How to Add a Meta Description to a Post Using the Yoast SEO Plugin in WordPress

There are a lot of great guides for getting the SEO settings set up correctly on your website. While many of these guides will differ in what they consider to be important SEO elements on your site, one common item that they agree upon is the importance of the “meta description” field.

The “meta description” field is included in search engine results under the clickable title of your page. This description offers you the chance to accurately and succinctly describe the information that visitors will find on the page. WordPress does not make this easy to edit, however, which is one of the reasons that you might have installed the Yoast SEO plugin. But even after installing that plugin, you may still be having difficulty figuring out how to add a meta description to your posts. Our guide below will show you how.

How to Add a Meta Description to a WordPress Post

The steps below will assume that you already have the Yoast SEO plugin installed on your site. If not, then you can read this guide to see how to install the plugin.

Step 1: Sign into the admin section of your WordPress site.

Step 2: Hover over the Posts option in the left column, then click either the Add New option to create a new post, or click the All Posts option and select an existing one.

Step 3: Scroll down to the Yoast SEO section of the post, then click the Edit Snippet button.

Step 4: Type your meta description into the Meta Description field. The bar under the field indicates when you have hit the recommended character length. Orange means the meta description is too short, green means the length is good, while red indicates that the description is too long.

Step 5: Click the Update or Publish button at the right side of the post when you are ready to publish your post.

***Search engines may not always use your meta descriptions. Sometimes they will populate the meta description in the results pages with a sampling of text from the page. There is nothing you can do to prevent this from happening.***

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Matthew Burleigh

Matt has been working with WordPress and creating content using this powerful content management system for years. While he has written about many other tech topics, WordPress is one of his favorites.

You can read his full bio here.