Edit the SEO title and meta description for a page

  • seo
  • title
  • description
  • noindex
  • customizer

Updated

WordPress has no meta description field of its own, so the SEO title and meta description Google shows come from an SEO plugin's panel in the page editor. Open the page, fill in that panel's title and description, and update the page.

The steps below use Dirigible SEO, which adds an SEO panel to the sidebar of every page and post. Other SEO plugins, such as Yoast SEO, have similar fields in their own panel.

For category, tag, and author pages, see SEO for categories, tags, and authors.

How do I change the SEO title and description?

  1. Open the page or post in the editor.
  2. Open the SEO panel in the sidebar.
  3. Set the SEO Title. Use the Title, separator, and Site tokens to build it from the page and site names, or type your own.
  4. Write an SEO Description: one or two sentences that tell a searcher what's on the page.
  5. Check the Search Engine Preview below the fields to see roughly how it will look in Google.
  6. Click Update or Publish.

Give every page its own title. Duplicate titles make it hard for Google, and searchers, to tell pages apart.

How do I hide a page from Google?

Turn on Private Page (Do Not Index) to ask search engines to leave this page out of results. Use it for thank-you pages, internal pages, and similar. Don't turn it on for any page you want people to find in Google.

How do I set a canonical URL?

If the same content lives at more than one address, turn on Override canonical URL and enter the preferred address in Canonical URL. Google will treat that address as the main copy. Most pages don't need this.

Set the title separator

The separator is the character between the page name and site name in titles, such as the dash in "About - Acme Co."

  1. Go to Appearance → Customize → SEO → Options.
  2. Choose a Title Separator.
  3. Click Publish.

Moving from Yoast SEO

To bring over titles and descriptions from Yoast:

  1. Go to Dirigible → Tools & Maintenance and click Other tools in the list on the left.
  2. Under Migrate Yoast Data, click Migrate.

Run it once, after Dirigible SEO is active, then spot-check your most important pages. While Yoast SEO is still active, Dirigible SEO lets you edit its fields but doesn't add its tags to the live site, so deactivate Yoast once the migration is done.

Good image alt text also helps pages show up in search. See How to write alt text for images.