Meta keywords and meta descriptions allow you to add extra information to your WordPress posts to increase their search ranking and your own website‘s SEO. Keywords are important words or phrases that people are likely to search for if they were looking for the content you are publishing whilst a meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is about.

Meta keywords and description are actually HTML meta tags, and they go into your website’s header. WordPress SEO 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 keywords and descriptions for SEO?

Search engines don’t tell us how much weight they assign to keywords and descriptions, however, it’s obvious they are important and will help your page or website rank higher. Whilst some SEO experts believe that keywords and meta descriptions are not important at all, there are good reasons for adding them.

Meta descriptions are extremely important as it can be used to grab a user‘s attention.

How to enable Meta Keyword support in Yoast SEO

For the purpose of this guide, we will be using the Yoast SEO plugin.

Yoast SEO comes with built-in support for meta keywords and descriptions, however, the meta keywords feature is turned off by default and will need to be switched on. Start by visiting ‘SEO » Dashboard’ and then click on the features tab. Now you need to click on ‘Enabled’ under ‘Advanced settings pages’ option and then click on save changes button to store your changes.

Yoast SEO settings page will now reload and you will be able to see a lot more options under the SEO menu.

Once more, head over to the ‘ SEO » Titles & Meta’ page and then click on the ‘Other’ tab. Now you need to click on ‘Enabled’ under the ‘Use meta keywords tag?’ option and then click on the save changes button.

You have now successfully enabled meta keywords support in Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress and can now add meta keywords and descriptions to your posts and pages.

First, you need to edit an existing post or add a new one to add meta keywords and descriptions. Scroll down a little to ‘Yoast SEO’ meta box below the post editor. You will see your site’s title and an automatically generated description as a snippet. Below that you will see Meta Keywords field.

Try and enter 10 keywords, separated by commas, that are relevant to your content and that you have already used within the post itself. This will have the best effect. Now you need to click on the ‘Edit Snippet’ button and enter your site’s description. 

Make sure that you use your main keyword at least once in your description.

After that click on the ‘Close snippet editor’ button when you are done. You will be able to see your custom description in the snippet preview now.

Congratulations! You have successfully added meta keywords and description to your WordPress post. You can now save or publish your post or page.