Customize how your site appears in search results by adjusting SEO titles, descriptions, and page visibility. In this guide, you will learn how to configure SEO settings for your WordPress.com site.
This feature is available on sites with the WordPress.com Business and Commerce plans. If you have a Business plan, make sure to activate it. For free sites and sites on the Personal and Premium plans, upgrade your plan to access this feature.
The search engine optimization (SEO) settings are enabled by default. You can verify that your SEO settings are enabled by following these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab (or Jetpack → Traffic if you have not enabled plugins yet.)
- In the Search engine optimization section, confirm that the toggle for “Customize your SEO Settings” is turned on (green).
If you don’t see the option to customize your SEO settings, there are a few reasons why:
- Your site is not on an eligible plan.
- You have activated an SEO plugin, such as Yoast SEO, which replaces these features.
- Jetpack blocks are disabled in the editor. To enable the Jetpack block options, visit your site’s dashboard and navigate to Jetpack → Settings → Writing. Here, toggle on the Jetpack blocks option in the “Composing” section.
- You have a self-hosted (WordPress.org) website without the Jetpack plugin.
The page title structure determines how the titles of your content appear in search engine results and social media sites. For example, in the image below, we have chosen to display the Site Title (WordPress.com), a colon (:) and the Tagline (“Everything You Need to Build Your Website”):
Follow these steps to customize the page title structure:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab (or Jetpack → Traffic if you have not activated any plugins yet).
- In the “Search engine optimization” section, click the option to “Expand to customize the page title structures of your site.”
- For each content type (front page, posts, pages, tags, or archives page), click the buttons at the top right to add elements like the Site Title, Tagline, or Post Title to the page title structure.
- Add separators (like a dash (-), pipe (|), or colon (:)) to separate elements.
- Use your keyboard’s delete or backspace key to remove elements.
- Click the “Save settings” button to save your changes.
If you add custom text in the page title structure, that custom text will appear on all content of that type (post, page, etc.)
A meta description is a short summary of your website used by search engines. Search engines sometimes use this information to determine the site’s relevance for specific searches.
This meta description setting applies to your site’s front page only. To customize your site’s front page meta description, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab (or Jetpack → Traffic if you have not activated any plugins yet).
- In the “Search engine optimization” section, click the option to “Expand to edit your front page meta description.”
- Type a brief description (up to 160 characters) of what your site is about.
- Click the “Save settings” button.
📌
After updating your meta description, search engines may take two to four weeks to re-index your site. If your site was indexed before you added a description, search engines may display “No information available for this page” temporarily.
You can control how individual pages and posts appear in search results by optimizing their metadata. Metadata tells search engines what your content is about. You can choose to generate SEO metadata automatically or create custom titles and descriptions.
To automatically generate SEO titles, descriptions, and image alt text when you publish new content, follow these steps:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Jetpack → Settings, then click the Traffic tab (or Jetpack → Traffic if you have not activated any plugins yet).
- In the “Search engine optimization” section, toggle the option to “Automatically generate SEO title, SEO description, and image alt text for new posts.”
The changes will be automatically applied and used the next time you publish a page or post.
To manually add the SEO title and description of a page or post, follow these steps:
- While editing a page or post, click the Jetpack icon (that looks like a lightning bolt on a green circle) in the top right corner.
- Under the SEO section, type an “SEO Title“ and “SEO Description“.
- Click “Publish” or “Save” to save the change.
📌
Search engines typically update your title and description within a few hours. However, they may display content from your page instead if they determine it’s more relevant to a specific search.
You can auto-generate metadata using AI:
- Visit your site’s dashboard.
- Navigate to Pages or Posts and edit any existing piece of content (or create a new one).
- In the upper-right corner of the editing screen, click the Jetpack icon (it looks like a green circle with a lightning bolt inside).
- Click on “Optimize SEO” to expand those options.
- Click the “Generate metadata” button to automatically create an SEO title, description, and image alt text based on the content you’ve added.
- You can then manually edit the generated text, if needed.
- Click the Save button.
You can also toggle on the “Auto-generate metadata” option to have the metadata created automatically with AI if it has not been added when publishing the content.
You can exclude individual pages or posts from search results. To hide a page from search engines, follow these steps:
- In your site’s dashboard, navigate to Pages or Posts.
- Click on the page or post you wish to hide from search engines.
- Click the Jetpack icon (that looks like a lightning bolt on a green circle) in the top right corner.
- Under the SEO section, check the box labeled “Hide page from search engines.”
- Click “Publish” or “Save” to save the change.
