Easy Meta Tag Plugin for WordPress

I admit it, I’m a website slut. I see a domain I like and I can’t help but put some sort of website on it. Over the years I’ve gotten to the point where I can build a simple website in a matter of hours. It seems like when I use WordPress the website nearly builds itself.

Default WordPress Meta Description

By default WordPress doesn’t create a meta description tag. If this meta tag is missing, your search appearances will be affected. Often, the first 160 characters of text will be shown in search results. As you can imagine, this is less than optimal.

Most Popular SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO free is the most popular WordPress plugin for adding meta description fields to a WordPress site. I use it on many of my sites, including this one. It provides me with fine grain control over how each individual WordPress post appears in search. Yoast SEO is a great plugin but…

The Drawbacks of Yoast SEO

Using Yoast SEO isn’t easy for beginners. That fine grain control I was talking about makes using the plugin complicated. People who are new to search engine optimization techniques will be overwhelmed by the myriad controls. Additionally, using the plugin is labor intensive, it requires you to actually pay attention to what you’re doing as you individually set the meta information on each individual post.

Yoast SEO is perfectly alright for an actual blog like this one. The problem is that not everyone using WordPress is using it for blogging. The most popular sites I’ve built with WordPress aren’t blogs, they’re content aggregators scraping embedded video content and repackaging it.

The Easiest Way to Add Meta Descriptions to WordPress

So Meta for WordPress is the easiest way to add meta descriptions to a WordPress site. I wrote So Meta as a way to automatically add meta descriptions, keywords, and OpenGraph tags to scraped content. Tags are translated into keywords and titles into descriptions. The whole thing can be set up in five minutes or less.

Try So Meta for WordPress

You can download So Meta for WordPress now. Give it a try and tell me what you think. The official site for So Meta is https://someta.sourcepassive.com/

Building a Simple Drop Ship Store

I’ve out of work since April due to COVID-19. It’s clear that the industry I work in isn’t coming back soon so I’ve been looking for something to fill in the gap. I’ve taught myself to do all sorts of interesting new things along this journey, and it’s become clear how difficult it is to find a reliable source for the nonstandard gear that I want to buy from China.

Passive Income from Drop Shipping

When researching passive income one of the most common pieces of advice  I’ve found is to “build a drop-ship store“. Somewhere along the line I followed that advice but didn’t have the time or the follow-through to edit all of the product descriptions and to do the fine-tuning needed in order to build a real store with real customers.

My software configuration was pretty solid but the bad descriptions and half-ass follow-through didn’t encourage sales.

I’m not one to hopelessly waste my time if I don’t have to. I like to “reuse” my effort whenever possible. Since I had the storefront kicking around for a while without a customer-base I decided to just start over and to use it as a clearinghouse for all the wonderful space-trash that I’ve found.

What Software to Use for Drop Ship Stores

Let’s talk about software first.

EZ Direct is built using WordPress and utilizes Woocommerce and ShopMaster. This allows me to spend my time focusing on content rather than function.

WordPress handles the heavy lifting involved in content management. WooCommerce takes care of the specialized transactional crap involved in actually running the store. ShopMaster is the perfect final piece, it actually connects your store to the common dropshipping sources.

I won’t waste either of our time with another tutorial on those. Just follow the links above to the official ones. I’m just going to cover the things you need to get a dropshipping store up running quickly.

In addition to the three core components, I’m using a theme from Theme Farmer which is designed to play nice with Woocommerce.

I have also deployed the grip of plug-ins required to do the analytics, sharing, security, and whatnot that you expect from a real store and a real website.

Plugins for WooCommerce and ShopMaster WordPress Stores

Here is a list of plug-ins that I managed to get to play nice together:

  • Akismet Anti-Spam
  • Badlot for WordPress – Anti-Bot
  • Loginizer – Brute Force Login Preventer
  • Classic Editor (because I’m still not wholly sold on blocks)
  • Cloudflare – Reverse Proxy
  • Contact Form 7 (required by the theme)
  • Elementor (required by the theme)
  • Google XML Sitemaps, Hustle (for the social share buttons and slide-ins)
  • Jetpack (required for tax calculation)
  • Mailchimp for WooCommerce – Mailing List Integration
  • Nextend Social Login – Login with Facebook and Twitter
  • Nextend Social Login Pro Addon – Login with Google etc…
  • One Click Demo Import (required by theme)
  • Redux (required by theme)
  • Site Kit by Google – Traffic Statistics
  • ThemeFarmer Companion (required by theme)
  • WooCommerce Admin
  • WooCommerce API Product Sync with Multiple Stores
  • WooCommerce Google Analytics Integration
  • WooCommerce PayPal Checkout Gateway
  • WooCommerce Services
  • WooCommerce Tools
  • Yoast SEO

Configuration

Configuration was sort of a bitch but if you take it one piece at a time turning on only what you need and understand, it all came together.

Adding Products

I’ve taken a unique approach to stock my store with items. I’ve started to go back through my purchases over the last couple of years and started filling the store up with those items in the ShopMaster interface. In that interface, I can edit the item and then import it into WordPress. This is the first of what will be many edits. It never seems that it’s possible to make a listing look right on the first try.

Once the item has been imported into WordPress it’s important to edit it again in order to get it filed in the right product category. I can’t seem to find a way to get this to automatically happen.

Monetizing Product Links

I only managed to get a few listings done when I started to think about what my potential users were likely to do when looking at my products. They were going to do exactly what I do, price-check the thing on Amazon.

I already have an Amazon Affiliate account that I use here and on my other sites to monetize links to products that I incidentally mention. I decided to try something unique. I added native search ads from Amazon to the description of each product.  The result is a built-in comparison tool that also monetizes lost sales. We’ll find out if this was a good idea or not soon enough.

Results

It’s taken me two long days to build the store with 150 products in it. Now it just needs to be promoted. You can take a look at my work at https://ezdirect.org/

Leave a comment below and let me know what you think!

Proudly powered by WordPress | Theme: Baskerville 2 by Anders Noren.

Up ↑