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!
- Log in to your WordPress dashboard.
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- Make sure you have the Yoast SEO for WordPress installed. If you don’t yet, check our quick guide on how to do it.
- 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.
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- 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.
- Scroll down below the text editor until you find the section titled “Yoast SEO”.
- Click “Edit Snippet”.
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- 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.
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- When you’re finished, click “Close snippet editor”.
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- Double check your “Snippet preview” to make sure your title, slug, and meta description appear the way you intended.
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- 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!
I was already thinking on quitting Yoast due to similar errors and issues i do face with it.
I guess i still have a way of having an improved ranking with this your article. thanks alot, i will feed with with an update on the effect.
I have been struggling with the yoast seo plugin for long but. This article guides me a little… Thanks for sharing this…
Thanks for this but I have a problem with my Yoast SEO. I started using it for a while and it disappears from my dashboard. I tried to reinstall it but I always receive the message that the folder is existing already and each time I search for it, I couldn’t find it.
Thanks for sharing this, very useful indeed.
Thanks for this tutorial its really helpful
Have change it but it does not reflect on google
I would recommend to use another third party plugin for Rich snippets that can induce the featured image, video, rating and videos to show in the rich answer format to appear on the first page of Google. For people who don’t understand this answer I would suggest googling “Difference between regular and rich-snippets”
Regards,
Shahzad S.- Website designer in Houston
Would you be able to do this in the db without loggin in to wordpress?
Hey. I’ve changed it but when does google reflect my changes in search? It’s still showing the old one
Hi, I’ve changed the meta-data below my posts, but it’s not showing yet in Google. At the “search appearance” settings from Yoast, there’s ALSO a possibility to change the meta-data for all your posts. Will leaving this blank not overwrite my custom meta’s with the original one? What to do with the meta fields at the “search appearance” settings?
I added the keyphrase and meta-description and closed the snippet editor. SEO button was green -yay! Left page to do something else and when I came back nothing was there. I’ve tried several times. Is there no save button? I’m new, don’t see what I’m doing wrong.
HELLO THERE!
I want to know how to change the display of meta description.
I already knew how to add meta title and desc like the mentioned method above
But in my case, I have already changed the meta desc but whenever I got Google indexed the page, it’ll always show the content instead of the meta I set. How to solve this?
Hi John,
Believe it or not, Google can choose either to use, or to ignore, the custom meta descriptions you set.
Google is more likely to use your custom meta descriptions if they’re relevant to the main topic of the page itself, meaning that they include the same or similar keywords to the ones that Google believes are the page’s main topic.
Custom meta descriptions also need to be the right length, which Yoast helps with.
Hope that’s helpful.
Best,
Fred
Great information… My post meta description is using my website home page custom meta description. Please, I need some assistance.
Hello Harper, how are you?
What I want is how to change the homepage’s (site’s) meta description, not that of the post. Can you help? Thanks.
Hi,
There is a default title entry option given by WordPress for every post and Yoast also provides an option of enter the SEO title.
My question is can I use two different titles in both the boxes?
Please help. I am confused.
Hi HARPER PHILLIPS
Thank for this post.
please tell me how can I change the meta description of my entire blog, instead of a particular blog post.
I will wait for your reply.
Was having the same trouble too that is; the meta description of homepage not showing what it ought to show
But i’ve been able to resolve the issue
I want to add Meta keyword. Are there any option that you know.
I was looking for changing the website homepage meta description. How to do it?
I’m trying to optimize our site for 2 languages and I meet the following problem – when I optimize for english version – seo title, meta tags, url, key words, meta description, all changes I make become in force for the second language,too. How can I fix this issue?
Thanks for the tips. I’m using Yoast but I wasn’t aware of this feature. I will activate it today.
Is there any way to change the meta title of the single page without a plugin?
Hi,
I’ve tried to follow this tutorial, however at the bottom of screen on my edit post page there is no Yoast Snippet box to edit, only an excerpt box.
Individual pages have the Snippet box but not individual blog posts, I would be grateful for any help??
But if you have already saved it, and you want to change it, it seems that it is not possible. Or is it?
Yes, you can change it any time. You’ll then want to have the page indexed by Google in “Webmaster Console,” and the change will show up within anywhere from a few minutes to a couple of days.
hlo sir,
I have one problem.
When i will write Meta description of my post then it show automatic description which are provided in post.
They can’t show my own written description why?
please reply me
Hi Jaspreet,
The issue is that Google is still free to use its own auto-generated meta description.
The best you can do is make your Meta description as descriptive and relevant to your focus keyword as possible, which makes Google more likely to use it instead of auto-generating one.
Thank you so much for this! I have Yoast. And every time I couldn’t figure out what it was talking about. But by this post, I have finally figured out how to make my SEO better! Thank you so much!! You don’t even know how much you have helped me!!
Hi Amy, You’re very welcome! 🙂
Did anybody ever figure out how to change homepage meta? I cant find this anywhere
Was having the same trouble too that is; the meta description of homepage not showing what it ought to show
But i’ve been able to resolve the issue
How did you get your meta description for your homepage changed to show what you want?
nice information I thing how to add meta descriptions in WordPress but your post is very helpful for me
I am having a hard time with figuring out how to manually change the meta description. Right now Google is seeing the same description as the title of my home page. I can not figure out how to fix this.
Does changing the SEO title affects the post link?
Hi Ernest! No, the permalink won’t be affected.
What about that of Homepage meta description?
This is what I’m trying to figure out now. Did you ever figure out how to change the meta description for your home page rather than for each post?
Hi, I am having the same issue. Did you find the solution?
Anyone help me, please. I don’t change my site meta title tag & meta description for the homepage. How to fix this?
What is meta title? how to add that? Is that necessary for seo?
I am just new with yoast and was struggling to add meta description. Found this blog in google and done it successfully. Thanks a lot.
I was struggling to achieve this. I searched in my cpanel, wordpres settings but couldn’t.
Finally yoast helped me.
Thank you!
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won’t that result in lower SERPs though as you changed the data?