The most important meta tags that affect our website's SEO are Title and Description. You're probably thinking, but wait... this Title is not as meta as it might seem at first. It's true, the <title> tag is called this way only and exclusively because of old habits. However, this does not change the fact that at the moment it is a strong ranking factor and if we want our website to be displayed at the top of organic results, we need to optimize it for both the Google algorithm and the user.
Meta description, on the other hand, deserves its name 100%. Despite the fact that Google does not treat it as a ranking factor, it plays an incredibly important role in the code of our site. It allows us to display a short description of what the user will find on it and encourage them to further interact with our enticing SERP.
For more detailed information about meta tags, please see our glossary .
Ways to Place Meta Tags in WordPress
Yoast SEO - definitely the most frequently chosen by owners of sites built on WordPress. It is a real SEO combine, which, in addition to placing Meta Tags (including mass-generated ones), allows us to change a number of different options.
Meta Tag Manager - Allows you to add and modify meta tags on every subpage on our website, but you cannot use it to change the <title> tag.
All in One SEO - Thanks to this plugin, we will not only assign meta tags, but also take care of other elements affecting the SEO of our website (e.g. adding a schema, personalizing the appearance of the link in social media and other useful functions).
Rank Math - This is another plugin that allows us to make various types of SEO modifications, during installation it has the ability to import data from Yoast SEO.
The SEO Framework - A simple plugin that seems like a very stripped down version of the other plugins on the list. In reality, it contains most of the useful SEO features and is so easy to use that even an amateur can master it.
Installing plugins on WordPress
Installing plugins on WordPress is intuitive and even an inexperienced user should have no problems with it, however I will show you in just two steps how it works for WordPress version 6.1.1.
Downloading the plugin from the WordPress CMS admin panel.
First steps towards adding a meta tag description
Adding a New Plugin in WordPress
From the menu on the left, select Plugins -> Add New. After going to the new window in the search engine, enter the name of the plugin you want to download and click "install". WordPress itself will intuitively zalo database guide you through the installation.
From the menu on the left, select Plugins -> Add New. Return to the "Plugins" view, then enable the option you have chosen.
enabling a plugin to improve visibility in search results
Installing a plugin in WordPress
We have installed the plugin, now what? Nothing could be simpler, just go back to the installed plugins view, find the one we are interested in and select "enable". More advanced plugins will require us to go through a wizard that helps to initially configure basic and slightly more advanced options.
Adding Title and Meta Description for selected plugins
Below I will present selected plugins which, in my opinion, fulfill their function and allow you to change both the "meta title" and the page description.
Meta tags using Yoast SEO plugin
I'll start with a plugin that is one of the most advanced SEO tools on WordPress CMS. Its operation is very intuitive. Just run the plugin and a window with editing and simplified SEO analysis will appear on each page. The first window with keywords can be ignored, because "meta keywords" have long ceased to be a ranking factor and do not help with positioning.
Window for optimizing the page title for appropriate keywords
View of the Yoast SEO editor on a website subpage
In the above screenshot you can see the fields that interest us the most when it comes to meta tags in SEO. If we want, we can replace the standard page title assigned by the plugin with our own. In the "Description" field we enter what best reflects the content presented on the page. Here we can find good practice for creating meta tags.
Optimizing "meta tags" for Google robots
Correctly assigned Meta Tags
In the above view we can see what a correctly completed Meta Description and title tag should look like.
Once the page is updated, our changes will be implemented immediately, all that remains is to wait for the update in the index or try to speed up the indexing process a bit using Google Search Console.
Meta tags - Rank Math
The Rank Math plugin gives you the ability to mass-populate meta tags (which is a good option for quick optimization), but in this case we want unique page titles and descriptions.
To update the data, we need to go to a specific page or blog entry and select our Rank Math plugin from the hamburger menu located in the upper right corner.
How to Place Meta Tags - WordPress
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