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How to Add Meta Tags in WordPress- 2023 Guide

How to Add Meta Tags in WordPress

Meta tags are an integral part of SEO and help search engines understand the content of your website. They provide valuable information to search engines, such as the title, description, and keywords of a page, which ultimately affects how your website ranks in search results.

If you want to optimize your WordPress website for search engines, adding meta tags is a crucial step. In this article, we will guide you through the benefits, process of adding meta tags to your WordPress website, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your pages.

Whether you are a beginner or a seasoned website owner, this comprehensive guide with FAQ’s on meta tags will ensure that your website is SEO-friendly and ready to rank higher in search results. But before moving to details you must basic understanding what are meta tags and how you could get benefitted by adding them in your WordPress website.

What are Meta Tags?

Meta tags are pieces of HTML code that provide information about a webpage to search engines and other web services. They help search engines understand the content and context of a page, which in turn can affect how the page is ranked and displayed in search results.

Optimizing website with meta tags allow search engine’s bots to understand website content and context in depth. As a result, it can affect your website’s visibility and rankings in the search engine result pages.

Why are the Meta Tags Necessary?

Meta tags are the first impression of a web page to internet users. Well-optimized meta titles and meta descriptions can increase the click-through rate of your website, as they can be used to hook the readers and generate curiosity in the internet user’s mind.

The meta tags play an important role in the on-page SEO of your WordPress website. It can substantially increase search engine rankings and visibility of your website depending on the way you optimize the meta tags.

What are the Three Main Parts of Meta Tags?

While building the SEO structure of your website, you have to use the three main parts of the meta tags. Those three parts of meta tags are the title, description, and keywords. All these three parts are essential as they make it easy to create a meta tag. Let’s take look at all those three parts of a meta tag.

Title Tag

As the name suggests, the title tag shows up in the Google search results as the title of your web pages. It is an important element as it acts as anchor text for the web page appearing in the Google search results.

Whenever someone shares a web page on social media the title tag acts as the main title that is shown to the users. A well-optimized title tag can increase the click-through rate of a web page hence, it is a must to curate it in the best possible way.

While creating a meta title, make sure to keep it attention-grabbing so, more internet users can get curious about it and eventually end up visiting the web page to check out its content.

Meta Descriptions

A meta description is a summary of your content that is placed just below the title tag in the Google search results. Meta descriptions allow Google to understand whether your web page is worthy enough to place into its snippet section.

Earlier meta descriptions were shown up to 150 characters in the Google search results but after the new algorithm update, it can be shown up to 300 characters. So, now you can more effectively summarize your website’s content through meta descriptions.

While curating a meta description for your web page, try to make it simple and short. So, Google can easily understand the content of that particular web page. Meta descriptions are like a pitch to the internet users on what you offer, and how they will benefit by visiting the web page. Hence, always make sure to add an effective meta description for your website to attract internet users.

Keywords

As we all know, keywords assist the website to increase its visibility and rank higher in the Google search result pages. In the meta keyword tag, you can include all the well-performing relevant keywords based on your industry.

If executed well by following effective keyword strategies, you will get to see improved visibility and rankings of your website in the Google search result pages. Hence, make sure to utilize the meta keyword tags properly.

Ways to Add Meta Tags in WordPress Website

You can add meta tags to your WordPress website using two different ways, Manually adding code, or using WordPress plugin.

We will explain you both these methods in detail to guide you to add meta tags to your WordPress website.

How to Add Meta Tags in WordPress Without Using Plugins

If you have already installed excessive plugins on your WordPress website and don’t want to make a reason of slowing website it down, manual meta tag addition is the best choice.

Many of premium WordPress themes provides meta tags features inside the theme customization otherwise you can add it through theme file editor option.

If you prefer to manually add the meta tags to your website, you can do so by editing the header.php file of your theme. Simply find the section where the head of your website is located, and paste the meta tag code in the appropriate spot.

By following steps you can add meta tags in your WordPress website

  1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard and go to Appearance
  2. Click on > Theme File Editor option
  3. Check header.php file in theme files section on the right hand and click on to open
  4. Insert your html meta tag code in <head> </head> section of header.php file
  5. Click Update File Button

Your meta tags will now be added to your website and should appear in the source code when you view it in a web browser.

Note: It’s important to make a backup of your header.php file before making any changes in case anything goes wrong. Also make sure to repeat the same process if you change WordPress theme in near future.

How to Add Meta Tags Using Plugins

Using a plugin is one of the easiest ways to add meta tags to a WordPress site. There are various plugins available on the market, such as Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack that can assist you in adding meta tags to your WordPress website.

Add Meta Tags Using Yoast SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO plugin completely supports WordPress keywords and meta descriptions. However, by, default, it keeps the meta keywords feature off. So, when you want to add meta keywords on your site, you’ll have to enable this feature.

To enable the feature, simply, navigate to the SEO section > Dashboard page. You’ll see a features tab, click that tab. You’ll see an option ‘Advanced settings pages’ with two tabs ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’. Click ‘Enabled’ and save the changes you made.

Further, you will see a lot of other SEO options on the same page. Again, navigate to the SEO section > Titles and Meta page.

It will display many tabs, click on ‘Other’ tab. Under that category, you will see ‘Use meta keywords tag?’, again with ‘Enabled’ and ‘Disabled’ options. Click ‘Enabled’ and save the changes you made.

Finally, you are done with enabling the meta keywords feature in the Yoast SEO plugin. Now, you can easily add the keywords to your WordPress posts.

To enter the meta tags to post or page, go to your WordPress dashboard, Search for post or page you want to add meta tags. Select that page or post and click on “Edit” button.

On scrolling down the page or post, get over to the Yoast SEO post editor. It will show an auto-produced description in the form of a snippet. Also, it displays a Meta keywords field.

Place your keywords by separating them with commas. See that you don’t place keywords more than 10. The keywords have to be relevant to your web content and you should have used them within your blog post/page.

To add other meta tags such as meta title and meta description, click on ‘Edit Snippet’ button. Write a short description of maximum 160 characters relevant to that blog post. Check that you use the focus keyword at least one time within the meta description in WordPress.

On clicking the ‘Close Snippet Editor’, you’ll see the snippet preview of your custom meta description. Finally, you are successful in placing the keywords and description to your blog post/page.

Conclusion

In conclusion, adding meta tags to your WordPress website can greatly improve its SEO and help search engines understand the content of your pages. With the use of plugins such as Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack, the process of adding meta tags becomes simple and straightforward.

Furthermore, the ability to customize title tags and meta descriptions can increase the click-through rate from search results and ultimately drive more traffic to your site.

Remember to keep your tags concise, relevant and include keywords to achieve the best results. Implementing meta tags may require a little effort upfront, but the long-term benefits make it a worthwhile investment for the success of your website.

FAQ’s

What are Other Popular Plugins to Add Meta Tags in WordPress?

Other popular WordPress plugins that can help to add meta tags are The SO Framework, RankMath, EasyMetaTags, WPMetaSEO, MetaTagManager.

Does Meta Tags Help to Improve SEO and Search Engine Ranking?

Meta tags can play a role in improving SEO and search engine ranking. However, they are just one of many factors that contribute to a website’s ranking.

Meta tags, such as title and description tags, provide information about web page content and help search engines understand context of the page. Properly optimized Meta tags help searchers to understand what information he will get after clicking the link. Relevant description can help you to improve click through rate.

However, other factors such as content quality, backlinks, and website architecture also play a significant role in a website’s ranking.

How Many Meta Tags You Should Use?

It is recommended to use a maximum of 10 meta tags in a WordPress website. It is important to use website content’s relevant meta tags, as it can help improve website’s SEO and user experience.

What are Common Meta Tags of WordPress Website?

Some of the commonly used meta tags are title tag, description tag, keywords tag, robots tag, author tag, viewport tag. There are also social media meta tags such as Twitter cards, Open Graph, and schema.org markup.

Do You Need to Put Meta Tags on Every Page of WordPress Website?

It is recommended to add meta tags to every page of a WordPress website for better SEO. This includes the title tag and description tag, which provide content information and help search engines to search query relevance.

Additionally, it is also important to include other meta tags, such as the Open Graph tags. These which determine how the page will be displayed when shared on social media platforms.

Difference Between Meta Data and Meta Tags?

Meta data refers to the information about a specific content piece such as a blog post, page or image. This information includes the title, author, date published, categories, and other descriptive information.

Meta tags, on the other hand, are HTML tags that provide information to search engines about the content of a specific page. This information includes the page title, description, and keywords.