AutoDescription

Originally written for the LightSpring theme used on Host Mijn Pagina, this plugin automatically adds a few things as meta tags into the header of your HTML document, this means that search engines and Facebook will easily read your website’s data.

No configuration is needed. Either Network Activate this or use it on a single site.

You can also fine-tune each page’s SEO, these options can be found beneath the content on the post’s edit page.

It’s now named The SEO Framework

Check out The SEO Framework’s website!

Yup, this very plugin is also used on this site, or on any of the Host Mijn Pagina network sites. It’s custom made to work brilliantly fast, with regards to object caching to prevent database bombing and heavy server load.

Generating a description from the content is heavy work, especially if you wish to remove shortcodes, html entities and the like. So that’s where the object cache check comes into play. Not everyone thinks about it, but WordPress has deprecated their own Object Cache and asked plugins to do it for them, which not everyone is setting up (correctly).

Luckily most people have figured out Page Cache is awesome and so I’ve done it like this:

• If you have object cache available, the description is always available. This is handy for when you use browser add-ons to check for you SEO and what not. But I must say I haven’t found out other reasons.
• Either way, if there’s no object cache available, the (automatic) description won’t be displayed. This is brilliant for when you do have page cache: the plugin only runs through all the code once!

I must say that this could be even more specific and fine tuned, but that requires time. So it’s a future update :)

Get it from WordPress.org

AutoDescription is a plugin when you don’t want to think about SEO things and just get it over with.