WP description plugin

[catherine-279388]

Can anyone recommend a WP plugin which creates a description from the individual blog post it's describing?

[StalkerB]

What do you mean? Just a character limiter that takes the first 165 characters of the post and adds it a meta description? Or one that uses the excerpt? Or something else?

All in One SEO does auto descriptions, not sure how they're generated though - http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/all-in-one-seo-pack/

[catherine-279388]

I want it to do the former - take the first 165 chars from the post!

[Tunji]

I wouldn't recommend automatically generating the meta description because it won't necessarily be the best summary to display in the serps.  Writing something specific for users will have a better chance of click throughs.

[catherine-279388]

Ok I'll take your advice.  Could you recommend a good plugin to allow for easy addition of a description?

[Tunji]

Sure.  The one that's getting the most attention right now is by Joost de Valk:  http://yoast.com/wordpress/seo/  It does a lot of SEO stuff and might be overkill.  Another that creates a Title and Description field on the WP backend is HeadSpace2: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/headspace2/

[StalkerB]

My vote's for headspace2.

I like that I can add js and css on the fly to specific pages with it easily.

[catherine-279388]

Thanks Jeff

I've been resisting the Yoast solution for the same point you raised, but it does seem to be the best solution.  Will download it into a test blog and try it out.

Thanks for you help

Catherine