Set your page's meta tags
Meta tags are the invisible lines in your page's HTML that tell search engines and social networks how to label and preview it: the title, meta description, canonical URL, Open Graph tags, and hreflang. None of them change how the page looks to a visitor; they only change how machines describe it.
Search engines and AI assistants read these tags to decide how your page is titled, summarized, and grouped. Without them, Google picks a title and description off the page at random and your shared links get no preview image. Setting them yourself controls how your business appears in search results, in AI answers, and when someone shares your link.
Do it on your platform
Pick your website platform below for the exact place to make this change, and how to confirm it worked.
- 1
In the WordPress dashboard, open Plugins → Add New Plugin.
PluginsAdd New Plugin - 2
Install and activate a free SEO plugin like Yoast SEO or Rank Math. A default WordPress install has no field for meta description, Open Graph, or canonical until one is active.
- 3
Open the page or post to label under Pages → All Pages (or Posts), and click its title.
PagesAll Pages - 4
Scroll below the content editor to the SEO plugin box and click Edit snippet to set the SEO title and Meta description.
- 5
In the same box, open the Social tab to set the Open Graph share image, title, and description, and the Advanced tab to set the Canonical URL.
- 6
Click Update to publish. On a multi-language site, add hreflang with a separate plugin like WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress. Yoast and Rank Math do not output hreflang on their own.
Check it worked. Open the live page, right-click, and choose View Page Source. A correct meta description sits inside a <meta name="description"> tag; press Ctrl/Cmd+F and search for your text and for 'og:title'. Paste the URL into Facebook's Sharing Debugger to confirm the share card.
Heads up. Two active SEO plugins fight and output duplicate tags, so keep only one. hreflang is not provided by Yoast or Rank Math; a multi-language site needs WPML, Polylang, or TranslatePress, which adds the hreflang links once the translated pages exist.