Metadata

What is metadata? It’s “data that describes other data”. Basically, metadata is data on web page that you cannot see unless you inspect the code of a web page. This metadata provides more information about the page to search engines. Search engines can use this metadata to understand the topic of the page better.

Page titles and meta descriptions are a type of metadata because they provide more information to search engine about the topic of the page. You can’t see the page titles or meta description on the web page unless you dig deeper and look at the code.

However, search engines can see metadata and display it for users. Below is as screenshot from Google’s search results. You can see how a page title, URL and meta description look search engine results.

Meta Descriptions

Meta descriptions can only be edited from the website’s CMS which will most likely be WordPress.

How To Edit Meta Descriptions

Log into WordPress and go to edit the page. Scroll down to the “Yoast SEO” setting. You want to look for the “Meta description” area.

After you have made changes, you have to save the page by clicking the “update” button near the top of the page.

How To QA Meta Descriptions

Make sure to review the live page to make sure the changes were made.

In Chrome, go to the web page > right click > inspect element > control + f > and search for “description”.

Look for the HTML that says:

<meta name=”description” content=”META DESCRIPTION GOES HERE”>