Optimising your site using the techniques and tactics described in the article will help to improve rankings and gain more subscribers, in general you will have a better website. This covers the tips to use yoast plugin in wordpress based websites.
Installation of the Yoast SEO
Installing Yoast SEO should be the first step in your SEO strategy. Yoast SEO plugin will help to make sure your website is crawlable and findable. Yoast SEO will immediately take care of some technical SEO issues, just by being installed on your website. Besides that, the plugin will help to construct your website in such a way that Google will understand and rank it. The plugin offer a free and a premium plugin.
Why do you need to get higher rank?
Knowing your customer and their needs should be the primary focus. Make sure to attract the right audience to your website. Who are your customers? For whom did you build this website? What terms do your customers use when searching on Google? And what’s their search intent, what kind of content are they looking for?
SEOs refer to this stage as doing your keyword research. This is a hard and important phase. There are a lot of helpful tools that make doing keyword research easier. Some of these tools are free, others are rather expensive. While these tools will make the difficult phase of keyword research easier, you should remember that you can’t outsource your keyword research to a tool. You really need to think about your audience and about the search terms they are using. It’s also important to analyze what you’re seeing in the search results pages when entering your keywords. Take your time for this phase. It is crucial. If you do your keyword research correctly, you’ll come up with a long list of keywords you want to rank for.
If you’re just starting with your site, try to aim at ranking for long-tail keywords. Long-tail keywords are keywords that are longer and more specific and have far less competition than the popular head keywords. After a while, when your site starts to rank for the long-tail keywords, you could try and go after the more head keywords.
Know your customer needs
Before writing your content, you should think about what search terms you want to be found for. Every page or post should be optimized for a specific keyphrase. To find out, you need to do keyword research. In this process, you should ask yourself questions such as what terms do I want to rank for? Within a niche, you can become a true expert. Your expertise can enable you to create content that goes beyond that of your competitors. You can go deeper than others, or shed light on different angles of the same topic. For this, you’ll want to focus on long tail keyphrases. A keyphrase like this is more specific, and therefore easier to rank for. Also, it’ll be more suitable for your specific niche topic. It’s also important to think about what your audience actually wants to achieve by searching for a specific term. This is called search intent. For example, they could be looking for the answer to a specific question and you are able to provide the necessary information. Or they might want to buy a specific product that you can offer them. Think about the needs of your visitors and address them by creating content accordingly.
Content Creation
In order to get ranked, you need to have content. A very important step in how to start with your SEO is to write amazing content for all these search terms you want to be found for. The content analysis in the Yoast SEO plugin will help you to write that content. Our analysis will help you to write a text that is both readable and SEO friendly.
While you’re writing, make sure to use the words you want to be found for. Use them in headings and in the introduction and conclusion of your text. After writing your text, you should optimize your SEO title and your meta description. The Yoast SEO plugin will help you to do all these things.
Google needs to know your website exists. And, in order for Google to know about your awesome new site, you need at least one external link towards your site. The reason for this: Google crawls the web. It follows links and saves all the webpages it finds in a very large database called the index. So, if you want to get into that index, you need at least one external link. So make sure to get that link from an external website.
Internal Linking
Google also follows the links on your website, your internal linking structure. It crawls through your website following the internal linking structure of your site. That structure is like a guide to Google. Make sure your internal linking structure is flawless. That’ll help with your ranking.
If you start with a brand new website, you’ll probably don’t have much content yet. This is the perfect time to think about structure. So, decide which pages are most important to you. What are the pages you want to rank with? Make sure that these pages have the most internal links pointing towards them.
External Linking
External links are important to get your site in high positions in those search engines. But gathering those external links can be a hard process. Make sure to write content people wantto share and link to. Original ideas and great, valuable content will make the chance that people would want to share that much bigger. Of course, reaching out to people and making them aware of your awesome website and product can be a good strategy to get those external links too. Read more about a successful link building strategy or find out what link building is first.
Content Optimization
Your site should provide the best content on your chosen subject. People are looking for engaging, authoritative articles and trustworthy answers to their questions. Writing high-quality content for your WordPress site begins with your own unique ideas or distinctive take on a particular topic. But it also means presenting these ideas in a well-structured and accessible manner. Together, this will help you attract the audience you’re looking for and keep them engaged.
Optimize your Permalink
In most cases, your post’s URL should probably contain your focus keyphrase, so that it’s obvious what your page is about from the link. Always try to keep your permalinks short, descriptive, and clean don’t put unnecessary words in for the sake of it. Before you publish new posts or pages, you may also wish to consider removing ‘function words from your permalink. These are words like “a”, “and”, and “the”. When done carefully, this may make your permalinks more readable, and easier to use or link to. Posts with especially long titles may benefit from this approach. For posts which have already been published, we’d recommend being careful when changing permalinks.
Page Title Optimization
Each page’s title “the contents of the HTML title tag” can be one of the most important factors for ranking well in search results. Not only is it the literal title of the tab or browser window, but it’s also the first line people see in the search results. It describes what your page is, or is about, and acts as an advert which encourages users to click. On many websites, the default structure for posts and pages isn’t necessarily the most optimal approach for SEO. It’s critical that you think about the structure of your titles, as well as the content of the title on each individual page. It is good to consider the following points
- Search engines may put more weight on the first few words so, trying to get your keywords near the start of the title might make you more likely to rank well.
- People scanning result pages see the early words first. If your keywords are at the start of your listing your page is more likely to get clicked on.
Proper usage of Headings
Headings are great for structuring your content and helping reader’s process information in bite sized chunks. They can also be helpful in describing a page’s layout and focus to search engines.
WordPress transforms the headings you put in your content into their respective HTML tags. That makes it important to think about whichtype of headings you use, and in which order. Getting that wrong can make your content harder to understand.
Although most themes for WordPress get the basics right, it’s worth making sure that your template sets your post title is an <h1> tag, and that you’re not using <h1>tags anywhere else in your page or your post content. Your post content should then ‘flow’ naturally; for example, large, significant headings should use <h2> tags, subsections should use <h3> tags, and then subsequent new sections should use <h2>.
Meta Description Optimization
This is primarily used search engines to show a description of your page in the search engine results, usually below your page title. Tailoring and writing a descriptive Meta description can encourage users to click your results in the search engine, even if you’re not necessarily ranking in the top position. It’s an advert, and your opportunity to impress.
Writing compelling, informative descriptions of your page content for everypage on your site is best practice and gives you the opportunity to attract more visits. While it might feel like a lot of work to craft descriptions for every single page and post, it’s worth the effort. If you don’tprovide a meta description, the search engine will generally try to find the keyword which was searched for in your page, and automatically pick a string around that and highlight the searched phrase in bold in the results page.
Automatically generated snippets (whether by plugins, or search engines) are rarely as descriptive or as compelling as hand written ones. So, we recommend that you use the meta description field you find in the Yoast SEO plugin to write a meta description. Make sure it entices the reader to click through and make sure that it contains the focus keyword of your post or page at least once.
Image and Media Optimization
An often overlooked part of WordPress SEO is how you handle your images, videos, and media content.
To make sure that search engines can understand your images, you need to think about how you name and format your files. Writing descriptive accessible text descriptions helps, too, and can improve your performance significantly. As an added benefit, you’re also helping out readers who rely on assistive technologies like screen readers.
Update cornerstone content
Some pages on your site are more important than others. The most valuable content of your site is called cornerstone content. We’ve written extensively about cornerstone articles and how they can improve your rankings.
These posts or pages contains:
- essential information for your audience
- complete, up-to-date and well-written
- authority
- the most links from related posts within your own site
- rank higher than your other articles on the same topic
- most organic traffic to your site
When you’re in doubt where to start with updating your site’s content, always give priority to your cornerstone content. Your business relies on them, and they should never go stale.
Canonical Link
With Yoast SEO, it’s very easy to add a canonical link to a post or page. No need for a developer. Just go to the ‘advanced’ tab in the Yoast SEO metabox below your post or page. There, you’ll find the Canonical URL field where you can enter the URL of the original article the one you want to point search engines to.
Optimize site structure
A solid site structure helps users and the search engines navigate your site. On top of that, it will make clear what pages on your website are most important. There are two pillars to a good site structure organizing your site and contextual internal linking.
Organize your site
Organizing your site will help you set up a navigation path from your homepage right to your individual posts and pages, and back. Adding categories and subcategories will bring order to chaos.
You should always make sure your homepage is clear and easy to navigate. Cluttering the homepage with too many options will make your site more difficult to understand. Adding a clear menu and breadcrumbs helps your user navigate your site wherever they are.
Manage categories and tags
WordPress has two default ways of structuring your content: categories and tags. Categories add hierarchy to your content and group topics broadly. When setting up your site structure, pick a number of main categories. Adding them to your menu can be a good idea, especially if you only have a blog. If you have a blog and several products, a different setup might make more sense. Make sure your categories are roughly the same size. If your categories become too big, make subcategories. Tags are useful for users exploring topics, but they are often misapplied. It’s important not to use too many tags, and to use them more than once or twice. Remember, you want to group your content, not just give it a description.
If you want to structure your content differently, WordPress also allows you to create custom taxonomies. Always consider carefully whether your custom taxonomy groups content in a way that makes sense and helps your visitors.
Pagination
If you have lots of posts on your WordPress site, you might want to think about how your pagination looks and works. Otherwise, you might find that your best content is ‘buried’ deep in your site, and users and search engines may struggle to find it.
Breadcrumbs
You’ll probably want to add breadcrumbs to your posts and pages. Breadcrumbs are the links, usually above the title post, that looks like “Home > Articles > WordPress SEO“. They are good for two things:
- They allow your users to easily navigate your site.
- They allow search engines to determine the structure of your site more easily.
These breadcrumbs should link back to the homepage, and the category the post is in. If the post is in multiple categories it should pick one.
To get breadcrumb navigation to show you on your pages, you may need to adapt your single.php and page.php files in your theme, and include the code for breadcrumbs from the Yoast SEO plugin. You find the settings and instructions on how to do that in the SEO → Search Appearancesection.
HTML XML Sitemaps
You can use XML sitemaps to tell Google and the other search engines that your site has been updated. The WordPress SEO plugin automatically configures your XML sitemaps. We generate sitemaps for your different post types, including your images, and make sure that it generates and loads really quickly. You can check and manage which types of your content, archives, and templates should be included in your XML sitemaps in your SEO → Search Appearance settings. Content types which are set to not show in search results will be automatically excluded from your XML sitemaps.
For larger or more complex sites, it might make sense to provide an HTML sitemap, too. This is a normal page on your website, which helps users navigate to deeper or more specific content.
Speed UP WordPress Website
If the website speed is slow, it will frustrate users. That makes them less likely to engage, browse, convert, or visit again. That, in turn, can make them less likely to share your content, link to your pages, or recommend your brand. Speed is an important part of WordPress SEO, and a huge part of the overall user experience. That means that it’s critical to measure and manage your performance especially for users on mobile or slower connections.
Secure WordPress website
Security starts with your own login. The default username in WordPress is admin, so change that first. Otherwise, a hacker’s first guess for your username is just too easy. The same goes for your password. Passwords like ‘123456’ and ‘welcome01’ are just not enough. Use a password manager like 1Password or LastPass and pick a 20+ character password instead. WordPress also has a number of plugins for two-factor verification, so adding that to your website is easy as pie as well.
Mobile Friendly Theme
After making sure that your site is fast, make sure your website, or rather your theme, is mobile-friendly. Making your website mobile-friendly starts with making sure the links are not too close together, and buttons are easily clickable. Your font should be consistent and shouldn’t be too small and your images not too big, both in file size and dimensions. Use responsive design techniques for adapting the website to the user’s screen size.
Analyze and improve performance
The first one, for analyzing results, is Google Analytics. By adding Google Analytics to your website, you make sure all user data will be stored in your own account. You can, for instance, check how many visits your pages get, how many of your visitors convert, how many visitors immediately leave your website after landing on a certain page and much more. Within Google Analytics, you can see how visitors behave on your website.
The second tool is meant to analyze how your website performs and to see how visitors find you in the search engine. That tool is Google Search Console. By exporting and sorting through your search queries and impression data, it’s easy to identify opportunities where you could focus on improving clickthrough rates, content, and/or rankings.