Do you want to properly add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress? Meta keywords and meta descriptions allow you to improve your website’s SEO. In this article, we will show you how to properly add meta keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress.
Why Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress?
Keywords and descriptions allow you to tell search engines more about the content of your posts and pages.
Keywords are important words or phrases that people are likely to search for if they were looking for the content you are publishing. Meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is about.
Meta keywords and description are actually HTML meta tags, and they go into your website’s header. WordPress SEO plugins make it super easy for you to add them from your WordPress admin area for each post and page on your website.
How important are meta keywords and descriptions for SEO?
Search engines don’t exactly share how much weight they assign to keywords or description. However, it is quite obvious that they are important and help you rank better.
Some SEO experts believe that keywords are not at all important. Even Google says that they don’t give importance to meta keywords. However, other SEO experts disagree and advise users to keep adding meta keywords.
On the other hand, meta description is extremely important because you can use it to grab user’s attention.
Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily add keywords and meta description in WordPress.
Note: For the sake of this tutorial we will be using Yoast SEO plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install and setup Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress.
Video Tutorial
If you don’t like the video or need more instructions, then continue reading.
Enable Meta Keywords Support in Yoast SEO
Yoast SEO comes with built-in support for description and meta keywords. However, the meta keywords feature is turned off by default.
First you will need to enable it in order to use meta keywords on your WordPress site.
You will start by visiting SEO » Dashboard page and then click on the ‘Features’ tab.
Now you need to click on ‘Enabled’ under ‘Advanced settings pages’ option and then click on save changes button to store your changes.
Yoast SEO settings page will now reload and you will be able to see a lot more options under the SEO menu.
Headover to SEO » Titles & Meta page and then click on the ‘Other’ tab.
Now you need to click on ‘Enabled’ under ‘Use meta keywords tag?’ option and then click on the save changes button.
You have successfully enabled meta keywords support in Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. You can now add meta keywords to your posts and pages.
Keywords and Descriptions for WordPress Posts / Pages
First you need to edit a post or page where you want to add keywords and meta description.
Scroll down a little to ‘Yoast SEO’ meta box below the post editor.
You will see your site’s title and automatically generated description as a snippet. Below that you will see Meta Keywords field.
You need to enter your keywords separated by a comma. Don’t use more than 10 keywords or phrases.
Make sure that you only use keywords that are relevant to your content and that you have already used those keywords or phrases inside your article.
Now you need to click on the ‘Edit Snippet’ button and enter your site’s description. This will turn the snippet preview into an editable area.
Make sure that you use your main keyword at least once in your description.
After that click on the ‘Close snippet editor’ button when you are done. You will be able to see your custom description in the snippet preview now.
Congratulations, you have successfully added meta keywords and description to your WordPress post. You can now save or publish your post or page.
Adding Keywords and Meta Description for Homepage
You can also add keywords and description for your site’s homepage in WordPress. Here is how to do that using Yoast SEO plugin.
Headover to SEO » Titles & Metas page and then click on the ‘Homepage’ tab. Here you can add a custom title, description, and meta keywords for your site’s homepage.
Don’t forget to click on the save changes button to store your settings.
Meta Keywords and Description for Category Archives
You can also add keywords and description to your category and tag archive pages.
First you need to visit Posts » Categories page. Take your mouse over to the category you want to edit and then click on the ‘Edit’ link.
This will open the category editor page where you need to scroll down to Yoast SEO meta box.
Now you need to click on the Edit Snippet button to enter your own description of the category.
After that you need to click on the ‘Settings’ button to enter meta keywords to be used for that particular category’s archive pages.
Don’t forget to click on the ‘Update’ button store your settings.
You can repeat the process to add keywords and descriptions to your tags and other custom taxonomy archives.
That’s all, we hope this article helped you learn how to easily add keywords and meta description to your WordPress posts and pages. We recommend that you add custom meta description and keywords to every blog post and page that you create.
You may also want to see our ultimate WordPress SEO guide for beginners.
If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.
Titles & Metas not showing under the SEO
With the recent updates with Yoast, you would want to click the snippet preview in your post editor to bring the edit options up.
Sie,
Ita s very good knowledgeable article. I was actually searching for “Adding Keywords and Meta Description for Homepage”
There are infinite articles but failed to exhibit in pictorial form. Here it made me to understand very easily.
A million dollar thanks to you.
This doesn’t work anymore. The very clever folks at Yoast disabled the keyword feature as of v 7.2
Personally, I think this is a function that does have value. Even if the search engines don’t use it, a couple rank tracking proggies I use do, but whatevs.
I rolled back to the earlier version.
I won’t ever buy Yoast SEO Premium. Too many updates, and the recent updates require too much babysitting.
You are very right. Please can you share on how to roll back to previous version? I like to do same on our website.
Can you use WordPress Custom Fields and make them into SEO containers? The descriptions on pages and the keywords for those are important to Google because Google creates scores on your ads based on whether or not the keywords in your ads match the keywords on the landing page. I would think instead of using an SEO plugin we could just easily create custom fields and produce the same thing on a page by page and site by site basis including categories and tags – no?
My snippet is not displaying my post contents as usual, rather its showing, “Please provide a meta description by editing the snippet below.” How do I rectify it? Thank you
The meta keywords feature has been removed from Yoast (in April 2018), for anyone looking for it now. This is because the meta keywords tag is no longer used by search engines.
Thanks! What’s important for SEO now then?
I am really trying to follow the instructions but the version of Yoast SEO that I downloaded only has three tabs. Dashboard/Features/Webmaster
I watched the video and read the instructions multiple times. Please help!
Are you able to see ‘Search Appearance’ link below SEO and that will lead to some of the tabs mentioned in the article. Looks like article is bit old, but we can look for similar tabs/links in the SEO section of the WP area
Great Article !
Please also post article related to news website.
Like How to create hindi news website? & How to do SEO of any news website?
Thanks
Hello WPBeginner,
There is no option available for Title & Meta’s for Homepage in latest update of Yoast Plugin.
Please guide me.
Thanks.
Hi,
Yoast Plugin is not showing Meta keyword template in Titles & Meta -> Homepage.
Now, How can I add Meta Keywords In my website?
Hi,
Yoast Plugin is not showing Meta keyword template in Titles & Meta -> Homepage.
Now, How can I add Meta Keywords In my website?
Simply Outstanding…..I was kinda looking such tutorial from long time, at last i got it from YOU ./….Thanx Buddy
Can you give me an answer, how best to avoid duplicate content, from images, tags, and desktops page 2 and so on
Thanks for writing this helpful articles it helps me too much.
What is better? Using Meta tags, or using Yoast plug in. Also, can I know if WordPress is HTML, HTML5 or XHTML..
Help is much appreciated.
Nailed it! Thank you.
How to add
using yoast seo plugin. I have installed yoast seo plugin in my blog but it don’d have this feature.
meta name revised
Curious why you recommend using Meta Keywords? Even Yoast – as used in your example, says keywords are dead. (Thus why they advise you not bother, right on the page where you enable them?
Hi Kerry,
Many SEO experts believe that meta keywords are not useful anymore. We do not agree with this. We think that they can still be useful and are perfectly harmless if used in moderation (i.e. avoid keyword stuffing or using too many meta keywords in each article).
in SEO only one focus keyword use and in premium version how many keyword use…Thanks for the meta keyword info.
Thanks for the post. I tried to set up my homepage description on yoast. The tabs there is unclickable. I tried to click on it several times but isn’t clickable.
Thank very much I love it
Hi, Sir! Thank you for the brief and easy to follow step by step explanation on adding keywords to WordPress. It’s really helpful for me as a beginner. By the way, i already used Yoast SEO plugin for my site. But i still have a question about how can we know what is working and what is not in our SEO setting, or how we measure the performance of our SEO setting from outside? Thanks!
Hey febrifahmi,
The simplest way to measure the success of your SEO score to see if your site has started ranking for the keywords you are targeting. If those keywords have more competition, then initially you may not appear on the first or even the second page of the search results. However, overtime your ranking will keep improving if you keep following your SEO plan.
how can I add my research keyword of my website??
You can also use google keyword planner for keyword research.
Found exactly what i was looking for by reading this post, and you made it extremly simple to follow..so thank you!
meta keyword option is not displaying
Can I used more than one keywords in my wordpress blog in yoast plugins without a premium version ?
hey
I’m having a problem that the meta description added is not shown in the page source code or on search engines.
can any one help me ?
Meta keywords not displaying … Anyone?
In advanced setting page of yoast seo snippchet . meta keyword is not showing..
[After that you need to click on the ‘Settings’ button to enter meta keywords to be used for that particular category’s archive pages.]
do you know how long does it take for Google to update their meta description snippet after you’ve updated it in wordpress?
Is there any function to force enable index in search page?
I keep having the same issue that has been happening to me is still happening. I contacted Yoast and they could care less about my issue as a free member. If the plugin didn’t work, fine, I could get them not helping me. But the fact that this is my problem and they wont help me is utterly annoying:
I have Yoast on two different sites.
On site #1 I see one interface
On site #2 I see a completely different interface.
On site 1 I see what you see above with a whole slew of other options.
On site 2 I see a very limited view in terms of the interface and options.
Hi Kristi,
By default, when you install Yoast SEO plugin, it hides advanced settings pages. You need to visit SEO > Dashboard and then click on the Features tab. Scroll down to ‘Advanced settings pages’ option and click on Enabled. Don’t forget to click on the save changes button.
As a new blogger, let me tell you how difficult it was to get meta data added to my blog – all in the name of getting rich pins! This was legitimately the best step-by-step instruction I’ve found (after HOURS of hunting). Thanks for the great post!
new to wordpress i know basic wordpress how to use themes and plugins and my doubt is what to learn next either loops and hooks and functions or php deeply because i dont know how to modify the template in theme editor what to do please help me
Nice info,very easy to understand Meta Information.
Thanks a lot.
Nice. This was easy to follow, now I get to see if meta information really helps with search engines.
This was super helpful to me.
Detailed & Infromative, You saved my life. I was desperate to where I should insert meta Description and Keyword for my homepage.
Thank You
Thank you so much sir,this article is very much useful for beginners like me.
everything is working like charm just have an issue is that I want to put meta description for homepage and I put it over homepage section but not showing any metatag in the facebook posts meta checker while other page’s meta is showing there as desired.
please help me with index page’s metas
Thanks admin It’s very useful for me, its just take few seconds to add meta tags and keywords using this demo examples and its pretty easier so that don’t need to be a SEO expert to do that.
thanx admin. it is really helpful for me.
This is utter rubbish! No SEO expert thinks meta-keywords are of any use at all – only people who have read other inaccurate and outdated posts like this one. Google stopped using them about 15 years ago, Bing only use them to identify spammers.
If you had actually read the article, you will realise that the author wrote exactly that: “Even Google says that they don’t give importance to meta keywords.”
Hello, thanks for letting know about the meta keywords and I found this post very useful. I never used meta keywords but after reading this post and letting the importance of the meta keywords I feel I should use these keywords on my blog.
This post is really good. It makes me battle ready for my competitors. Thanks admin!
Hi,
How should we proceed with the custom meta descriptions for categories (custom taxonomy) with several sub pages (for ex: category: apple tv 4. page 1, page 2, page 3) as google see it as duplicate meta description for each sub page.
Your “Meta Keywords and Description for Category Archives” description is ok if I have 1 single page in that particular category. But what about if I have more then one?
Yoast have a great solution for the titles in this case (for ex: Title: Apple TV 4 – site name – page 2 of 3) but not for the “CUSTOM” meta descriptions for the categories with sub pages.
Our case ex:
Articole page – with 4 categories
Cat 1. Apple tv 1 result: 6 sub pages
(for the titles we use Yoast/Titles/Taxonomy
Title: %%term_title%% %%sitename%% %%page%%
= Apple tv 1 – site name – page 1 of 6) The result is OK!
(for the custom meta description we are using: Categories/Edit)
and the meta description is the same on each page!!) This is the problem:) How can we fix this?
Any ideas please:)
Thanks
Hey,
Thanks for creating this post I found it very helpful. I had no idea Yoast disabled this by default. I used to think this was unimportant. I will test now and see if it helps me increase my traffic.
Thanks,
Gerardo
I’ve ever use Yoast before, but doesnt give any change on my snippet, then manually I add my meta tag on head every single post and it works, but another problem is my post give a distance between content wich is paragraph and Post title, well I don’t know why because I’m not use a visual mode to edit my post..any advice maybe? need guide please…and sorry for my english…thank you
Thanks for the meta keyword info. It shouldn’t hurt if I implement them.
BTW, how did you implement your sidebar “I need help with …” widget? Is it done via a special plugin?
Off to share your post.
-steve
Hi Steve,
Yes it has custom CSS and some custom code behind it.
Sincerely Thank You! This article was very informative for a true beginner as myself. Do you have a live YouTube on step -by-step blogging for beginners?
Hi Joanne,
Check out our YouTube Channel. It has tons of video tutorials covering many different topics about using WordPress.
Meta keyword are good for SEO ?
And what is this ?
If you type something above it will override your meta keywords template.
Hi Priyanshu,
Some experts believe that they are redundant now, but many other SEO experts disagree. We believe that they are still useful.
If you turn on Meta Keywords, then Yoast SEO will try to get your keywords from your post’s tags. However, if you enter them manually, then it will not use tags as keywords.