Paulund
2012-05-10 #wordpress

Automatically Create Meta Description From Content

Meta description tags are still very much used by search engines, they provide the default text to be displayed in the search results. The Meta description tags should have relevant keywords to the article to attract visitors to your site. In Wordpress it can be done by using SEO plugins, but if you don't have these plugins installed or forgot to add the meta description to this plugin then here is the Wordpress snippet for you. This snippet will automatically take the first 125 characters of your content and add this into the meta description tag for the page.

function create_meta_desc() {
    global $post;
if (!is_single()) { return; }
    $meta = strip_tags($post->post_content);
    $meta = strip_shortcodes($meta);
    $meta = str_replace(array("\n", "\r", "\t"), ' ', $meta);
    $meta = substr($meta, 0, 125);
    echo "<meta name='description' content='$meta' />";
}
add_action('wp_head', 'create_meta_desc');