tags, such as the description and keywords meta tags.
  • Generation of Opengraph metadata.
  • Generation of Schema.org metadata.
  • Generation of Twitter Cards metadata.
  • Generation of Dublin Core metadata.
  • The various metadata types are generated for posts, pages, custom post types, attachment pages, category, tag, custom-taxonomy, author, custom post type archives and the front page. Please note that not all generators produce metadata for all the aforementioned content types. In some cases, this happens because of limitations of the metadata specification. Moreover, the generators are constantly being improved so as to produce as complete metadata as possible.
  • Supports both the default latest posts front page or static pages, which are used as the front page and as the latest posts page.
  • Supports the generation of metadata for embedded media (only a subset of the embeddable media in WordPress are supported).
  • Supports the generation of metadata for product and product group pages for the WooCommerce and Easy-Digital-Downloads (partial) e-commerce plugins.
  • The metadata generators support social media profile links for each author.
  • Publisher Settings shared by all authors (currently only social media profile links).
  • Custom locale setting, which is used in all generated metadata. (Should not be used in conjuction with a multilingual plugin.)
  • Generation of a HTML link with the hreflang attribute according to the locale of the content. (Should not be used in conjuction with a multilingual plugin.)
  • Advanced SEO titles based on user-defined templates. Different set of templates is available for the titles used in the <title> HTML element and for those within the metadata.
  • Command Line Interface via wp-cli, which can be used to import/export/clean the Add-Meta-Tags settings and data.
  • Supports the generation of metadata for BuddyPress profiles.
  • Supports metadata caching for posts, pages, attachments, custom post types, which can make the overhead of the generation of the metadata for post objects as small as it can possibly get.
  • Makes use of the non-persistent object caching mechanism of WordPress to optimize some of its commonly used utility functions.

Additional Features

Additional features include:

  • Web site description and keywords.
  • Global keywords. These are keywords that are automatically added to the keywords of the content throughout the web site.
  • Site-wide meta tags. It is possible to add full meta tags, such as verification meta tags or meta tags with extra robots rules, that appear throughout the web site.
  • Supports a default image, such as your web site's logo, which is used as a fallback, if no other image can be determined.
  • Supports the addition of the copyright meta tag.
  • Supports the addition of the NOODP,NOYDIR options to the robots meta tag.
  • Supports the addition of the NOINDEX,FOLLOW options to the robots meta tag on category, tag, author, time based archives and search results. The option to exclude the first page of each of the aforementioned archives from this rule is provided.
  • Metadata review mode. When enabled, WordPress users with administrator privileges see a box (right above the post's content) containing the metadata exactly as it is added in the HTML head and body for easier examination. The box is displayed on posts, pages, attachments and custom post types.
  • Supports reading data, such as custom descriptions, keywords, custom titles, etc from external fields and thus makes the migration from other plugins extremely easy.

Customization through the User Interface

The generation of metadata is automatic. However, customization by the user is possible directly from the post editing screen. Add-Meta-Tags adds a metabox in this screen, the Metadata box, which offers the following metadata customization features:

  • Custom description.
  • Custom keywords.
  • Custom content of the <title> element.
  • News keywords. (read more)
  • Full meta tags box, which can be used to enter full meta tags (<meta> and <link> elements are allowed by default), which are specific to the post.
  • Global image override field, which accepts an image URL, which, if set, overrides the generation of the metadata for any other media file that has been attached to the post.
  • Content locale override, which lets users override the locale on a per post basis. (Should not be used in conjuction with a multilingual plugin.)
  • Express review, which adds a field that accepts review related information using special notation, which results in the generation of a Review schema.org entity instead of Article. This feature should be used only by advanced users for testing.
  • Referenced items. (Note: Using this very experimental feature is not recommended.)

Advanced Customization

Add-Meta-Tags supports advanced customization via the WordPress filter and action system. See the list of available filter and action hooks offered by the plugin.

The Add-Meta-Tags Cookbook, which is a collection of code snippets that perform specific commonly needed customizations, is also available. (Note: still work in progress -- needs much work).

Template Tags

  • Some metadata related template tags have been included for use in the themes:
  • Semantic breadcrumb generator. Among other template tags, a basic template tag for the generation of a semantic breadcrumb trail for hierarchically structured content types, such as pages, has been included for use in your themes (how to use)