Topic
WordPress Search Engine Optimization (SEO) user guide
Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a big topic that will take days to explain. This guide would mainly focus on using the WordPress SEO plugins to help you prepare your website to be more Search Engine friendly. In this guide, we would demonstrate how SEO works in WordPress using a sample SEO plugin. There are many WordPress SEO plugins that do the same thing with some variations, ultimately, it is really up to you to decide on the best plugin for your website .
Usage
In the nutshell, the purpose of SEO is to help improve the website's ranking with search engine e.g. Google. The approach to rank well depends on how your web pages are written in the manner that the Search Engine preferred. No shortcut other than preparing your web pages page-by-page. That is the best you can do, though it may not guarantee that your website would rank well as there are many other factors that search engine considered in ranking the website for a particular search phrase.
Key points to note
- It takes a fair bits of hard work to write and prepare your website pages to be Search Engine friendly. No shortcut.
- Satisfying all SEO criteria recommended by the WordPress SEO plugin may not necessarily translate to good ranking with Search Engine. The Search Phrase that you are competing with other competitors play a large part in determining how well you would rank.
- The same best practice in writing a good English passages applies for SEO readability rating. Sentences should be concise, active voiced and not repeated too much.
- A good Page Title should consist of a good mix of Common Words, Uncommon Words, Emotional Words and Power Words
Steps
1. Click on "Add New Plugin" at the top left corner of the screen after clicking on the "Plugins" side panel item.
1. In the "Search Plugins" search panel, type in "SEO" and a list of SEO related WordPress plugins will be displayed. We would use All in One SEO plugin for the purpose of demonstrating the SEO concepts in this learning.
1. After you create and link your account with AIOSEO, it would provide the analysis on how your website scores against the SEO criteria. It would provide the lists of Important Issues, Recommended Improvements and Good Results that your website has scored.
2. For items marked as Important Issue, the reason of not meeting the SEO criteria is provided. Correcting these issues will improve your overall SEO score. Click on the Arrow button at the right end, the details on what to be corrected will be displayed on the screen.
3. Depending on issue to be corrected, you will be guided by the application on how to make the corrections by following the screen instructions (in the case demonstrated here, clicking on "Edit Your Meta Description" will bring you to the next screen where the correction can be made).
4. For better SEO score, do make your corrections in accordance with the criteria given.
5. After the corrections are made, the "Important Issues" are changed to "Good Results".
1. The Advanced SEO criteria depend on more technical system settings or backend codes of your website. For the purpose of this learning, we would demonstrate 3 items highlighted below.
2. For the "Both the www and non-www versions of your URL are redirected to the same site." item, it is a criteria that Search Engine impost to prevent websites from redirecting to another website, a common trick that some dodgy marketing site deployed.
3. For the "Your site has a robots.txt file which includes one or more "disallow" directives." item, it is to ensure that your website has blocked off some of the system admin or unrelated files from Search Engine Crawlers. The Search Engine would analyze and determine from all the files that they had crawled in your website to decide if your website is a legitimate or proper site. If the Search Engine can't make out it is a good website, it might decide not to index your site.
4. For the "We found Schema.org data on your page." item, it is quite well explained in the Excerpt below from Search bloom.
1. The performance speed of your website will not only affect the SEO performance of your website but more importantly it increases the web visitors' dropout rate (as no one would have the patient to wait for long for a page to load).
2. There are WordPress plugins that helps to improve the performance of the website, but the configurations involved are quite technical. It would be easier if the hosting platform you subscribed provides the facility to configure this for you.
1. The SEO score of a web page would depends on its Basic SEO criteria (Meta description length, Content length, Internal links, External links), Title and Readability of the page.
2. The SEO tool would provide the overall score of your web page based on the extent by which the SEO criteria are met.
3. After the highlighted issues are resolved (e.g. Internal links and external links are included), the ticks are displayed to indicate that criteria are met.
4. The next part is on the "Title" of the page, it carries a fair bit of weight on the overall SEO score of a page.
5. The total recommended length of a title is 60 characters, hence, it is a good SEO practice to keep the title length close to 60 characters but not exceeding it.
6. The next set of criteria is on the "Readability" of the web page. It is about the way you form the English sentences. A good practice in writing a good English passages applies here too. Your sentences should be concise, active voiced and not repeated too much.
7. To demonstrate how an issue highlighted can be corrected, the "Consecutive sentences" criteria mentioned that there are 5 consecutive sentences starting with the same word (as shown in Example below).
7. By correcting the repeated words in the sentences in the web page, the issue on "Consecutive sentences" is resolved.
8. By correcting the issues highlighted by the SEO plugin, the overall SEO score is improved.
1. Good header or title is crucial for your website to stand out in search and help generates clicks to your site. To demonstrate how it works, an example header "Keep your clients happy on every meeting" will be used.
2. "Keep your clients happy on every meeting" title scores 66% in Headline Analyzer.
3. The detail analysis on why the title is getting the SEO score can be broken into 4 parts, and the recommended percentages of each parts are provided.
- Common Words
- Uncommon Words
- Emotional Words
- Power Words
4. After the title is changed to "How to Ensure Your Customers Are Happy In Every Meeting", the SEO score improves.
5. The new title is able to score better because it has improved in most of the recommended wordings.
- Common Words - with inclusion of "are, how, in, to, you" improve the score to 50%
- Uncommon Words
- Emotional Words - "happy" is the emotional word retained from original title
- Power Words - "how to" is power words that increase the score by 10%
6. You may refer to the following sites on how to write a better title that is SEO friendly.