You have touched upon a bit of a shortcoming in WordPress, IMHO.
However, WordPress will generate a title for the blog page out of the box –I am assuming you mean the blog index page, the list of posts– so if you aren’t seeing that title something is messing it up. Switch off you plugins and switch themes to try to isolate what is stripping that title.
That doesn’t get your ‘meta’ tags though. For that you have a few choices: 1) edit your theme’s header.php to add the meta tags, 2) hook into wp_head, or 3) a plugin. I haven’t been happy with any of the plugins I’ve looked into, so I am basically rolling my own class for that right now but it is far from complete.
Guessing since I don’t know how your Platinum SEO plugin works…
One thing you might try is creating a page and set Settings->Reading->Posts Page so that the index points to the page you created. If you add content to that page maybe your plugin will pick it up as a meta description and/or use it to generate keywords.
Add add_post_type_support('page','excerpt'); to your theme’s functions.php and you should have excerpts for your pages, which might also help.
I would imagine the reason my blog page doesn’t have a title is because I leave the Site Title And Tagline fields blank in Settings->General. That’s because i’m using it as a CMS to engine my site (almost 500 pages worth) and it would be odd to have the blog’s title thrown on to the end of every pages title.
It really blows my mind that WordPress (which was really only intended to be a blog), doesn’t have a way right out of the box to ad meta tags to the blog. Pretty cooky…
I’m not sure what to do about this…
Thanks for your help, s_ha_dum.
This still has me baffled… I tried adding meta tags directly in my page_blog.php file and they won’t even show up when I view the page. It makes absolutely no sense to me why something so essential like this would be an issue. I mean, What do people do, who only use WordPress for a blog, as it was intended? Do they not have meta tags on their homepages? The most important page of their whole site?
Can’t someone please tell me how to do this?
Hook into wp_head, wp_title, and get_header, maybe others too, or write switches into the theme’s header.php and/or other template files. Take a look at how the themes twentyten and twentyeleven do it.
