It was difficult to think of an interesting title for this article. Maybe I should have called it “Save Time and Money — Keep Your Meta Tags Portable”, because eventually, if your Meta Tags are not portable, you’re going to invest time/money moving them.

Problem

The latest WordPress documentation says:

To add meta tags to your site, simply add them to the header.php template file in your WordPress Theme, specifically in the head section near the link for the style sheet.

That works fine until you switch themes. The meta tags don’t follow you to the next theme. This may not be obvious at first. Your search engine rankings may go down if the Google, Yahoo, or Bing search engines cannot verify your site — an activity they do from time to time. But it could take a long time to trace this back to the missing meta tags, and meanwhile your site is losing $traffic. 

Not good.

Solution

Use a Wordpress Meta Tag Plugin.

I’m agnostic about which Meta Tag Plugin to use, but I will tell you that I am using Meta Tag Manager Wordpress Plugin from netweblogic.  Just download it, install it, and activate it according to the instructions.  It shows up as a menu item under “Settings” in your Admin Dashboard.  Click on it and you should see something like the screen below. Just add new tags and save the changes.

Meta Tag Manager

You’re done.

Double Check Your Work

Finally, make sure your tags are really showing up. Navigate to your blog use your browser “view page source” capability to view the source of the page. Make sure your meta tags are included.