10-Basic-SEO-For-Wordpress-Google
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/ Basic SEO for WordPress Basic SEO for WordPress SEO What is SEO Site performance URL structure Page Title Meta description XML Sitemaps Popular WordPress SEO Tools Integrating Google Analytics Adding your site to Google Webmaster tools (Search Console) WordPress SEO Best Practices Create unique, high quality content Create a content structure with categories and tags Leverage social media Internal Links External links Image optimization Comments optimization SEO You have set up a great WordPress site, and learned to incorporate functionalities like eCommerce capability into it. In order to make your website successful, you still have to understand a few more more essential aspects. Search Engine Optimization or SEO is one of these. In simple terms, with SEO, you are making your site more accessible to search engines. So when a user types a relevant keyword on the search engine, your site shows up in the search results. By following the industry standards of search engine optimization, and regularly updating high quality content, you can surely get good ranking and traffic in due time. Now, WordPress is considered as one of the most SEO-friendly content management systems at the moment. You can take advantage of this to create an optimized site that scores high in / search engine rankings if you follow the expert advice on SEO. This tutorial will guide you on the basic concept of SEO, and introduce some of the popular tools and best practices. What is SEO SEO is a set of site optimization strategies that would make your site more accessible to search engines. The strategy involves optimizing the code, content and formatting of the site to make it more search engine friendly. And, it is also about maintaining user friendly content that helps users find what they are looking for easily. Some of the important aspects on your site that makes a difference in terms of SEO are good quality content, site performance, url structure, titles, descriptions, sitemaps and images. Let’s look into some of these terms in more detail to understand them better. Site performance How fast your site loads is an important aspect of SEO. If users click a button on your site, and it takes a bit longer to load, there are chances that they will leave your site immediately. This is especially relevant to eCommerce sites, as the customer wouldn’t have the patience to wait. According to statistics, a one second delay can impact your conversions by 7%, and customer satisfaction by 16%. Site performance is an important criteria that search engines consider for your page ranking as well. So it is important to look for any issues with site performance, and immediately fix those. You can use tools like Pingdom or G Tmetrix to understand the performance of your site. Some of the determinants of page load speed are your hosting service, the number of plugins, external code on the site, page size, etc. You need to consistently test these aspects to optimize the performance of your site. URL structure The blog posts on your site are accessed by users through their permalinks, which is automatically set by WordPress when you create a post. You may have noticed this while creating a blog post. The below screenshot shows a permalink: / Now, this permalink structure plays a big part in SEO. Let’s know what all ways you can optimize this. Simplify the permalink structure The structure of the permalink should not be very technical or complicated. It should have a user friendly format where users can get an idea on what the post is about. Keeping the permalink structure simple with the title of your article (post name) is a good practice. And if you have a category structure on your site, you can also set it up with the category name and post name. You can change the permalink structure from the navigation panel (S ettings > Permalinks) . You can select a suitable permalink structure for your site. For example, you can choose post name as below: / Or, choose a custom structure with category and post name. You can select the field ‘Custom Structure’ and then use the available tags for category and post name. Decide on ‘www’ You can also decide whether you want to keep ‘www’ in your url or not. That is, your site url will be either h ttp://yoursite.com/ or h ttp://www.yoursite.com/. You can choose the preferred option by going to Settings > General. / Remove stop words Stop words are words like ‘a’, ‘and’ ‘the’, etc. Having these words in the url is not really advisable. So, experts advise to remove these. If you are using an SEO tool, it will automatically remove stop words from the permalink. Get an SSL certificate Having an SSL certificate offers a minor advantage in search engine rankings. Basically when you have this, your site url changes from ‘http’ to ‘https’, which is more secure. Though this is not a mandatory requirement, you can definitely use it if your hosting service provider is offering it for free. / Page Title The page title is the one that appears on search results, and naturally it is the first thing that catches attention to your post or page. You have to optimize this title search engines. According to experts, you can keep the relevant keywords at the start of the title, for search engines to get the topic readily. Some of the common SEO tools allow you to modify this title, which we will discuss later in this tutorial. Meta description Another important aspect that search engines look for in a post is its meta description. This will be a short write-up that has the main keyword of the article and relevant information about the post. Search engines use this description to display in the snippet that is visible on search engines. XML Sitemaps XML sitemaps help to intimate search engines that you have updated your site with a new page or post. With the help of an SEO tool, you can easily manage these. Once you enable the option for sitemaps, it is presented to search engines every time you publish a new post or page. These are the fundamental aspects of WordPress SEO that you need to look into when you start out with a new site. Now let’s see what are the popular tools available to help you with SEO. / Popular WordPress SEO Tools There are quite a few popular SEO tools in the WordPress plugin repository. Let’s take a quick look at the top four Yoast SEO Yoast is one of the most popular SEO tools for WordPress with over 5 million active installs. It offers a comprehensive solution that helps you get to the top spot in search rankings. It helps you optimize the basic SEO aspects of your website and content. All in One SEO Pack This is another great option you can use for search engine optimization. It is quite simple for beginners as you can just install and it will work out of the box. However, for WooCommerce support, you need to purchase the premium version of the plugin. The SEO Framework This is another automated SEO solution that is quite good for beginners. It helps you improve your search presence quite efficiently. You can simply install and it will be up and running. SEO SQUIRRLY This plugin offers a solution that helps you optimize content to suit both search engines and actual readers. It also offers assistance in determining the best keywords for your site as well. How to integrate Yoast SEO Now, let’s see how to install the most popular SEO solution for WordPress sites - Yoast SEO. You can install Yoast SEO plugin from the Plugins section on your site ( Plugins > Add New ). Once you install and activate the plugin, you can run the Setup Wizard to guide you through the installation process. Once that is complete, you can use the plugin to optimize your site and content. You will see a new section on your WordPress navigation panel for Yoast SEO. Any issues that require your immediate attention will be displayed on the dashboard ( SEO > General ). For example, the visibility settings of your site is an important aspect that you need to configure when your site is live. / When your site is still in development stage, there is an option to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’. However, when your site is live you should change this option to encourage search engines to index your site. This is important, as with SEO you are trying to get better in search engine rankings. To uncheck this, you can go to S ettings > Reading. Uncheck the ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ option. / You can enable or disable specific features of the Yoast plugin. Go to S EO > General and click on the Features tab. You will see several options including XML sitemaps here. These are all enabled by default, and you can disable if you don’t want a particular feature. / On your Post edit page, you will see an option for Yoast SEO, which will help you optimize your content. / Here, you can set a focus keyword for your post, as well as a page title and meta description. Yoast plugin comes with a lot of documentation and tutorials, which you can go through to understand further optimization options. / Integrating Google Analytics Another important step that you need to do to get in control of your SEO is integrating Analytics to your website. With the help of Google Analytics, you will know the traffic statistics on your site, and also understand user behavior.