Many, many blogs that I see are not formatted with search engines in mind. Maybe it is because the blog owners are lazy, or possibly because the blog owners simply do not know what to do. But, WordPress SEO is actually very easy to accomplish. There is one major manual change you should make, then the rest can all be done with two plugins: WordPress SEO by Yoast and W3 Total Cache.
Changing URL Format Manually
This is the biggest thing I notice that very few blogs are taking into account. You want to make sure that your post name, which should contain a targeted keyword, is shown in the URL of each post.
By default, WordPress works against your rankmath vs yoast SEO efforts and uses the “?p=###” format. This is does not contain the post title, which you hopefully took some time to tactically create with a keyword of your choosing!
To change this, go to Settings > Permalinks. Now, simply click the bullet next to “Post Name”.
Installing the WordPress SEO Plugin
In order to get this wonderful little (actually very, very large) plugin, head over to your WordPress dashboard. Go to Plugins > Add New. Now just search for “WordPress SEO by Yoast” and click install. Done!
Optimizing Titles in Searches
When people find your blog in the search engines, you want the title they see in the results to be optimized. This means that the title people see should be in the format of “Title of Post > Site Name”.
This much better than the default setting, which would have displayed “[yoursite.com] > [Category] > [Post Name]”. You do not want the site name to be first; you want the post title first.
With the SEO plugin by Yoast, this is easily changed by going to SEO > Titles. Once there, go to the Homepage title template field and enter in “%%sitename%% ” %%sitedesc%%”. Also, go to the Post title template and enter in “%%title%% ” %%sitename%%”.
Optimizing Each Post
Everytime you are creating a new post, you will see a box under the text you are typing labeled “WordPress SEO by Yoast”. This is where you will optimize each post.
What you first must do is deal with the “Focus Keyword” field. You need to type in the main keyword that you are trying to optimize the post for.
The SEO Title field is not necessary if you already optimized Post titles previously. However, if you chose not to follow that step, then all you must do is click on the “Generate SEO title” button.
Next is the Meta Description box. What you enter in here will be shown when people find your post in web searches. Because of this, what you choose for your Meta Description is very important because it determines whether people will click on your site or not. You have to come up with your own Meta Description, but try to put your focus keyword somewhere in it.
Speed Up Your Site
Speed is pretty important for SEO. The speed of loading pages on your website determines how many pages per day a search engine spider will index.
So, to speed up your site, all you need to do is install the “W3 Total Cache” plugin.
Once installed, head over to the Performance tab, and click on General Settings. The specific settings you choose depends on your web host, but if you have rankmath vs yoast HostGator, read on.
For HostGator websites, you should check Page Cache, Minify, Database Cache, and Browser Cache.
To make these changes go into effect, click the Deploy button. If you have an error, click the Deploy button in the yellow box right below the “W3 Total Cache by W3 EDGE” title, NOT the Deploy button in the General box. The current version of this plugin has problems with the normal Deploy button, but clicking the button in the yellow box works.
XML Sitemaps
To complete your SEO efforts, you have to set up the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin to submit XML sitemaps to major search engines.
You can do this by going to SEO > XML Sitemaps. Then, simply check the button next to “Check this box to enable XML sitemap functionality.” Then check the boxes next to “Ping Yahoo!” and “Ping Ask.com”.
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