What is WordPress Metadata and Meta Tags? (For Beginners)

What is: Metadata

Metadata plays a crucial role in organizing and managing the content on your WordPress website. It helps search engines understand the context and relevance of your website’s pages and posts, which can ultimately impact your search engine ranking. In addition, metadata can help improve the user experience by providing context and information about the content they are viewing.

To put it another way, metadata is information that describes other information. Take, as an illustration, a document that you have open on your computer. The term “metadata” refers to any information about a document, including who authored it and when, and includes any and all information about the document.

Metadata in WordPress refers to information that may be stored about your site’s articles, pages, users, comments, and anything else that is shown on your website. For instance, the metadata of a post might contain information such as the author, the publish date, the category, the tags, and maybe even more.

Metadata can also refer to information about online sites, such as the title and brief description that show in search results. This type of information can be found on the web in general. Because they are a special kind of HTML tag that may be used to add metadata to a page, they are referred to as meta tags.

What Is WordPress Metadata and Meta Tags on a WordPress Website?

In WordPress, your posts, pages, users, comments, and custom post types all have metadata.

All the metadata on your site is stored in the WordPress database. Your theme is what determines which metadata is displayed on your site, and where and how it’s displayed.

For example, with the Twenty Twenty theme, the category is displayed above the post title. Below the title, you can see the author and publish date.

Some themes let you change how the post metadata display with the WordPress Theme Customizer. If your theme doesn’t have that option, you can use code to display blog post metadata in your theme.

The default metadata for posts includes the author, post date, and categories and tags. You can also add your own custom metadata.

How Do I Add Custom Metadata to WordPress?

Creating custom fields gives you the ability to add information, which is one of the many beneficial features offered by WordPress. Adding snippets of information to your articles is made possible with the use of custom fields. You are free to include whatever you wish, such as what you are now reading, viewing, or listening to; your current state of mind; the current weather; or anything else.

If you are updating a post, however, you will be able to view the custom metadata fields, even if they are hidden by default. First things first, be sure that your draft has been saved. Then, in the top right of the post editor, select the icon that looks like it has three vertical dots, and at the bottom of the menu, select the option that says Preferences.

In the drop-down menu that now appears, go all the way to the very end and tick the option next to “Custom Fields.” You will get a notification informing you that you need to reload the page before the custom fields will be visible to you. Make sure that you save your work right away if you haven’t done so before. Subsequently, you may proceed to click the option labeled “Enable & Reload.”

If you are interested in learning more about the functionality of WordPress custom fields, we have a tutorial that will teach you how to apply various tips, techniques, and hacks related to WordPress custom fields.

What exactly are Meta Tags in WordPress?

Meta tags are a specific kind of HTML element that may be used to add metadata to a website’s page. They are not a feature that is exclusive to WordPress. Meta tags are something that may be added to any page on the web.

So, what type of metadata are these meta tags that get added to a website?

There are a great many varieties of meta tags; nevertheless, the title and description tags are the ones that are discussed the most frequently. However, search engine bots will be able to see these tags even if they are obscured when you visit the website. The purpose of this information is to help search engines like Google comprehend what the website is about so that they can appropriately place it in the search results.

You can easily see an example of what a metadata description seems to look like on a WordPress website by looking at on a page that displays the results of a Google search (the so-called SERP).

You will notice the meta description directly beneath the title of our website. This information offers prospective visitors a summary that explains the content of our website in a descriptive manner for their convenience.

It is essential to make use of meta tags since they have the potential to improve the search engine optimization of your WordPress site, therefore attracting a more significant number of visitors.

When you create new posts or pages using WordPress, all the necessary metadata will be included automatically by WordPress. If you want search engines to have greater information about your web pages, however, it is advisable to modify the meta tag data yourself rather than relying on a third party.

The good news is that you can add metadata in a breeze by making use of a WordPress plugin.

How Adding Meta Tags in WordPress

Utilizing a WordPress plugin designed specifically for SEO purposes is among the most effective methods for editing the meta tags on a WordPress website.

Meta descriptions and meta keywords can be added to your WordPress site thanks to plugins like RankMath SEO or Yoast SEO for WordPress, which are the most popular as of 2022 and have this feature built in.

If you want a post or page of yours to rank higher in search results, we recommend that you add meta titles and descriptions to it.

We really hope that this post was helpful to you in learning all about WordPress metadata and the significance of meta tags. We hope that you now can answer the question of What is WordPress Metadata and Meta Tags?