SEO Basics

SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

The classic META Tags have 5 attributes: charset, content, http-equiv, name, scheme, with the name attribute the most relevant to SEO. The Name Attribute has several values: application-name, author, desription, generator, keywords, viewport.

META Tags have been expanded with RDFa to include the following items;

• about – a URI or CURIE specifying the resource the metadata is about
• rel and rev – specifying a relationship and reverse-relationship with another resource, respectively
• src, href and resource – specifying the partner resource
• property – specifying a property for the content of an element or the partner resource
• content – optional attribute that overrides the content of the element when using the property attribute
• datatype – optional attribute that specifies the datatype of text specified for use with the property attribute
• typeof

, but also how it appears to users in search results. How does a search engine know how to format and display what it finds in a short summary that someone can read?

It seems like everything for Yoast settings on a page or post is devoted to how a search engine formats and displays information to a viewer. It puts it in an application/ld+json script, which adheres to RDFa standards and tells or suggests to a search engine how to display something.

Yoast does not allow for a META Description for every page, only for the entire website. This provides a strong hint as to how search engines now use the description tag as opposed to years past.

Keyword(s) doesn't even appear as a META tag anymore. It is only used in the RDFa script for formatting purposes.

For a website administrator, they care about rankings. For a search engine, they care about how information will be displayed for a viewer.

Images

The URL is of course used (but predefined by Wordpress)

The Title Tag does NOT show up anywhere in a Page or Post, nor do they appear in raw HTML. The Title Field Tag is used in a Sitemap File and is marked as CDATA to ensure that if any special characters are used they are interpreted literally and not as markup.

They are only used for identification purposes within Wordpress.

The Caption Field is only used as a "pre fill" when adding an image into a post or page. It can be modified, added to, or deleted. It holds no spot in any META tags or anything other than text following an image tag (IE, it is outside the boundaries of the <IMG> Tag)

The Description Tag does NOT show up anywhere in a Page or Post, nor do they appear in raw HTML.

Open Graph / OG, shows up in HTML as <meta property="og:image" content="https://NameOfFile.jpg"/>

Living example: Anthropology (and as it accidentally and conveniently turned out Anthropologie)

<TITLE> as an HTML element is different than an Image Title. The <Title> Element is automatically created by Wordpress and Mediawiki from the Title of a Post or Article, followed by the Web Site Name. This is what Google typically displays as the heading for a search result.

<META> name="description" content="This is what Google displays" If it isn't present, then the first paragraph of content is generally displayed (Wikipedia's entry on Anthropology and Anthropologie.com clearly demonstrate this)

Wordpress Plugins for SEO to granularly control things

Title Element Override

Meta Description Override