There’s one thing you may have been doing correctly from the start: blogging. Blogging is great, but blogging with properly set up SEO plugin can bring more truffic to your website.
So probably you heard that WordPress SEO by Yoast is a best free SEO plugin for WordPress. Most of our clients come to us with the Yoast SEO plugins installed and now all is left to do is to set it up properly.
First, locate Yoast SEO Dashboard within your WordPress website. It’ll look something like this:
General settings will bring you to the Configuration Wizard, where you have the option to either configure the SEO yourself, or hire a configuration service with Premium.
If you decide to configure it yourself, here is a few detailed instruction that we recommend:
A Guide To Configuring The WordPress Yoast SEO Plugin
How to Setup WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
The Biggest Benefits Of Using Yoast SEO Plugin In WordPress
- Content Analysis
Content Analysis is the feature I personally use the most often. To get it rolling, you need to set a focus keyword for the post. Yoast will then run a realtime scan over your content to see if the keyword is used a sufficient number of times and whether it is used in the most optimal places. You’ll see the analysis at the bottom of the page with a bunch of red, orange and green dots, followed by a bunch of information that’ll help you improve your SEO. Check here if you want more info about Content Analysis.
- Post titles and meta descriptions
In the Yoast SEO meta box you can completely optimize your post or page title and meta description, using the snippet editor functionality to see what it would look like in Google. Don’t want to think about that for every single post? Yoast SEO also let’s you set templates for titles and meta descriptions for all types of pages. Read more »
- Robots Meta Configuration
Yoast does this cool thing where it allows you to choose which posts and pages you want to show up in Google’s index. It may seem strange, and you might be thinking that you want all your information to be stored on Google. The more, the merrier! But actually, this isn’t the case at all – especially if you want a favorable SEO score. You should avoid things like duplicate content, less relevant data or pages that aren’t updated. With this awesome feature you can easily decide what categories, tags, pages or custom taxonomies you’d like to be indexed and nonindexed.
Read on for more info about Robots Meta Configuration
- Permalink Clean-Up
Just by checking one box you can make sure that your content is always found exactly in the URL that you want it to be under. You won’t need to worry about strange variables being added at the end or others messing with the links. With Yoast SEO you can click the option to have your links stay exactly how you want them.
- XML Sitemaps
XML Sitemaps are an essential part of current day SEO, and can thus not be excluded from a complete Yoast SEO plugin. While there are other WordPress XML Sitemap Generators out there, they don’t talk to your SEO plugin. Meaning that if you noindex a page, preventing it from showing up in Google, it might still be in your sitemap. They also don’t allow you to keep certain taxonomies out of your sitemap. This plugin does. And, to boot, it makes your XML Sitemaps look good by using an XSLT stylesheet on them, so humans can read them too.
Conclusion:
Configuring your SEO plugin correctly is a step in the right direction — but it’s only the first step!
Optimizing your content for specific keywords based on SEO analysis can do wonders in attracting your ideal prospective customers, engaging them, and converting them into buyers.
SEO is all about content marketing. And content marketing is all about SEO. We encourage you to keep blogging – now with properly set up SEO plugin- and bring more traffic to your website.
More traffic = more sales = more revenue = more business !