Many plugins can be installed in WordPress – including for SEO. One of them is the popular Yoast SEO. The step-by-step guide will help you perform basic optimization for SEO. See how to simply improve the visibility of a site put up on WordPress.
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Start: indexation, installation, GSC
For starters, check if your site indexes at all. Log in and go to Settings > Reading > Search Engine Visibility.
Google Search Console
When you make sure the option is unchecked, add the site to Google Search Console. With this, you will be able to measure the visibility of the site and the effects of SEO. You can add a page to GSC in two ways: put the verification tag in the <head section> of the page or just use the plugin. I will show you how to do it in Yoast SEO.
If you don’t already have the plug-in installed, you will literally do it in a moment. Just go to the Plugins section in the side menu and click Add New. Then search for the Yoast SEO plugin, install it and activate it. You can activate or deactivate plugins in the Installed plugins section.
Then, you can proceed to add the site to GSC. Go to the side menu SEO > General > Webmaster Tools and paste the verification code.
After that, all you have to do is save the changes and verify the service in your Google Search Console account.
The next step is to add a site map (Google Sitemap) to GSC. A Sitemap is an .xml file that lists all the subpages of your site. With Yoast SEO, you will generate a sitemap with a few clicks. Go to the SEO section > General > Features and find the item in the list: XML Site Map – then make sure it is enabled. The site map generated by Yoast has the address: https://twojadomena.pl/sitemap-index.xml. Now you can add the site map link to Google Search Console.
Why create master pages?
One important part of SEO is internal linking, so be sure to have good URLs. The name of the sub-page is placed in the slug, that is, it is in the website address after the domain name. Before you start internal linking, it’s a good idea to introduce parent pages.
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The best way to describe it is with an example.
Let’s say you run an online shoe store. Start by creating a subpage: shoes.
Your offer includes, among other things, sports shoes, so you also create a SPORTS SHOES sub-page, but set the SHOES sub-page as the overarching sub-page. To do this, in the screen of the newly created sub-page, click on the right side of the Page Attributes section and select the appropriate parent page. This will make the address of the new subpage look like this: https://twojawitryna.pl/buty/buty-sportowe.
Meta title and meta description in WordPress
It is also worth taking care to set meta tags. Although meta description doesn’t directly affect SEO, it increases click-through rates, which already matters. So I recommend taking care of meta titles and meta descriptions.
The meta title should be about 70 characters with spaces. In the title, it is best to include the positioned phrases and the name of the company or blog. The meta description can be a little longer, but must not exceed 160 characters with spaces. You can include phrases in the meta description, but above all, it is worth remembering the Call to Action to encourage users to enter the site (Buy, View, Book, Discover, etc.).
Meta title and description can be easily set in Yoast SEO: individually for a specific subpage or globally. If you want to set the meta title and description for a single subpage, go to the bottom of the screen, then enter the title and description in the appropriate fields:
If you want to speed up your work, you can use variables so that new subpages will have the right titles right away. You’ll do this in the Yoast SEO plugin panel – in the screenshot you can see how to do it for categories:
How to create SEO-friendly subpages?
To create a new subpage, choose from the Pages side menu > Add New. Remember that each sub-page can have only 1 H1 header (<h1>). In WordPress, the H1 header is very often the name of the subpage. It is also a good idea to write a minimum of 3-4 thousand characters of content for each subpage and include H2 headers (<h2>) with phrases in the texts.
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Internal linking
In addition to gaining links on other sites, it is worth taking care of internal linking. It’s a good idea to include internal links in blog articles – link the positioned keywords to product pages and categories related to the topic. It’s also a good idea to place small boxes linking to sub-pages on parent pages.
These are just the basics of using Yoast SEO on WordPress – SEO is a really broad topic, but even after basic optimization you will see the first results, so in my opinion: it’s worth it.
