Do you want to know how to change the homepage title tag and meta description in WordPress? Follow my step by step, easy guide, and you will have a new title tag and meta description in no time.
The title tag and meta description in WordPress can be changed in the settings option in your WordPress admin menu. From settings, you select ‘General’, we make our changes here.
You can also use the Yoast plugin. The Yoast plugin dashboard has a ‘Search appearance’ option. In this option, you can enter your site title tag and meta description.
First, I will show you how to change your title tag and meta description without a plugin.
Second, I will show you how to change these details using the Yoast plugin.
Title tags and meta descriptions are important for SEO. They help the search engines to understand what your site is about. It helps them find relevant search queries for your website.
Let’s do this step by step.
- Here is how you make the changes without a WordPress plugin
- Log into your WordPress admin
- Select ‘Settings’ from your WordPress admin menu
- Making changes to your title tag and meta description
- Here is how you make the changes with the Yoast plugin
- Select ‘SEO’ and ‘Search Appearance’ in your admin menu
- Change your title tag and meta description in Yoast
- Conclusion
Here is how you make the changes without a WordPress plugin.
Log into your WordPress admin
First thing we need to do is log into our WordPress admin. Here is mine.
Enter your details, click on ‘Log In’ and we come to our admin dashboard.
Here is my dashboard.
Select ‘Settings’ from your WordPress admin menu
Now we have access to our dashboard, we select ‘Settings’ from the menu on the left. Move your mouse over ‘Settings’ and a menu will appear.
In that new menu, select ‘General’.
Like this.
After we select ‘General’ we come to this page.
At the top of this page, you have your site title and tagline settings. The site title is your title tag, the tagline is your meta description.
Here is my title tag and meta description in a browser tab.
When I hover my mouse over the browser tab, my details show as a popup.
Making changes to your title tag and meta description
I am going to change my title tag and meta description, and do this again.
Here are my changes.
At the bottom of this page is a ‘Save’ button. After every change, you must save your changes.
Here is my site in a browser after I saved my changes.
That is how you change your WordPress website title tag and meta description.
Here is how you make the changes with the Yoast plugin.
If you don’t have Yoast installed on your site, you need to do that first.
You can download Yoast from www.yoast.com. Or, you can install the plugin from the WordPress plugin library.
I use Yoast on all my sites, it is an invaluable tool when it comes to SEO for your site.
Here is the title tag and meta description for www.newblogr.com in Google search.
The blue link above my site URL is the ‘title tag’. My meta description is the grey text underneath my website URL.
It is important that these two things reflect what your site is about.
Select SEO and Search Appearance in your admin menu
To get started with Yoast, we need to find ‘SEO’ in our WordPress admin menu on the left. Hover your mouse over ‘SEO’ and select ‘Search Appearance’ from the popup menu.
Like this.
Once selected, we come to this page.
Change your title tag and meta description in Yoast
Here you have an ‘SEO title’ section, this is your title tag. Underneath that, you have a section to type your meta description.
You enter the information for your site into those two boxes and then click on the ‘Save’ button at the bottom of the page.
Every time you make changes, don’t forget to click on save.
I am going to change my meta description because in Google search results, my meta description was cut after ‘SEO’. That tells me that your meta description length should be no longer than 160 characters.
I have changed my meta description and clicked on save.
The changes won’t show in the search results straight away. The search engines will scan your site and will update their data later.
Conclusion
If you haven’t updates your title tag and meta description yet, I recommend you do that as soon as you can. It helps the search engines know what your site is about.
I have shown you two ways you can do this. The first, without using a plugin, you use the settings in WordPress to update your information. The second is with the Yoast plugin.
Both are very easy to do and take a matter of minutes. You can go back and make changes anytime.
The settings I have shown you here are for your homepage. That means the information will be displayed when someone visits your homepage or searches for your site.
All your posts and pages should have their own SEO title and meta description. I use Yoast for my posts and pages because it is easy to use.
With Yoast, there is a section at the bottom of each post and page in your WordPress editor, to complete your title tag and meta description.
Comments
How do you complete you title tags and meta descriptions?
Do you use a plugin or not?
Have you ever used Yoast? What do you think?
I look forward to your comments.
