Descriptions and Keywords
Looking to boost your site’s search ranking? One of the first (and easiest) steps to take is filling in the Description and Keywords both for your entire site and the individual pages that make up your site.
Description and Keywords for your entire site can be found under Settings > SEO.
Description and Keywords for each individual page can be found under Pages > Edit Page > Advanced. The Advanced settings are accessible by selecting the Pages tab, which opens your Pages list in the sidebar, then clicking on the individual page.
We highly recommend utilising these fields on all of your pages except for your Home page. The Home page fields should be left blank as it’s best that this page relies on your site level SEO settings.
Both of these fields assist search engines in properly categorising your site, but the Description field is the more important of the two as it’s what Search Engines actually display as the description for your site in their own results.
Your site’s Description should be two to three sentences long and provide a fairly detailed description of what your site is about. Are you a florist in Denver? Then write something like:
Flowers and Such is a professional florist in Denver, CO with 25 years experience making birthdays a little brighter and anniversaries a little rosier. We have roses, lilies, orchids, tulips and every other flower under the sun.
This example Description lets visitors know exactly what the business is about, where it’s located (which makes this site more likely to show up in local searches), lists some flowers people may be searching for and shows a bit of personality to boot.
Page Descriptions work in exactly the same way, except they should be specific to the page for which you’re writing the description.
For the Keywords field, you’ll want to use around 10 to 30 words that match your content and the types of searches people may do to find that content. The imaginary florist we’ve written about above might want a list of Keywords like Flowers, Florist, Denver, Colorado, Birthdays, Anniversaries, Weddings, Apologise, Roses, Lilies, Orchids, Tulips for their site settings.
And, of course, that could get even more specific with their word selection when filling out fields for individual pages relating to certain flowers, holidays, people, etc.
Keywords are ultimately only helpful with search engines if they are words you actually use throughout your site. Otherwise Google (and other search engines) will think you’re trying to game the system by using Keywords that are irrelevant to your site and will simply ignore the words you’ve written.
Be sure to Publish your site after you’ve added Descriptions and Keywords, as they will not have any effect on your live site until you click the Publish button.
Keep in mind it may take a few weeks to see results based on your efforts.