How to Change Your Website Meta Description in WordPress
Your meta description is a unique snippet of text which appears below your
Headline
Your meta description is a short piece of text which appears below your
Headline
When a user visits your site, they will see the first few words of text in
your meta description.
This description should sum up the purpose of your website in a concise yet
descriptive manner. It is also one of the primary elements which drives
Traffic Acquisition (TA) to your site.
Why Should You Care About Meta Descriptions?
Meta descriptions play an essential role in any type of web content
because they provide a brief explanation to the reader of what your article
is about. More importantly, meta descriptions are a great tool to
increase your website’s conversion rate. We’ll discuss how in a
moment.
How to Change Your Website Meta Description in WordPress
“Cut to the chase,” you’re saying. “I want to see results. Now.” You’ve just
been instructed to change your website’s meta description; we’re about to dive
into how to do it in WordPress.
Step 1: Change Your Website’s Slug.
The first step in changing your website’s meta description is to
change its slug. The slug, or sluggoose, is the
short URL (Uniform Resource Locator) which you, the
author, give to the world for your articles. This is the
machine-readable name for your article which you’ll need to edit in order to
change your meta description.
For example, if you have an article titled “How to be a successful author”
and you’d like to change its meta description to “Tell the world how to be a
successful author.”, you’d need to go into your WordPress Dashboard,
click on Settings, and then into the General section.
Here you’ll see a drop-down menu of your site’s slugs:
- Product blog
- Pro-Blog
- author.com
- author
- how-to-be-a-successful-author
- how-to-be-a-successful-blogger
Choose the first option for the slug you’d like to use and click Save
to set it. Your chosen slug must be unique and should reflect the theme
of your website. For example, if you’re writing about pets, you might
want to use the pet-slug. Remember, you can always change
your website’s slug at any time by clicking Update
at the bottom of the Dashboard page.
Step 2: Edit Your Website’s Content.
Once you’ve set your slug, the next step is to edit your
website’s content to match. You’re going to want to cut out the
excess, shorten, and clarify all
word(s) and phrase(s) that appear in your content
(articles,
videos
, and
eBooks
).
Start by going into themes (formerly known as dashboards)
and scrolling to the Editor section. Here you’ll see a number of
sub-headings (formerly known as columns) for
different types of content.
Since you’re authoring new content for your website, you’ll
want to click Add New at the top of the section.
You’ll then see a wizard appear with all the required
fields for a new piece of content. Fill in the headline,
summary, and meta descriptions for the article.
As you fill out the form, you’ll notice the summary and
meta descriptions getting shorter and shorter. Once you’re
done, click Publish. Once published, your content (including
the meta descriptions) will appear below your Headline.
If you’d like to change the Headline without
editing the content, you can do that from the Editor section
of your website’s dashboard.
Step 3: Repeat Steps 1 and 2 For All of Your Blogs.
You can repeat steps one and two for as many blogs or
aggregated content (formerly known as websites)
you have. Just click on Settings for the first blog you’d like to
change and then click Save.
After you’ve edited all of your blogs to match, you can export
the new slugs you’ve created in Step 1 and use them to create
short links (formerly known as permalinks)
to your content.
Step 4: Measure the Results.
You can finally measure the results of your hard work! From the Dashboard
section of your WordPress website, click on Traffic. Here you’ll
see a graph representing your website’s traffic over the past month.
To calculate the total number of visits, you’ll want to add
the numbers from the Month and Weekly
buckets. Remember, you can also view these numbers in the Daily
or Hourly buckets if you’re interested in more frequent updates!
If you’d like to see how people are finding your content, you can also
check the referring domains of your website’s traffic. Here you will see
a list of all the websites that are bringing you visitors. You can monitor
these domains to see if they’re bringing you any traffic from overseas!
Wrapping Up.
That’s all there is to it! You’ve now changed your website’s meta description
and performed an amazing traffic acquisition stunt!
You should have seen an increase in traffic and conversions as a result
of this short article. And, if you’ve been following along, you should now have
a better understanding of how crucial the meta description is to a website’s
search engine optimization.
Thanks for reading! If you have any questions about how to change your
website’s meta description or want to read more about SEO, I’d love to have
you join my private Facebook group where we can continue the conversation
informally! You’re also welcome to visit my blog or website where I often write
about SEO and content marketing.