Learning how to effectively add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress can enhance your website’s SEO, leading to increased traffic, and more leads and sales for your business.
We have found that these elements play a crucial role in informing search engines about the content of our pages, improving our site’s visibility in search results.
Keywords are important words or phrases that people are likely to search for to find your content. A meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is about.
WordPress SEO tools and 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 Meta Descriptions for SEO?
Like most WordPress users, you are probably wondering whether adding meta keywords and meta descriptions will improve your WordPress SEO rankings.
While search engines don’t exactly share how much weight they assign to keywords or descriptions, SEO experts always recommend adding a proper meta description and keywords for on-page SEO optimization.
When it comes to meta keywords, most modern search engines either assign very little importance or don’t use them at all. The main exception is the Russian search engine Yandex.
Instead, search engines prefer that you add your focused keywords in your title, description, and throughout your content. This is why SEO plugins like AIOSEO come with a TruSEO score that helps you optimize your content for focused keywords and keyphrases.
Our Recommendations for Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions
We recommend adding a meta description for all the posts and pages on your site, including your homepage, category pages, and tag pages.
When it comes to meta keywords, it’s up to you whether or not to use them. They will not harm your site, but they may not be of much benefit either.
That being said, let’s take a look at how to add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress. Use the links below to jump to the section you are interested in:
If you prefer the written tutorial, then please continue reading.
For this tutorial, we will be using All in One SEO (AIOSEO), which is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your entire WordPress site for better SEO and comes with a comprehensive set of tools to grow your business.
First, you will need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin. For more details, see our guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.
Upon activation, All in One SEO will take you through a simple setup wizard. Just follow the step-by-step instructions to get everything set up for your site. Alternatively, you can follow our guide on how to set up All in One SEO for WordPress correctly.
You can generate a post’s keywords from its categories and/or tags. Also, you can dynamically generate relevant keywords on your WordPress blog posts and archive pages.
First, you need to edit a post or page where you want to add your meta keywords and meta description. AIOSEO works in both the WordPress block editor and the classic editor.
Once you are on the content editor screen, scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ box below the content area.
Adding a Meta Description to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO
Using All in One SEO’s Dynamic Tags in Your Meta Descriptions
Optionally, you can add tags to your meta description. The ones that All in One SEO offers by default are Page Content and Separator, but you can add other dynamic tags as well.
Using All in One SEO’s ChatGPT Integration to Automatically Generate Meta Descriptions
If you want to save time, then you can also use All in One SEO’s AI-powered Title / Description Generator. It uses ChatGPT to automatically craft high-quality meta descriptions based on the main theme of your content.
Adding Meta Keywords to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO
To add your meta keywords, you need to click the ‘Advanced’ tab for your AIOSEO settings.
Make sure you click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page after adding your meta description and keywords.
You can also add keywords and descriptions to your category and tag archive pages.
Make sure you save the changes to your category before moving on.
Your meta description and keywords will now be used for the category page, which is the archive of posts in that category.
You can repeat the process to add meta keywords and descriptions to your blog’s tags and other custom taxonomy archive pages.
All in One SEO integrates seamlessly with other popular WordPress plugins. This allows you to add keywords and meta descriptions for your WooCommerce product pages, SeedProd landing pages, MemberPress course pages, and more.
Want to know how effective your keywords are? All in One SEO doesn’t just let you add keywords in WordPress, it helps you track their performance too.
For more details, see our guide on how to check if your blog posts are ranking for the right keywords.
We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add keywords and meta descriptions to your WordPress posts and pages. You may also want to see some other guides related to adding metadata in WordPress: