2.11 Setup for SEO

Hey, welcome back to the WordPress Secure Setup Guide. In this lesson, we're gonna go through setting your site up, so it has a strong foundation for SEO. Now, most of the work that you do for SEO. is going to be across the life span of your site. But there are a few things that you wanna do during the installation process, so that you're all ready to go. When you start studying SEO and really diving into the details, these can get fairly complex but the good news is there is an excellent SEO plugin for Wordpress, it's extremely popular, and it's developed and maintained by a guy named Yoast. This guy lives eats and breathes SEO and he's constructed his SEO plugin in such a way that it almost makes things hands free for you. I'm not one typically to rave about a Word Press plugin, but installing this plugin and as a general rule, following what it tells you to do is almost like having an SEO consultant working for you as you developing your site. I say this because there's a lot of educational material integrated into the plugin, and it saves you from having to go out and study all different aspects of SEO and then find individual plugins to handle each thing. Everything's integrated into one. So I'm just going to show you through the basics of this plugin, and a couple of things you should think about getting up and running when you first install it. So we'll go ahead and add the plugin. Just search for Yoast, Y-O-A-S-T. And then this is the one you want, Yoast SEO. So we'll install that and activate it. And then right away you can see you've got a little red notice up here. And this is gonna tell you whenever there's something wrong with your site that's preventing you from getting optimum SEO. One of the things this plugin will do is continually analyze your site and each of your posts and give you feedback on improvements that you can make. So this brings us to the first thing that you going to want to set up with a new site. And that is connecting it to Google Search console and you'll find Google search console here. I'll give you a link to this in the notes below this video. Now this also used to be Known as Google Webmaster Tools so if you see references to Google Webmaster Tools. That's actually referring to this now and this is, basically, a free service provided by Google to help you figure out how to improve your performance in the search engines. So it's kind of a must use. So what you wanna do is get yourself set up on Google Search Console and then go back in to your Yoast plugin and use it to connect Google Search Console into your site. As far as how you go about that, if you head up to the top here in then you click this little down arrow, you'll be able to go through and watch this video tutorial. It will guide you through or there's a link to the knowledge base for written instructions. So once you do that this alert will disappear and then you're ready to move on to the next step. And the next thing is dealing with titles and metatags. Now yoast plugin actually handles all of this stuff for you automatically, so you don't have to really think too much about it. But what you do have to do is make sure that your theme is compatible with the plugin and that it's actually showing the titles and meta tags that the plugin is generating. In most cases this will work but sometimes you might have a theme that's generating titles with its own SEO processes. And if that's the case, sometimes I can interfere with this from working. So the way that you can check is, go to your home page and just hover your mouse over the tab of this one. And you can see there is this separator which is a dash, and then if you go back here you can change this separator to something else. So let's change it to this double arrow.. And then we're gonna save. Now we're gonna refresh and see if that separator has changed. Yes so this a little double area separator and that tells us that the toggles are being generated by the plugin or coming through successfully. Next up you've got the social section. You pretty much just wanna go through all of these pages and just fill everything out as the plugin guides you too. And this area just lets you hook into your various social profiles and by being in multiple places online with everything connected, that's gonna help you boost your overall presence. Got XML sitemaps next. And just make sure that these are always being generated for you. If you wanna have a preview of your site map make sure it's all looking correct. You can click this button here and then you'll be able to look at your site map and make sure everything is in order. Then under Advanced you have the ability to turn on Breadcrumbs. So if you want to do that, make sure enabled is checked, and then go ahead and save your changes. However unless you've specifically selected a theme that says that it's fully compatible with the Yoast plug in, there's a pretty good chance that you're going to have to integrate these breadcrumbs into the theme yourself. And there is a Knowledge Base article on Yoast site about how to do this but am just gonna to walk you through an example in the thing that we have installed here. So first up you gonna want to copy this snippet, is actually has a little error in it. This code here is not correct. I'll show you how to change that. Then inside your WordPress installation, go into the wp-content folder, then into the themes folder and then find the folder for your theme. Now, typically, the two files you wanna integrate breadcrumbs into, will be single.php, this controls how a single post looks. So, open that one up. And then, you're also going to want page.PHP. Which controls individual pages. So go back into single. And here you're gonna have to have some degree of familiarity with HTML to do this. But as a general rule If you look for this code here while have posts the post this is the code that starts out putting each of the post and page items on your site. So you should be fine to just add the code in right above that. Now I mentioned this code has actually come out broken on that knowledge base page just a little error I think. So, what you need to do is delete this exclamation mark and two dashes and then also delete this bit here. So now let's go and have a look at one of our single posts So there we go. There's our breadcrumb trail there. And then we wanna do the same thing for our page template. So once again, while have post the post, you may see small variations of this but generally speaking, you're gonna see something that looks like that. And we'll add in that same code. Now, let's go take a look at a page, and there we go we have to break from child there to. Now, that is pretty much everything that you need to look at when you setting up yoast and you're getting ready to go. So from here, it's just really taking advantage of the plugin as you're creating each one of your pieces of content. So, if we have a look at an example. So here is our Hello World post. Now if you scroll down this is what yoast is going to give you to help you produce each one of your pieces of content. So you get a little preview of how this page will look in Google search results and you can edit things to make sure this is how you want to be seen. It'll evaluate the readability of your posts and just basically make sure that you go through and familiarize yourself with each one of the settings and use them every time you create a post. And to that end, I a definitely recommend you have a read of the full guide that Yoast provides on working with WordPress SEO, some of this stuff is directly relevant to the plane and some of it is information that just applies across the board. I give you links. All of this in the nights below this video. All right so now we're almost there. And we've got a couple more things to do and one of those actually relates to SEO in certain ways ,and that is optimizing your site for speed. One of the things that Google will judge your page on is how quickly it loads it loads very slowly then it's gonna decide that that's not a very good experience for its uses. And it will prioritize sites that load very quickly. And of course on top of being good for SEO it's just good for your visitors. If they can access your content as quickly as possible. So we're gonna learn how you can optimize your site for speed in the next lesson. I'll see you there