Adding SEO title and meta description is a good practice to optimize your web pages for search engines and users. An SEO title is an HTML element that specifies the title of a web page. A meta description is an HTML element that provides a brief summary of a web page. Both elements appear as the clickable headline and snippet for the search result and are important for user experience, SEO, and social sharing.
To add SEO title and meta description to your web pages, you need to edit the HTML code of your website. If you are using WordPress, you can use a plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math to easily add and edit these elements. Here are the steps to add SEO title and meta description using Yoast SEO plugin:
Install and activate the Yoast SEO plugin on your WordPress dashboard.
Go to the post or page that you want to optimize and scroll down to the Yoast SEO meta box below the content editor.
Click on the Edit snippet button to open the snippet editor.
Enter your SEO title in the Title field. You can use variables like %%title%%, %%sitename%%, or %%sep%% to insert dynamic elements. You can also use the preview to see how your title will look like in Google search results.
Enter your meta description in the Meta description field. You can also use variables like %%excerpt%% or %%focuskw%% to insert dynamic elements. You can also use the preview to see how your description will look like in Google search results.
Save your changes and update or publish your post or page.
You can also use the Yoast SEO plugin to set templates for your SEO titles and meta descriptions for different types of content, such as posts, pages, categories, tags, etc. This can save you time and ensure consistency across your website. To do this, go to SEO > Search Appearance on your WordPress dashboard and choose the content type that you want to set a template for. Then enter your template in the Title template and Meta description template fields. You can use variables like %%title%%, %%sitename%%, %%sep%%, %%category%%, etc. to insert dynamic elements. You can also use the preview to see how your template will look like in Google search results. Save your changes when you are done.
Adding SEO title and meta description is not enough to optimize your web pages. You also need to follow some best practices to make sure they are effective and relevant. Here are some tips to write good SEO titles and meta descriptions: