[Top] 63 Why and How to Change Your Meta Title and Meta Description in WordPress using Yoast

Why and How to Change Your Meta Title and Meta Description in WordPress using Yoast

If you’re trying to increase traffic to your website and improve your SEO, Yoast SEO for WordPress has quickly become the go-to SEO solution for most WordPress developers. It’s a multifaceted SEO plugin that’s full of features that make optimization easier to keep up with! One of our favorite features is the snippet editor, which gives you the ability to edit your meta title and meta description in WordPress which we’ll cover in this post.

Your post’s metadata (the meta description, title, and slug) is the information that appears in your search engine (Google) result page listing when a potential visitor is conducting a search. While most search engines don’t factor this metadata directly into your search ranking, they DO factor in your click-though-rate. By using the snippet editor to adjust your listing’s description, you feature copy that will hook your visitors and significantly improve your click-though-rate and search ranking as a result.

Using the snippet editor is very easy, so let’s get started!

1. Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
2. Make sure you have the Yoast SEO for WordPress installed. If you don’t yet, check our quick guide on how to do it.
3. Select “Posts” from the left side-bar menu, then click “Add New” to start a new post.
   • If you’d like to optimize an existing post, click “All Posts” instead then click the title of the post you’d like to work on.
4. Scroll down below the text editor until you find the section titled “Yoast SEO”.
5. Click “Edit Snippet”.
6. Edit the information listed under “SEO Title”, “Slug” and “Meta description” until you’re happy with the way it appears. Yoast makes it easier to gauge the success of your copy with a color coded bar under each text box.
7. When you’re finished, click “Close snippet editor”.
8. Double check your “Snippet preview” to make sure your title, slug, and meta description appear the way you intended.
9. And that’s how you edit your meta title and meta description in WordPress! Now you can save, schedule, or publish your post as normal!