Wordpress SEO - The all in one guide
Hello
If you are here, I guess you have a beautiful WordPress site, but now you want people to find you.
WordPress is out-of-the-box already pretty good at SEO, but not perfect. That’s why I write this guide.
Before you start reading this, I assume you already have a basic WordPress knowledge.
Setup
Visitor statistics
If you haven’t already done so, make an account in Google Webmaster Tools.
Add your site, you will get a key, just keep this tab open.
Before we start installing plugins, It is important that your links makes sense, the default wordpress Permalinks structure is to use parameters like this https://www.ab-it.io/?p=123 to define a page. This doesn’t make sense to humans and even if search engines can handle this, it is recommended to change.
Even google ask you to do it (page8)
Some users might link to your page using the URL of that page as the
anchor text.
If your URL contains relevant words, this provides
users and search engines with more information about the page
than an ID or oddly named parameter would
- Go to Settings=> permalinks
- Select postname
- save changes
- Done
Well that was simple wasn’t it? The chances are high you will get now a 404 error if you go to one of your posts.
If you don’t get one, skip this
If it didn’t work, it means Wordpress doesn’t have write access to your .htaccess and you need to do it manually:
You can contact your host and ask to modify the .htaccess file for wordpress pretty URLs.
Install plugin
Go to plugins tab and add the All in one SEO pack.
The name speaks for itself, and this plugin will handle a lot.
Configure Plugin
Now you can click All in One SEO in your dashboard. Luckily standard these options are pretty good so I won’t go in depth over them.
If you need extra explanation of an option, you can click the ? in front of every option.
In the webmaster verification box, you can fill in the
Google Webmaster Tools with the key you got in the beginning of this tutorial.
In the Google analytics box, add your Google Analytics Key: UA-XXXXXXX
Under Feature manager, install Sitemap.xml,Social Meta and Robots.txt(of course you can install others too, but these won’t be covered here)
Sitemap
After you have done this, click update options an then click in the dashboard on All in One SEO==> XML Sitemap. (I would recommend to leave everything in performance as it is.)
Now you have to enter your ftp settings, as the plugin needs it to generate the sitemap.
Adapt this to your needs(for most sites the default options are OK) and press Update Sitemap.
now you can view your sitemap under the /sitemap.xml URL of your site.
Perfect! Let’s help google here and submit this manually.
Go back to the Google Webmaster Tools and under crawl>sitemaps press add sitemap.
insert “sitemap.xml” as the sitemap and submit it.
Google is now fully aware of your site!
Social Meta
If you have a Facebook/Twitter account you want to link to this website, you can fill this in.
This is actually the openGraph configuration.(tldr; make your site better shareable on social media).
This is documented very good, So I won’t go deeper into this.
(please click the question marks and then the link in front of Facebook Admin ID and Facebook App ID as this isn’t straightforward)
Robots.txt
you can hide some parts of your website for search engines here.
Using the SEO plugin
So now that we have fully configured the plugin, we can add SEO descriptions on our pages.
Go to Pages in your dashboard and you will see 3 new columns:
“SEO Title”, “SEO Description”,”SEO Keywords”
You can edit this by clicking the pencil. You should give every page a good SEO title,description and keywords as this will help people finding your site through search engines.
You can also do this with Posts(If you have a blog).
Every time you make a post, at the bottom of the page you can add SEO settings for your post.
Extra Plugins
WP Fastest Cache
Search engines rank faster sites above slower sites, so your SEO definitely benefits from Caching.(bonus, the users also do!)
Install this plugin from the plugin repository.
- Go to WP Fastest Cache
- Check everything except “
- Don’t show the cached version for desktop to mobile devices
- “ (unless you have a different site for mobile of course)
- Submit
if you get an error.
- /wp-content/cache/ is needed to be created
— /wp-content/cache/all/ is needed to be created
then you have to create these directories with permission 755 and do it again.
Your Website should be blazing fast now.
WP Spell Check
Chances are that you make spelling mistakes, nothing wrong with that, but this hurts your SEO and makes your site look unprofessional.
This plugin checks your site for spelling mistakes and correct them.
Article originally published here: https://www.ab-it.io/blog/wordpress-seo-the-all-in-one-guide/
