Wordpress- adding meta data

dinneenp

Hi,
http://codex.wordpress.org/Meta_Tags_in_WordPress states:

<title><?php bloginfo('name'); ?><?php wp_title(); ?></title />

Below this line you can add your meta tags. You can add meta tag information such as the content, language, author, contact, and copyright, since these are basically the same on every page of your site.

This is what I have in my site below the above code. Do they mean to replace generator and Wordpress with my data?
<meta name="generator" content="WordPress <?php bloginfo('version'); ?>" /> <!-- leave this for stats -->

Bonus question:
I'm in the header but it's telling me:
You need to make this file writable before you can save your changes. See the Codex for more information

Thanks,
Pa.

Evil Phil

You need to change the permissions on the header file to make it writable. There's actually metadata plugins for wordpress that will handle this for you.

dinneenp

Evil Phil wrote: »

You need to change the permissions on the header file to make it writable. There's actually metadata plugins for wordpress that will handle this for you.

Any chance you could recommend me one? There seems to be so many for each task that it's hard to pick one.

Basically I'm trying to get better ranking- SEO can be a bucketful of work...
Cheers,
pa.

Evil Phil

Depends on what you're looking for exactly. Start with you basic needs and decide from there. However, Google doesn't rank on metadata, and I don't believe the other major search engines use it either.

Trojan

One good plugin for handling meta tags, as well as changing title tags on specific pages, is All In One SEO. Out of the box it's pretty decent configuration.

There are plenty of others, some with less complexity in terms of available functionality.

Sean^DCT4

Evil Phil wrote: »

Depends on what you're looking for exactly. Start with you basic needs and decide from there. However, Google doesn't rank on metadata, and I don't believe the other major search engines use it either.

Don't think you're correct about that one..

I was under the impression it was a combination of:
inbound outbound page rank algorithm, META data, SEO'd URL formatting, image tags, header tags, dynamic content etc.. could be wrong though..

Trojan

dinneenp: you have the <meta name="generator" content="WordPress 3.0.1" /> line in twice - you can take out at least one of them (ideally both, for security reasons it's not a great idea to publish your WP version).

Evil Phil

Yeah I could be wrong too, I do seem remember Google don't use meta data but the others might. As might Google for that matter.