SEO in your theme
SEO in your theme
How to set the title, description and focus keyword that search engines see for each of your pages.
Open SEO in the admin sidebar, just under Design. The screen lists every page on your site in one short table, 25 to a page:
- the theme's own pages, such as Home, About, Contact, FAQ, Terms, Privacy and the blog, marked Theme page;
- every published page you made yourself under Pages in WordPress, marked WordPress page.
Each row shows the page's title in Google, whether it has a description, its focus keyword and its SEO score. The link under the page name opens the page in a new tab.
Use Find a page to search all your pages, and the menu beside it to show only pages with a missing title or description, no focus keyword, text that is too long, or a Poor, Needs work or Good score. Rows per page at the foot of the table shows 10, 25, 50 or 100 at a time; your browser remembers the choice.
To change a page, click Edit (or anywhere on its row). An editor opens under the row with the three boxes below. Only one page is open at a time.
Title in Google
This is the blue headline people see in Google and the text on the browser tab. Type it exactly as you want it to appear.
The grey text in an empty box is the title the page uses now. Leave the box empty to keep it.
The counter under the box shows how many characters you have used. Search results usually show about 60 characters in full, so the counter turns orange when you go over.
Description
This is the short summary under the title in search results. One or two sentences that tell people what they will find on the page work best.
Search results usually show about 160 characters. Leave it empty and search engines pick some text from the page themselves.
Focus keyword
The word or phrase you most want this page to be found for, for example "wedding venues in Bath". Use one focus keyword per page, and a different one for each page.
What the ticks mean
Under the focus keyword in the editor there are three small checks. They update as you type.
| Check | Green tick | Red cross |
|---|---|---|
| In the title | The keyword appears in the title | It does not |
| In the description | The keyword appears in the description | It does not, or there is no description |
| In the web address | The keyword appears in the page's address, such as /wedding-venues/ | It does not |
A grey dash means there is nothing to check yet, usually because the focus keyword is empty. The home page address has no words in it, so its last check always shows a dash.
The ticks are a guide, not a score. Write for people first: a natural title that includes the keyword is better than a list of keywords.
Saving
Click Save, or press Enter in the title or keyword box. The page saves straight away without reloading, Saved appears beside the button, and the row above updates. Cancel puts back what was saved and closes the editor.
If you leave the screen with changes that are not saved, your browser asks you first.
The SEO score
Each page gets a score out of 100, worked out from its title, description and focus keyword as the page uses them (what you typed, or what the page shows now):
- Good (80 to 100), Needs work (50 to 79) or Poor (0 to 49).
- The title counts for up to 40 points: a length of about 30 to 60 characters, the focus keyword in it (more if it comes early), and a title no other page uses.
- The description counts for up to 35 points: having one, a length of about 120 to 160 characters, the focus keyword in it, and a description no other page uses.
- The focus keyword counts for up to 25 points: having one, the keyword in the page's web address (the home page always counts here), and a keyword no other page uses.
The editor shows the score at the top and updates it as you type, with a short list of what is done and what could be better, for example "Title is 72 characters. Google usually shows about 60 before cutting it off." Use it as a guide: a clear title and description written for people matter more than the number.
The SEO checklist
The card on the right sums up all your pages:
- the average SEO score, and how many pages are Good, Needs work and Poor;
- how many have a title, a description and a focus keyword set;
- how many titles are over 60 characters and how many descriptions are over 160;
- how many pages have no description;
- how many pages, listings, categories and blog posts are in your sitemap.
The figures update each time you save a page.
Under the checklist, Quick links opens your sitemap, Google Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools and PageSpeed Insights in a new tab.
The focus keyword in the page code
When a page has a focus keyword, the theme also adds it to that page's code as a keywords tag. Pages with no focus keyword are left exactly as they are.
Hide a page from search engines
In a page's editor, switch on Hide this page from search engines and click Save. Search engines are asked not to show the page, and it leaves your sitemap. Visitors can still open it, and links to it keep working.
Use it for pages that are only useful to people already on your site, such as a thank-you page. In the table the page shows Hidden, and it is left out of the score figures. The Show menu can list just the hidden pages.
If your whole site is set to discourage search engines (Settings ▸ Reading), a note at the top of the SEO screen says so. Untick that setting when you launch.
The same values on Design ▸ All Pages
The theme's own pages also have an SEO title and Meta description on their cog panel under Design ▸ All Pages. Those are the same values as in the SEO table: change one and the other shows it. The cog panel has an Edit all pages in SEO link to come back here.
If you use an SEO plugin
If Yoast SEO or Rank Math is active, what you type in the table is passed to that plugin for each page, and nothing is printed twice. Leave a box empty to keep what the plugin shows now.
With another SEO plugin, set the titles and descriptions of your normal WordPress pages in that plugin. The theme's own pages still use the values in this table.