In this article How to Add Meta Tags in WordPress, we’ll learn what meta tags are and why they are necessary. After that, we’ll how to add them to your website, both with and without a plugin. Let’s get started!
What Are Meta Tags?
Meta tags are invisible tags that present data about your page to search engines and website visitors. It can be seen by selecting View/Source or View/Page Source from the browser menu. Meta tags include a global description of the page, keywords and copyright information.
Why Are Meta Tags Important?
Meta tags are essential when it comes to building your website SEO-friendly. When search engine crawlers visit your website, they retrieve metadata information in the class of meta tags in addition to getting the actual content of that page. In fact, meta tags provide us to notify crawlers about the specifics of the web pages.
There are mainly two methods to start adding meta tags to your content, you’ll need to follow some basic steps.
Method 1: Without a Plugin
Here are the most common and easiest way to add meta tags to WordPress, it can also be done with a plugin. Manually adding the necessary HTML tags to your header.php file is simple, but the tags will not be retained if you change your website’s theme. These meta tags will also apply to the entire website, and will not be unique to each post or page.
Step 1: Open the header.php File
To add meta tags in WordPress without a plugin, you’ll need to open the header.php file. If you are in cPanle (File Manager) simply click on edit file. Or if you are on localhost (offline) can be opened using Notepad++ or any HTML editor.
You can also open header.php file from WordPress admin panel from Appearance > Theme Editor > Select Theme Header (header.php)
Once you open the file, you’ll need to look for the tag. Your meta data should be placed within those tags.
Step 2: Copy and modify the Meta Tags
Now, copy the generic keyword meta tag below and paste it under the opening tag:
<meta name="keywords" content="keywords related to the content of the website" />Then copy the generic description meta tag below, and paste it under the previous line:
<meta name="description" content="meta description for the content of the website" />After that, you can customize the placeholders and fill in your own keywords and meta description.
Method 2: Using Meta Tag Plugins
There are various plugins that provide the blog administrator to set the keywords, description, and other meta tags to be unique per post. Using Meta Tag Plugins lets you customize each of your meta tags, and pick the ones you want to add, or not, on a per-post basis. This provides your meta information to completely represent each page.
In the coming step, we’ll learn how you could insert meta tags by using third-party plugins.
Step 1: Install the third-party Plugin
We will use the the Yoast SEO plugin offers built-in support for description and keyword meta tags. To start inserting meta tags to your site, you’ll first need to download the Yoast SEO plugin.
You can install it with from the WordPress admin with Plugins > Add New, or you can download and install it manually to your wp-content/plugins directory. Finally, activate the plugin in the Plugins section of the admin sidebar.
Step 2: Add Meta Data to Your Posts and Pages
After the first step navigate to Pages > All or Posts > All, depending on the type of content you want to add meta tags to. Click on Edit, and then scroll to the bottom of the screen where the Yoast SEO section is located:
Enter your primary keyword into the Focus Keyphrase section. Then, click on the Edit Snippet button to enter your meta description. This will be displayed in search engines, and should be a short paragraph describing the page’s content and encouraging browsers to click through.
Once you insert details of your meta tags, save the post or page, or publish it. That’s It!
Conclusion
Studying how to add meta tags in WordPress is honestly easy. You can utilize it’s using the third-party plugin to dynamically embed meta tags for individual posts and pages on your website. You can also manually insert meta tags to the header.php file. If you like our article share your experience with us, & don’t forget to follow us on Facebook & Twitter
