WordPress SEO & The Yoast SEO Plugin

An Overview of Search Engine Optimization aka SEO

While Google is the most important search engine, there are many other search engines out there that can be important tools for understanding your website visitors. Follow along as we explore these alternative search engines.

Give Google (and your visitors) what they want

You must understand what the Index is and how it works. It's critical for your success.

Understanding what SERPs are, also known as Search Engine Results Pages.

Regardless of what some say, keywords are alive and well. In this lecture we’ll explore what keywords really are and some guidelines on how to select them.

There are 3 distinct parts to SEO; on-page, off-page and technical SEO. Which ones should you focus on? Let’s find out.

It’s important to know where your visitors are coming from. If you don’t know, you can’t do anything to change it.

If you understand the basic foundation of SEO, you're ready to move on to learn some of the tools. Before you go, take this short quiz and check your understanding.

Learn how to use these easy and free keyword research tools and how to choose good keywords to start with.

Is WordPress a website, a blog, or both? A few key things you need to understand about WordPress.

Your site structure and permalink settings can make a huge difference in how Google sees your site.

Too many people don’t set up their WordPress site correctly. Learn the right way to set it up to dominate the competition.

Using categories and tags (also known a taxonomies) correctly make it easy for your visitors to find the content they're looking for and it makes it easy for Google to understand what your site and posts are about.

If you have a “Brick and Mortar” store (a physical location), then you must include one of these Local SEO plugins.

Don’t make this one deadly mistake (and don’t tell your competition). Discover how and why to edit your profile settings now.

Now you need to do some keyword research and additional site setup. Use this assignment to catch up and get ready for the next section.

• Do your own keyword research
• Set up your WordPress site
• Install your SEO plugins

I've just completed the update to the Yoast SEO Plugin section. See the lecture for more information.

This is the introduction to How to Set up the Yoast SEO Plugin. 

First, most people who install this plugin don’t do anything other than activate it, and move on from there. So, setting it up correctly for your site puts you out in front of most WordPress website owners.

Second, this is only one of the SEO plugins I recommend. Hopefully you got a copy of my report on the Top 11+ Must Use SEO WordPress Plugins for 2016. And hopefully you went through the report and installed some of those plugins to your site.

If you didn’t get the report, I’ve put a copy of it either below this video or in the notes section, depending on where you are watching this.

Third, simply setting up the Yoast SEO plugin will not fix your SEO woes if you don’t optimize each page and post on your site, and continue to optimize each new page and post as you go.

So whether you’re a seasoned content marketer or you’re just starting your WordPress site, you’re in the right place.

The following lessons will walk you through each section of the plugin so you’ll understand what each setting does and what you should choose without the guesswork. 

Setting up the Yoast SEO plugin with the Configuration Wizard

If you are just installing the Yoast SEO plugin for the first time on your site, things will look a little different than with the older versions of the plugin. To start, you’ll only see 3 choices in the nav bar on the left of the dashboard.

They are...

• Dashboard
• Search Console
• Go Premium

If you’ve previously installed the plugin and your version gives you more options than shown here, you can skip this video if you want, or it may be interesting for you to see how the Configuration Wizard works. Your choice.

In this lesson I’ll take you through the General Settings in the Yoast Dashboard. 

At this point, you should have the plugin installed and activated already, but if not, go to the link I’ve listed below or in the notes, then install and activate the plugin. Make sure you have the most current version of the plugin installed before you go any farther.

https://wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/

The rest of of this lesson is on the General Settings section of the plugin.

In this lesson, we’ll be working on the Titles & Metas section. This is one of, if not, the most important section of the Yoast SEO plugin. Take your time going through the lesson, and ask questions if  you aren't clear on any of the settings.

In this lesson, we will set up all of our social media profiles. 

You want to pick your main accounts associated with your website. So if you have company or business social accounts, enter those URLs. Otherwise, just enter your personal social media accounts as desired.

Here is the link for the Twitter Validation page I mention in the lecture - https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator

This lesson is on XML sitemaps.

If you don’t already know, an XML sitemap is a document that helps Google and other search engines better understand your website while crawling it. XML stands for Extensible Markup Language. Luckily, you don’t need to remember what XML stands for, you just need to know that having these sitemaps will help your SEO.

The Advanced Settings

In advanced settings we’ll be going over Breadcrumbs, Permalinks and RSS settings.

This lesson is on the Tools section of the Yoast SEO plugin.

There are 3 tools you may want to use.

• Bulk Editor
• File Editor
• Import and Export

Pay attention to this lesson, as some of the tools available to you can break your website.

This lesson is on connecting the Yoast plugin to your Google Search Console account.

Before you take this step, you have to have your website connected to your Google Search Console inside of Google analytics, or this won’t work. 

First, this is not an endorsement of the Yoast SEO premium plugins or extensions, I just want to be thorough by covering all sections of the plugin.  You’ll have to decide if any of the premium products are right for you.

On the Go Premium page you’ll find information about the Premium version of the plugin as well as Extensions for Video SEO, News SEO and Local SEO. 

Some final thoughts for you on setting up the plugin and SEO in general.

Did you set up the Yoast SEO Plugin correctly? Here's a short quiz to test your knowledge.

Since Google can’t watch your video or see what’s in your images and photos (yet), your words are what Google uses to judge your website. Learn what's important to make Google and your readers happy!

Notes for me: adding other H tags, using bold and Italic, white space, bullets and numbered lists.

Often overlooked, proper image SEO can really boost your rankings and visibility.

Text and images aren’t the only things that Google (and people) like to see in your posts. We’ll review some of the other possibilities, and they're totally fun!

Students will write a new blog post or page on their own WordPress website to optimize in the next section.

Just installing and correctly setting up the Yoast plugin isn’t enough. Now you need to optimize your post using the built in tools in the post editor.

The Yoast SEO plugin was just updated to version 3.0 with some major changes to look, access and functionality. Watch this video to see what's new.

Here are the example posts I mentioned in the previous lecture.

Optimizing your pages can be a challenge, we’ll go over some tips and when not to worry about the ‘Green Bullet’.

I’ll walk you through how to optimize an example post so you can see how I approach getting the coveted ‘Green Bullet’.

See if you can get a 'Green Bullet' while keeping the post or page people friendly.

Gain new insights on the difference between attracting people to your website and promoting your website to increase traffic.

Does having more pages and posts on your site add to your authority and ranking in Google? The answers might surprise you.

Now that you understand more about getting traffic to your website, find any pages on your site that are not indexed (that should be) and submit them for indexexing with the tools from ‘Getting Indexed - Part 2”.

Understand the difference between inbound and outbound marketing. You've got to know which way you're going!

Learn about content marketing and why it’s the hottest way to bring high-quality traffic to your website.

Is blogging still a viable way to earn money online? Discover which marketing method is right for you.

What are internal links and how to use them for SEO purposes both for people and the search engines.

Wait, what? Learn what external links are and whether you should use the nofollow tag or not.

What are inbound links? Why some are better than others and why some can really hurt your reputation.

How using social media is the easiest way to get links and traffic to your site. But not all links are created equal. Where to best invest your link building efforts.

Avoid this rookie mistake with social sharing! Learn how in this lesson.

Build some links and share your content.

A general review of the course so far.