Knowledgebase

Meta Descriptions: Your First Impression in Search Results

Why Meta Descriptions Matter

Meta descriptions are short summaries of your web pages that appear below the title in search engine results. While they don’t directly impact rankings, they have a huge influence on click-through rates (CTR). A compelling, relevant meta description can be the difference between someone clicking your site or scrolling past it.

Think of it like your "elevator pitch" it needs to be concise, relevant, and appealing.

The SEO Impact

Search engines often bold words in your meta description that match a user’s query. This makes well-written meta descriptions more likely to grab attention and generate clicks.

Even though Google sometimes rewrites them automatically, providing a good one increases the chance your intended message shows up.

What WordPress Doesn’t Do

By default, WordPress:

• Does not include meta descriptions in page output unless your theme or a plugin adds them.

• Doesn’t give you a user-friendly place to write or manage them.

• Often leaves it up to chance or auto-generates content from the first paragraph, which may not be ideal.

This can lead to missed opportunities or misleading search snippets that don’t accurately represent the page.

Best Practices for Writing Meta Descriptions

• Keep it under 155 characters to avoid truncation.

• Include your target keyword or phrase naturally.

• Focus on clarity and benefit — what’s in it for the visitor?

• Use active voice and a light CTA when appropriate, e.g., “Learn how to improve your site’s SEO today.”

Blue Raven Quickly finds pages with missing Meta and allows you to add descriptions and tags to your Pages

Meta Tags: Why You Should Still Use Them

Meta tags, especially meta keywords, were once a primary tool in SEO. In the early days, many websites used them to list keywords and phrases they wanted to rank for. However, over time, search engines like Google stopped using the meta keywords tag as a ranking factor due to abuse and keyword stuffing.

Why Should You Still Consider Meta Tags?

Even though meta tags aren’t as influential in SEO as they used to be, they still have some benefits:

1. Content Organization: Meta tags help search engines and other platforms understand the main focus of the page, even if they don’t directly impact rankings. They offer a quick overview of a page’s content and help with the proper categorization and indexing of the page.

2. SEO Best Practices: While meta keywords no longer have the same weight, using relevant meta tags that describe your content can still support your overall SEO strategy. 

3. External Tools and Platforms: Certain external tools and platforms (like content management systems and social sharing sites) may still rely on meta tags for organizing and displaying content. Ensuring these tags are in place helps optimize your presence across multiple channels.

While meta tags like meta keywords are no longer a ranking factor, they still play a role in content organization, social sharing, and providing additional context to search engines and users. They’re part of the SEO best practices and can enhance your site’s structure, helping improve user experience and content visibility.

Our Blue Raven Wordpress Plugin will enable you to quickly find the missing Meta from various pages like you Home page, About Us, Policy pages, and not only add the standard Meta Description and Meta Tags, but it will also add the meta content using Open Graph for Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter Cards or X Cards

Sitemap

Why It's Crucial

A sitemap is essentially a roadmap of your website, it is a structured list of your site's pages, posts, and sometimes media files, that search engines like Google and Bing use to better understand and crawl your content.

Without a sitemap, search engines have to guess how your content is organized. With one, you're handing them a clean, structured guide that helps ensure all of your important pages are found and indexed properly.

Even though search engines are smart enough to discover content without a sitemap, having one:

• Speeds up indexing of new or updated content

• Increases the chances that deeper or less-linked pages get found

• Helps search engines prioritize what’s most important on your site

• Provides data like last updated timestamps, which can improve crawl efficiency

What WordPress Lacks

Since version 5.5, WordPress includes a basic built-in sitemap at yourdomain.com/wp-sitemap.xml. While it’s better than nothing, it has a few limitations:

• It’s not user-friendly or visible in the WordPress dashboard

• It only includes URLs and last modified dates, with no support for:

  • Images

  • Video content

  • Custom post types (unless your theme/plugin supports it)

• You can’t control priority or change frequency settings — which some search engines still respect

• It lacks options to exclude pages (like “thank you” or checkout pages)

For site owners who want better control or full-featured sitemaps, a third-party plugin is usually required.

Submitting Your Sitemap to Search Engines

Once you’ve created a sitemap, you should submit it to search engines using their respective webmaster tools:

Google Search Console

1. Visit Google Search Console

2. Add your site and verify ownership (if you haven’t already)

3. Navigate to Sitemaps under the left-hand menu

4. Enter the URL of your sitemap (e.g., https://yourdomain.com/sitemap.xml) and click Submit

Bing Webmaster Tools

1. Visit Bing Webmaster Tools

2. Sign in and add your website

3. Verify ownership

4. Submit your sitemap under Sitemaps

By submitting your sitemap directly, you:

• Let the search engine know your site exists (if new)

• Encourage faster crawling and indexing

• Get access to crawl reports and performance data

Effortlessly add a sitemap to your page, when combined with Blue Raven Robots.txt file the sitemap url is automatically added to your robots.txt file too.

By using the Blue Raven tool and by simply enabling the Site Map option you enable your sitemap to generate the file and update it once a day.

An enhanced sitemap gives search engines more context than just the URL, which can:

• Help get images indexed for Google Image Search

• Improve visibility of rich content like galleries and thumbnails

• Strengthen page relevance in search results

• Adds Priority, Last Changed Date and a Change Frequency

IndexNow

IndexNow is an open protocol developed by Microsoft that allows websites to instantly notify participating search engines when content is created, updated, or deleted. Instead of waiting for search engines to discover changes during their next crawl cycle, IndexNow lets you proactively push updates, leading to faster indexing and fresher search listings.

Currently, Microsoft Bing and Yandex and a few other search providers support IndexNow. To use it, you simply need to generate a free API key once on the page, scroll to "Generate API Key" then Generate the key and add it to the Blue Raven Sitemap Page, and enable Index Now. After that, any new or updated content on your site will automatically send a ping to notify supported search engines saving you time and boosting visibility.

Alt Text for Image SEO

Why it matters:

Alt text (alternative text) is a key part of image SEO. It serves two vital purposes:

1. Accessibility: Screen readers use it to describe images to visually impaired users.

2. Search visibility: Search engines use it to understand what the image is about, which can influence your rankings, especially in image search results.

How it helps SEO

Well-written alt text can help your images appear in Google Images and even influence your regular page rankings by reinforcing topical relevance. For example, an image of a hydroponic system with the alt text "DIY vertical hydroponic system for indoor gardening" gives Google context about both the image and the surrounding content.

What WordPress gets right... and wrong

WordPress does support alt text natively in the Media Library. However:

• It doesn’t force or remind users to add it.

• It’s easy to overlook, especially when uploading many images at once.

• There's no simple way to review or bulk-edit alt text sitewide unless you're working manually or using a third-party plugin.

How Blue Raven makes it easier

With Blue Raven, we simplify image SEO by giving you a centralized interface where you can:

• View all your site’s images that are missing alt text.

• Add descriptions one at a time in a focused, distraction-free way.

• Automatically move to the next image after saving, making bulk editing fast and seamless.

This makes improving your image SEO less of a chore and more of a quick win.

Schema Markup

Why it’s important

Schema markup is a form of structured data that helps search engines better understand the content and context of your website. It powers rich results like star ratings, product availability, pricing, FAQs, breadcrumbs, and more. These can boost visibility and click-through rates in search results.

For example, if your product page includes proper schema, Google can display price, stock status, and reviews directly in the search snippet,  making your result more eye-catching and informative. We will however also be adding Google Merchant and other shopping feed in the future.

What WordPress lacks:
WordPress includes very minimal schema by default, often just the basics like page type or author. To add detailed schema (like product specs, business information, business address, key contact points, business type, events, or FAQs), you typically need to:

• Write and inject JSON-LD manually,

• Use multiple plugins with confusing settings,

• Or rely on your theme (if it supports it at all).

This can be inconsistent and error-prone.

How Blue Raven helps:
Blue Raven simplifies schema in two key ways:

• Global Schema Settings: You can easily define important structured data for your site — like your business name, logo, social profiles, and contact information — right from the Blue Raven dashboard. This ensures consistency and improves your site's authority in the eyes of search engines.

• Product-Specific Schema: Inside our Generative Product Tool for WooCommerce, Blue Raven automatically embeds relevant product schema (e.g., Product, Offer, AggregateRating, Review) based on the information you've entered, or that Blue Raven generates for you.

You don’t have to write a single line of JSON. Just fill in your product details and we take care of the rest, ensuring your WooCommerce listings are rich-result ready and more search-friendly than ever.

Robots.txt — Managing What Search Engines See

Why it matters:

While not as critical to SEO as it once was, the robots.txt file still plays a valuable role in telling well-behaved search engine crawlers which parts of your website they should or shouldn't access.

This is especially useful when you want to:

• Prevent indexing of private or low-value pages (like /wp-admin/, login screens, or cart/checkout pages).

• Avoid wasting crawl budget on unimportant content.

• Keep internal assets or staging areas out of search results.

What is it exactly?

The robots.txt file is a simple text file that lives at the root of your domain (e.g., yourdomain.com/robots.txt). It contains directives (rules) like:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /my-private-page/

This tells all crawlers (*) not to access those listed pages or folders. It's not a security feature — bad bots may ignore it — but major search engines like Google and Bing will respect it.

What WordPress doesn’t offer by default:

• WordPress generates a virtual robots.txt file only if one doesn’t exist, but it’s not editable through the WordPress dashboard.

• You’ll need to manually create and upload your own robots.txt to make custom changes.

• There's no built-in UI to manage or preview your current rules.

How we simplify it:

With Blue Raven, enabling and managing your robots.txt file is effortless:

• Just slide the “Enable Robots.txt” toggle to on.

• If you don’t already have a file, we’ll generate a clean, starter version for you.

• If you do have one, we’ll read it in — and let you edit it directly from the dashboard.

• No need to mess around with FTP, file managers, or cPanel.

This gives you full control over crawler behavior without ever leaving WordPress.

Web Traffic Analytics — Understanding Your Visitors

Why it matters

While web analytics doesn't directly improve how searchable your site is, it plays a crucial role in helping you understand how users find, engage with, and behave on your website. Without this data, you're essentially flying blind.

Analytics tools answer key questions like:

• Where are my visitors coming from?

• Which pages get the most traffic?

• How long are people staying?

• What’s driving conversions (or not)?

This data informs smarter decisions about content, SEO strategies, and marketing spend.

The Traditional Way: A Bit Tedious

To set up analytics on a typical WordPress site, you usually need to:

1. Get a tracking code — often a JavaScript snippet from platforms like Google Analytics or Meta (Facebook).

2. Insert it manually into your site’s <head> section, which requires editing your theme’s header.php or using a plugin.

3. Repeat for each tool — if you want to track with Google, Meta Pixel, Microsoft Clarity, and others, you might need separate plugins or multiple steps.

4. Hope your theme doesn’t override it during an update.

5. Use Specific Plugins — there are a number of plugins that will do this for you, and they do it will, most however only focus on a single tracking code, so you may end up with 2 or 3 extra plugins, and more plugins mean more bloat. 

It’s not hard, but it’s definitely not elegant.

Popular Analytics & Tracking Tools

Here are a few common platforms site owners use:

• Google Analytics (GA4) – Tracks website traffic, user behavior, conversions, devices, and much more. Industry standard.

• Microsoft Clarity – Provides heatmaps, session recordings, and click tracking for better UX insights.

• Meta Pixel (Facebook) – Helps track visitors for Facebook Ads retargeting and conversion events.

• Pinterest Tag, LinkedIn Insight Tag, and others – Each platform has its own version for audience tracking and ad performance.

How Blue Raven Makes It Easy

With Blue Raven, you can enable all the major tracking tools in seconds, no code editing, no third-party plugin jungle:

• Simply enter your tracking ID or pixel ID for each platform.

• Toggle the platform on in our Analytics Tags section.

• That’s it — we inject the correct code, in the right place, with zero theme editing required.

This approach is:

• Cleaner than stacking multiple plugins.

• Faster than hunting down where to paste scripts.

• Safer — no risk of breaking your theme or forgetting to re-add code after an update.

You get full control of your site’s tracking strategy, from one place.

You may also find that, for certain services, you need to verify your site with a specific provider. For example, when adding your site to Google Search Console (formerly Webmaster Tools) or Google Analytics, you'll be asked to prove that you own or control the domain. Verification methods typically include uploading a file to your web directory, adding a DNS TXT record, or inserting a meta tag into the <head> section of your site.

None of these methods are particularly difficult, but to simplify the process, we’ve added Site Verification directly into Blue Raven. Currently, we support verification for Google, Meta (Facebook), Microsoft, and Ahrefs — all from one easy interface.

Search optimization isn’t just about keywords or content, it’s also about structure, visibility, and technical hygiene. Things like meta descriptions, alt text, sitemaps, robots.txt files, and analytics tracking all play vital roles in helping search engines understand, index, and present your content properly.

Unfortunately, WordPress doesn’t always make these things easy out of the box and cobbling together multiple plugins can be clunky, confusing, and time consuming.

That’s where Blue Raven comes in.

With Blue Raven, you can easily handle all of the above,  from adding structured meta data and alt text to enabling analytics tags and managing your robots.txt, all from a clean, unified interface. And that’s just the beginning.

Blue Raven also gives you:

• A powerful Form Mailer Builder for creating and managing contact forms.

• Help with privacy compliance through our Cookie Consent Management tool.

• Our intuitive generative WooCommerce Product Creator that helps you optimize listings with compelling titles, descriptions, and metadata.

Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or developer, Blue Raven helps you build a search-ready, conversion-friendly site — without the plugin bloat.

Ready to simplify your SEO and site management? Explore Blue Raven today