WordPress Website SEO for Beginners (Search Engine Optimization Basics) - in English by anookumarsikhosikhao
So you're new to WordPress and you want to get more search traffic through SEO well I've got some good news and some bad news for you the bad news is that WordPress alone isn't going to help you rank in Google it's just the tool but the good news is that WordPress makes it dead simple to implement search engine optimization best practices so even if you're a complete beginner you can optimize your website for higher Google rankings easily and you're about to find out how to do it in this WordPress SEO tutorial stay tuned what's up guys samphire with HRT's the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche now first I want to clear up any confusion.
Content Management -
Mobile-Friendly Content -
Before we get into the WordPress interface I just want to make a quick note on theme selection now there are a ton of free and premium templates you can get so here are two things that you should look for first the theme should be mobile responsive and this is important because as Google said mobile-friendly content may perform better for those who are searching on mobile and second you should avoid themes that are bloated with plugins or third-party scripts that you really don't need to read through the theme descriptions to ascertain what's included and you also can run the theme demo URL through PageSpeed tools like Google'sPageSpeed insights Pingdom or GT metrics right let's advance to some important WordPress settings first we need to decide whether we want to use just domain calm or WWN calm and the reason for this is because Google will look at these two pages separately now the good thing about WordPress is that it'll automatically redirect the other version to the one that you choose.So if you have a new website then it doesn't really matter which one you select but if you've ever used both protocols or you have an issue like this way the site where you can access the same page from different URLs then you'll want to see which version has more backlinks pointing at it you can check this by using HRF Site Explorer tool just enter your domain then you'll be wanting to take note of the amount of referring domains pointing at your website then take the other version of the URL and do the same thing and in this case there's a clear winner but for other sites where it's not so obvious, you would want to manually do a full backlink analysis using the backlinks report.
You can change your URL by clicking on settings and then edit both your WordPress address URL and site address URL now if you have existing content on your website and you change your URL there are issues that can arise so I'd recommend having access to a developer you can contact if need be alright next we want to make sure our permalinks are set up optimally so click on permalink under settings in the sidebar and you can see from the previews that permalinks are basically just the URLs for your posts and pages the one that.
I prefer using is post name and that's for two reasons number one people can look at your URL and know immediately what it's about so taken a look at these links from our blog and guess what they're about and number two it keeps the URL short in our on-page SEO study we found that short URLs tend to rank better in google as you can see from this graph now it's important to note that if you already have content using a different permalink structure then changing it toa different option may cause broken pages which is a bad thing particularly if you have backlinks pointing at them but if you want to set up your structure this way then you may need to add redirects which you can do with a plug-in like redirection the other plugin that.
I highly recommend installing is Yoast SEO now this plugin is the industry standard and should work great for you out of the box if your site is new then you can hover over the menu in the sidebar and go to XML sitemaps you'll want to make sure that this checkbox is checked and that you generate an XML sitemap which you can submit to search engines like Google and Bing as a general rule of thumb you only want to include pages that you want Google to find on your website here soI've disabled the author sitemap excluded media pages, as well as tags and format pages we'll touch on some of the other advanced settings.
on-page optimization tips you use for every single piece of content you, create you can create a new piece of content as a post or a page and by default, posts are used for your blog and pages, on the other hand, are more commonly used for static pages thatdon't really change often like yourabout Us page contact page or servicespages so let's create a post in terms of SEO there are four main parts here thetitle URL body of the content and yourmeta tags and we'll tackle these in thisorder this part here is where you set atitle for your post in general the titlethat you enter here will act as your h1tag from an on-page SEO standpoint nowthe main goal of the title is to enticevisitors to click through to yourarticle while accurately describing whatthe content on the page is about so youwant to create something that's clickworthy and not clickbait the secondbasic tip is to include your primarykeyword phrase in your title for exampleif we were writing a post on the best Nike running shoes then our title mightbe 17 best Nike running shoes foroptimal performance and comfort 2018 guide by default.
WordPress will change our the URL slug to the full name of the posts but we can edit it and change it to our primary keyword target where dashes would replace the spaces so I'll change it to best - Nike - running shoes and click OK next is the body since we're talking specifically about WordPress SEO I want to focus on the editor rather than on-page ranking factors and we have a good video on that so I'll link it up in the card and description now your editor will likely look different from mine since themes and plugins can add additional features first drop-down is very important because it includes text formatting styles so you can include h2s h3sand other subheadings into your posts with a click of a mouse so in this case our h1 is the title that we already set up here and an h2 would be a subheading like a zoom running shoes which is a branding and if we wanted to include.
specific models within the zoom line that we can create an h3 like Nike zoom fly and elaborate on the model using headings helps create a structure which can help Google better understand your content it also improves readability for your users the other two SEO relevant features are hyperlinks and images to create a hyperlink select the text you want to create a link from and click on the link icon and enter in the URL you want to link to the selected text will then act as what we call anchor text you can click on the gear icon to get more options.
I highly recommend selecting the open link in anew tab checkbox which will do exactlywhat it says when a visitor clicks thelink this is good for keeping visitorson your site while still being able todirect them to helpful resources and thefinal feature in here is the add Mediabutton this is used to insert imagesinto your post you can just drag anddrop your photos in here and WordPresswill upload it to your server after it'sdone uploading I highly recommendfilling in the alt text and this is goodto add for a few reasons first it addsmore context to the page telling Googlewhat the image is about and it may behelpful for ranking your images in Google images second it's helpful forpeople who are using screen readers likethe visually impaired and third if yourimage breaks then the alternative textwill show to replace the broken imageall right let's move on to the Yoast SEOsettings since we install the plug-inyou'll have a few fields that you canenter in at the bottom of the post orpage the first part is the title tagthis is the part that would show up inGoogle search results as well as in thebrowser tab so rather than leaving it asthe default.
I recommend pasting your title in here you'll notice that it's highlighted in red which tells us that our title tag is too long this will result in truncation in the Google search results which aren't appealing so we can actually alter this without changing the title of the actual article or your h1 tag so let's remove the word optimal click out of the text box and it looks like we're good to go.
Now we'll Want to Write a Meta -
description and this part is meant to support your title and further entice someone to click through generally I don't bother with a focus keyword as it doesn't do anything aside from giving you some SEO scores from Yoast so feel free to add it if you'd like but know that it doesn't make a difference for your actual search engine optimization efforts after you've finished your post you can publish it and have an SEO-friendly post done without touching a line of code now creating a page will be the exact same but there's one main feature difference worth noting assuming that you have your permalink structures the post name both page and posts URLs will show up like this but with pages, you can actually create them with different holes using subfolders so let's say that you're a digital marketing agency using WordPress and you have five different services you do SEO paid advertising social media marketing public relations and email marketing then.what you can do is create services landing page where you would talk about the different services you provide and naturally you'd probably add links to your individual services pages now rather than having each service page as domain.com slash service name you can nest them under the services subfolder so let's do that right now you can see that I'm creating a page on SEO services so I'll just click on the parent drop-down and choose the services page finally I'll save our pages of Draft and now you can see that the URL is accessible as a domain.com slash service slash SEO WordPress is my favorite CMS to you simply because it makes on-page SEO.
if you have any questions about using WordPress for SEO then leave a comment and I'd be happy too.
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