How to add meta tags in WordPress

meta-tags-in-wordpress Tutorials

What will be required to add meta tags

Before beginning this manual, check the availability:

  • access to the administrative area of ​​the WordPress site.

Why are WordPress meta tags important: meta description,  meta keywords and  meta  title?

The quality of the content of the site is important, but only it is not enough. In access to users now thousands of thousands of sites, and to view all sites there is no possibility, so basically limited to 3 of the most popular results from the SERP.

That’s why SEO is considered the holy grail of web marketing. Correct and quality SEO-activities can send a lot of traffic to your site.

Meta title (meta title) of the blog as part of its description, tells the reader about the topic of the blog. Needless to say, this is the most important item on this list, because a poorly-worded title can extremely impair the SEO of your site.

Meta description  helps your blog doubly: facilitates the work of the search engine, briefly describes the content of the record and attracts users with a compressed and capacious summary of the record.

Example of displaying meta description and title tags in a browser

The use of keywords (keywords), on the other hand, is a much more controversial issue. While many SEO experts believe that this is a very significant factor in SEO, others believe that keywords do not mean much,  including Google .

As a result, because search engines refuse to indicate the weight of various factors in the ranking of sites, we do not know exactly how significant the meta description and keywords play in improving your site’s SEO.

However, we know that they play a role, which should be enough to attract your attention to them.

There are many plug-ins that you can use to add meta descriptions and keywords to your WordPress blog. In this tutorial we will use the popular Yoast SEO plugin .

To learn how to install the Yoast SEO plug-in on your WordPress site, follow our special guide  (English) dedicated to this topic.

Using the SEO Yoast plugin to add meta tags to WordPress

The Yoast SEO plugin is designed by Joost de Valk, a recognized guru in SEO in WordPress.

Although WordPress is itself a pretty decent CMS platform from the SEO point of view.

Yoast SEO can be used to equip your site with additional power, which can affect the big difference in the ranking of sites.

The popular Yoast page analysis feature highlights SEO-related details that might have been missed, for example, alt tags on images, message length and sentence structure.

We will use the plugin to add title, description and keywords to the WordPress blog.

Step 1 – Enabling advanced SEO settings Yoast

By default, you will have many Yoast SEO tools. However, in order to benefit from this plugin, we strongly recommend that you enable some of the advanced settings manually.

Both the meta title and the meta description are already included.

But the meta keywords must be activated using the aforementioned advanced settings (as shown later in this guide).

To enable advanced settings, go to  SEO -> Console . Here, select the Features tab   and look for the Additional page settings heading  . Move the button to On.   

Under the heading. This will force the page to reboot and after that you will see additional settings.

In some versions of the plugin, additional settings are initially included, among which you can also enable or disable individual ones. Example of the opportunity page in English:

Seo Yoast plug-in page for advanced settings

Step 2 – Adding Meta Title

To add a Meta Title or SEO title to an entry, go to Entries -> All Entries  and select the entry for which you want to add a meta title.

Once the entry is opened in the editor, scroll to the Yoast SEO header  . In this section you will see Viewing snippet, then how it will be displayed in the search engine.

This is automatically created for each record. Click on  Edit snippet . You will see additional fields before you.

The first field, called the  SEO-header , is the meta page title. Enter the appropriate title in this field.

Yoast will help you to create it correctly, the color bar is shown below – green means that the length is optimal.

 

Step 3 – Adding Meta Description

Meta descriptions in WordPress can be added in the same section as the SEO header.

At once under the field of  SEO-heading  there are two additional fields –  Label  and  Meta-description . Just write a brief and understandable description of your record.

Again, Yoast will inform you about the optimal length of the description through the color bar.

Be sure to add the appropriate words that are also used in the entry in the meta description.

When finished, click Closed Snippet Editor and save the changes by clicking the Update button .

 

Step 4 – Adding Keywords

Unlike the meta title and meta description, keywords can be disabled in the Yoast SEO settings and then they need to be turned on manually.

To do this, go to the SEO -> Titles & Meta page and select the Other tab .

Here you will see the setting  Use meta tags keywords?  – turn it on.

Save the settings. Please note that the names and the set of settings may differ in different versions of the plug-in. Below is an example of this setting in English. language:

Yoast seo plugin - use of meta keywords

To add keywords to the entry, go back to  Records -> All entries . Scroll to the Yoast SEO section and immediately under the Snippet View you will find the Focus keyword field  or Meta keywords .

In the case of the Focus Keyword option, you will be given the opportunity to add just one word:

Or, if the field is designed for several keywords, then add a few keywords (not more than 10),separated by commas.

Here, too, try to find the keywords most suitable for your article that describe your article and are presented in the article itself.

Adding multiple keywords to a WordPress entry

As mentioned earlier, Google announced that the keywords are not included in the ranking algorithm of the page.

Other search engines provide fewer explanations on this issue, which means that your gain in rating growth may differ depending on the search engine used by the reader.

Conclusions

There are several ways to improve the SEO of your site on WordPress  (English).

In this tutorial, we looked at one of them, discussing how to add meta tags in WordPress, namely: keywords, meta headers and meta descriptions using the Yoast SEO plugin.

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