Introduction
WordPress keywords and meta descriptions are an important part of improving your websites SEO as far as possible. These pieces of additional information can help your website to appear in relevant searches, boosting you up the search rankings and helping you to keep as many new viewers finding your website on a regular basis as possible. Learning to add WordPress keywords and how to properly use meta tags for WordPress can be difficult for beginners, however, and without getting your head around this area properly you’ll find that your website is unable to reach its full potential in terms of SEO and visitors.
We’re here to help you deal with this problem, teaching you how meta data for WordPress works and introducing you to some helpful tips and tricks for maximizing your performance as far as possible. Below, you’ll find a guide to WordPress meta description management and adding meta data to WordPress posts, helping you to ensure that your website achieves everything it possibly can.
What are WordPress meta tags and keywords?
Keywords and meta tags allow you to tell search engines a bit more information about the content of the pages and posts on your website. This is an important part of ensuring that your website is featured in relevant searches, by making sure that the search engines properly understand the content of your web pages and posts and know that they are properly relevant to users’ searches.
Keywords are essentially just important words and phrases that web users are likely to search for when they are looking for content like that which can be found on your website. WordPress meta descriptions, meanwhile, are just short descriptions of what your post or web page is about.
Meta keywords and meta descriptions for WordPress are HTML meta tag elements for your web page, and they go into the header area of your website. This is easy to do for each page of your site using WordPress SEO plugins, many of which are free and easy to find and install.
Are meta descriptions and keywords for WordPress important for SEO?
It is not clear exactly how much weight each search engine assigns to meta tags and keywords, but it is clear that both of these are important elements of search engine optimization, and both help you to rank better in search results. Google says that they place no importance on meta keywords, and some SEO experts agree that they are irrelevant, but opinions are divided on this. It’s also worth noting that while Google may be the largest search engine in the world, some users prefer other search engines, which might use different methods to determine ranking.
Even if the keywords are not important, the meta description element of your WordPress pages and posts is a very important one. This is the short paragraph of information that appears under your web page title on a page of search results, and the content of this will determine how easily your web page grabs the attention of users who have encountered your page in their search results.
How to add keywords to WordPress
There are a number of different ways to add keywords and meta descriptions to WordPress, but for this guide we’re going to be using the Yoast SEO plugin. This is the most popular SEO plugin for WordPress, and is easy to install. There are plenty of guides out there to how to install plugins on WordPress, and Yoast SEO follows all of the same steps as every other plugin that you might want to install on WordPress.
Yoast SEO includes full built in support for both description and meta keywords in WordPress. Descriptions are active by default, but meta keywords are turned off in the default settings of Yoast SEO. In order to use WordPress meta keywords, you’re going to need to enable this setting. To achieve this, start by selecting the “SEO” page, and clicking on “Dashboard”, and then “Features” within the “Dashboard” page. On this page, you’ll see a heading marked “Advanced settings pages”, and under that a toggleable switch marked “Enabled” and “disabled”. Select “Enabled”, and then save your changes. Your Yoast SEO settings page should now reload, enabling you to see many more options on the SEO menu page.
Now we’re going to get those keywords set up. Select the “SEO” page, and then the “Titles & Meta” page, and then click the “Other” tab on that page. There is a heading on that tab labelled “Use meta keywords tag?”, and under that heading should be another “Enabled” and “Disabled” switch. Select “Enabled”, and save your changes. You have now enabled meta keywords in the WordPress SEO plugin Yoast SEO. Now you’ve done that, you can add new meta keywords to all of your web pages and posts.
How to add meta tags to WordPress
Now that you have enabled meta keywords and tags in Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress, you can add new keywords and meta description to your pages. Start by finding the post that you want to edit keywords and meta description elements for. Scroll down a bit on the edit window, and you’ll see a “Yoast SEO” meta box beneath the main post editor.
In the Yoast SEO box, you’ll see a snippet of automatically generated description text and the title of your post. Below that, you should see an editable field labelled “Meta keywords”. In this field, you can insert whichever keywords you like, each one separated from the others by a comma. Don’t use more than 10 words or phrases here, and ensure that they are all relevant to your content and visible somewhere in the main text of the article.
After you’ve done the tags and keywords, it’s time to edit the description of your WordPress page.
How to add meta descriptions to WordPress
On the same page as the keywords and tags field, you should see a button marked “Edit Snippet”. Click this button, and the description snippet above should turn into an editable field for inputting text. You can put whatever description you want in here, but make sure that you include your page’s main keyword at least once in this description.
Once you’re happy with your meta description, just click on the “Close snippet editor” button and it should save for you. The snippet preview should now display whatever description you chose to input in the previous step, which means that your webpage should now show your custom text under its title in google search results! You can now choose to save or publish your newly edited post or page.
Conclusion
The steps above should give you a good introduction to using WordPress keywords and WordPress meta tags and descriptions to boost your SEO rankings for your web pages and posts. There are many other ways to edit your keywords and meta data for WordPress, but the Yoast SEO plugin option is our favorite option, thanks to the high level of functionality and performance offered by Yoast SEO. This is a simple process, and no matter how little experience and confidence you have in web design and coding, you can use Yoast SEO to add meta data and keywords to all of your pages and posts with ease.
If you follow the steps we’ve given above, you should be able to get things set up and running with ease. If this does not line up with your preferred plugins, then other options are equally valid; this is only one of the many possible ways to set up WordPress meta data and keywords.