How to Add Meta Description to WordPress Post Using Yoast SEO

In this post, I am going to show how to add the missing meta description tag to WordPress posts and pages using the Yoast SEO plugin. If you view the source of a WordPress post, you will find that it does have a meta description tag. Google is a very smart search engine, so even if you miss meta description, it will capture the description using the content of the post. But the same can not be assumed for other search engines. So, webmasters should explicitly mention the meta description tag in a WordPress post and page. The meta description tag looks like as follows:

<meta name=“description“ content=““/>

For the homepage, the description is the same as the tagline you provide in general settings. For posts and pages, you can add meta description by writing a small PHP code. But if you do not want to write PHP script, you need to install Yoast SEO plugin and to make a very small change using the plugin.

Here are the steps to enable meta description in WordPress posts and pages.

• Log into WordPress using admin credentials. You will see SEO on the sidebar if you have installed Yoast SEO plugin.
• Click on SEO and then on Search Appearance under SEO.
• Once on Search Appearance – Yoast SEO page, click on Content Types.
• Under Posts, you will find Meta description box. Type %%excerpt%% in the box and then click on Save Changes.
• Do the same thing for the Pages which is present below Posts on Content Types page.

That’s all. Now view the source of any post or page, you will find the relevant meta description tag.