I'm trying to avoid installing a SEO plugin...
Why?
...to insert meta tags
Don’t. Search engines don’t work that way these days. They are much more sophisticated and don’t take much notice of the sort of meta tag you want to insert. Google doesn’t use those sort of meta tags, for example. It does use some meta tags, but from a content point of view, filling in your WordPress title and tagline exhaust the ones that are related to content. The rest are “settings”-type meta.
If you Google my site with the name “Dario Alfonsi” you can (or should, one never knows these days what others see in Google) see the description text that I put in WordPress SEO by Yoast. It really does make things incredibly less complex to use it.
@electricfeet – thanks for adopting this orphan. My comment wasn’t intended to be dismissive of SEO plugins but rather a general philosophy to run with as few plugins as possible following a discussion I had with my webhost. He said that the main reason for sub-optimal WP site performance was plugin “overload”. He despaired of sites with 30 or 40 plugins, which he said were all too common and told me that the fastest-running WP websites are generally those with the fewest plugins. He advised me to install a maximum of ten.
Hence, I was looking to add my own SEO code if possible. But since a) my notion about meta tags is clearly outdated and b) SEO is complex, I have abandoned my idealism and will take a look at Yoast.
Well if you’re expecting 100,000’s of daily hits then that will be a major problem.
But knowing that your site is very localized and likely to attract 10’s per week/month then I don’t think the #plugins will be an issue.
I use GTMetrix to assess performance, and if you can get down to 1s pageloads then I don’t see the need to worry. (I’ve setup on my host for you and we need to make a change which I’ll explain to you)
Hundreds, not 10s, once the word gets out!
Bit of a distance for Rocco to come for a massage 😉
Badly-written plugins are awful and can slow down (or break) your site (I know — I trashed my local install last week by installing a 2-yr old plugin).
But well-written ones can extend WordPress’s functionality fantastically. And some are then integrated into the WP core.
So don’t think plugins = bad, but think rather bad plugins = bad. Problem is, as a newbie sorting the wheat from the chaff, because there are still a lot of poor-quality plugins in the WP repository (it’s getting better, now they’re doing better reviews).
SEO by Yoast is pretty well-regarded, I think. It’s very easy to use and I know from experience that it does what it says on the tin.
N.B. Don’t be impatient; it takes the search engines a while (weeks/months) to catch up with you. Registering as the business owner on Google helps: they send you a letter with a code in it to check it’s really you. All the other searches seem to pick you up once Google does (at least it seemed that way to me). Check out Google’s webmaster tools as well. Good luck!
