SEO for WordPress: “How I hit page #1 of Google in 27 days!”
Chapter 4 - WordPress Setup & SEO Plugins
In this chapter, I’m going to show you how to:
Optimize your WordPress settings
Install and setup WordPress plugins for SEO
How To Optimize Your WordPress Settings
Log into your WordPress dashboard and navigate down to the “settings” tab. Within the settings tab, you’ll see an option for “General” settings. Click on that option and you’ll see a section asking you for your “site title” and your “tagline.”
Enter your main keyword phrase into the “site title” section. In the “tagline” section enter your main keyword first followed by a short description of your website. For the site title, keep the text under 60 characters. For the “tagline” keep the character count under 160 characters. You can use a website like http://www.charactercountonline.com to count the characters.
I’m going to show you which plugins to install to set your website's “site title” and description; but sometimes Google will extract your site title and description from this general settings area. So just in-case, it’s important to set up these general settings with your keywords as a backup.
By default, the general setting area usually says something like “Just another WordPress Blog” for the site title. If you don’t change the general settings, Google might index your website in Google using the phrase “just another WordPress blog.” This happens to a lot of my clients.
Some of my clients websites get indexed in Google using a title and description that they don’t recognize. After I log into their website, the problem is with their general settings
The next settings that you’ll want to check is your permalinks. You’ll find the “permalinks” option under the settings tab as well. Just click on “settings” and click on the word “permalink.”
Select the checkbox next to the option that says “Post name.” This is the best permalink structure to for SEO.
The default permalink structure doesn’t give search engines information about your blog posts. The “post name” structure will create permalinks that have the same title as your blog posts and articles. For example, if I decided to write an article on my website entitled “How to Blog”:
The default permalink structure will create a link like this: read2learn.net/?p=123
The Post Name permalink structure will create a link this: read2learn.net/how-to-blog
WordPress Plugins To Install
Install the WordPress plugins below to improve your on-page SEO:
Add Meta Tags
All In One SEO Pack
CommentLuv
Google XML Sitemaps
Related Posts Thumbnails
Shareaholic
SSL Insecure Content Fixer (*if you have an SSL certificate installed)
WP Force SSL (*if you have an SSL certificate installed)
WP Sitemap Page
WP Smush
To install these plugins, navigate down the plugins tab, click “Add New”, search for the recommended plugins, click install, then activate!
Install all the plugins and I’ll show you how to set them up right now. The first plugin we’ll setup is “Add Meta Tags.”
Add Meta Tags
Navigate back over to the settings tab so we can set up these plugins. Under the “settings” tab, click the link that says “Metadata” which is the Meta Tags plugin.
Next, you’ll be taken to a page that’ll ask you for the following information:
Front Page Description
Front Page Keywords
Global Keywords
For your front page description, make sure that you enter your most important keyword phrase first! Search engines give your first keyword phrase more priority than any other keywords within your site description. Next, you’ll want to use your keyword at least one more time in the site description.
For your front page and global keywords, use the same technique! Add your most important keyword phrase first, and then add your other keywords after. Keep in mind that spammers have abused the “front page keyword” tag, so it doesn’t hold as much weight as it used too. So don’t waste your time stuffing 100 keywords in this section; instead just use the ten keywords from your list that you put together earlier.
Leave the “site-wide META tags” option empty. The plugin will handle this feature automatically. Now scroll down and you’ll see a few “boxes” that you can click. Make sure that you check the boxes for the following settings if they’re not set already:
Dublin Core Metadata
Schema.org Metadata
Extra SEO Options
Before you click the “save changes” button, you’ll also have the option to click the box next to the section that says “donations.” By checking that box, the message from the author at the top of the screen goes away.
Click “save changes.” You’re done with this plugin.
All in One SEO Pack
This plugin is very similar to the Meta Tags plugin. On the top left of your Wordpress dashboard, click the All in One SEO tab to adjust the general settings. For this plugin, you’ll need to enter information for:
Home Title: Enter your most important keyword phrase.
Home Description: Use the same description as the Meta Tags plugin.
Home Keywords: Use the same keywords as the Meta Tags plugin.
If you scroll down the page, you’ll see additional options, but you can leave most of those settings the way they are. There are a few updated settings on this plugin that’ll make life easier.
For example, you’ll notice that this plugin has a “Webmaster Verification” area where you can enter your verification code for Google Webmaster Tools, Bing Webmaster Center, and Pinterest Site Verification.
The Google Webmasters Tool will give you detailed information about your website's performance. Before the Google Webmasters Tool can give you information about your website, they’ll give you a verification code to enter on your website to verify your ownership. The All in One SEO plugin gives you a specific area to enter the verification code instead of searching through your website's HTML code to find the correct spot.
The All in One SEO plugin also has an area for you to enter your “Google Plus” profile information, and your Google Analytics ID. Once again, this will make life easier for you so you don’t have to manually enter HTML code on your website.
Scroll all the way down and click the “Update Options” button to save your settings.
Next I want you to go back to the “settings” tab on your WordPress dashboard. I mentioned this earlier, but I want to revisit this section.
Click on the “General” option, and in the “Site Title” section, enter the same keyword phrase that you used for the “site title” on the All In One SEO plugin. For the “Tagline” section, enter the same paragraph you entered in the “home description” section of the All in One SEO plugin.
As I mentioned earlier, this will be your backup just in-case Google decides to ignore your All In One SEO plugin settings and look somewhere else for your site title and description. Google does this all the time. Sometimes Google will even change your site title in their search results because they think their version is better.
So keep your site title, homepage description, and keywords exactly the same in the general settings area, All in One SEO settings, and Add Meta Tags settings. This will ensure that no matter where Google goes to extract information about your website; it will be the same every time.
CommentLuv
Under the settings tab, click the “CommentLuv” link and make sure that the plugin is enabled. You don’t really have to change anything else with this plugin. Just scroll down and click the “save settings” button.
When someone leaves a comment on your blog and enters in their website's URL; this plugin will display a backlink to that person’s website showing the title to their latest article. That’s why it’s called “CommentLuv” because you’re showing “LUV” to your commentators by promoting their blog articles too.
To use this plugin for SEO, reply to all your commentators from the article page and not from your WordPress dashboard. If you reply to comments from your WordPress dashboard, then you won’t be able to take advantage of “CommentLuv.” But when you reply to your comments from the article page, you’ll get to use the CommentLuv feature too.
You can actually choose which blog post to display under your comments. You’ll have the option to choose from 10 of your most recent blog posts. That’s perfect because you can promote a different article for each “reply” that you leave on your blog. This is good for two reasons:
You’re linking to other articles within your website. (Deep linking)
If people click on your links, they’ll stay on your website longer.
If you can get people to stay on your website longer, Google will rank your website higher. Google wants to provide their users with quality content, and they’ll assume your website is good if people click around to read more articles.
Some people prefer to include multiple links to other articles within the body text. I don’t recommend this for a few reasons:
People get annoyed when their reading an article full of links that link to other articles. (Bad user experience.)
You’ll overwhelm your readers if you link them to a new article before they’re finished reading the current article. (Bad user experience.)
Most bloggers unwittingly set their links to open in the same window. (bad user experience)
If you want to link to other articles within your body text, then only add one link per 100 words. Just don’t go overboard and make sure that your links open in a new tab.
Google XML Sitemaps
Under the settings tab, look for the link that says “XML-Sitemap.” This will probably be the last item within your settings tab. Click the link to go to your Google XML Sitemap settings.
The only thing you need to do with this plugin is click the link that says “Build sitemap” or “Build my first sitemap.”
This plugin will automatically build a sitemap for you. An xml sitemap will help search engines find all the pages on your website and index them to Google.
Related Posts Thumbnails
This plugin uses the same concept as CommentLuv. At the end of your article, the Related Posts Thumbnails plugin will display 3 related posts with a small thumbnail from the featured image of the articles.
This plugin is designed to keep people on your website and reading more articles. If you set up unique categories and tags for each article, then you’ll need to set this plugin to “random.”
The random settings will display related posts randomly. If you set this plugin to only show related posts based on categories or tags, then this plugin might only show one related post or nothing at all depending on how you “tag” and categorize your articles.
Shareaholic
This is a social sharing plugin that allows people to share your website articles on Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, Pinterest, and other social media websites. You don’t have to use this specific plugin, but you need to make sure that you have some type of social sharing buttons on your website.
Google will notice if your website is being shared through social networks. If people share your website with friends through social networks, then your website will seem important to Google and you’ll rank higher.
I personally like Shareaholic because I think it looks cool. After you install this plugin, just make sure that you activate it, and the default setting will work just fine.
SSL Insecure Content Fixer & WP Force SSL (*if you have an SSL certificate installed)
You only need to activate these plugins for them to work. These plugins will make sure that your website is directing your visitors to the secure pages (https://).
WP Sitemap Page
An HTML sitemap allows site visitors to easily navigate your website. It’s a bulleted outline text version of the site navigation. The anchor text displayed in the outline is linked to the page it references.
Site visitors can go to the sitemap page to locate a topic they are unable to find by searching the site or navigating through the site menus. Using the sitemap, search engines become aware of every page on the site, including any URLs that are not discovered through the normal crawling process used by the search engine.
Sitemaps are helpful if a website has dynamic content, is new and doesn’t have many links to it, or contains a lot of archived content that is not well-linked.
After you activate this plugin, create a page on your website, name the page “Sitemap”, and paste this shortcode on the page: [wp_sitemap_page]
Next, publish the page and link to the page on the footer of your homepage.
WP Smush
If you have a website with a lot of images or large images, they can slow down your website. WP Smush is a plugin that compresses your images as you upload them. If you’re installing the plugin for the first time, you can use it to compress images that you’ve already uploaded to your website.
To find WP Smush, click on the “media” tab on your dashboard, and then click on the “WP Smush” link. You’ll see an option to “bulk smush” all your current uploaded images. After your images are compressed, this plugin will show you how much your images were reduced.
Summary & Action Plan
Install the WordPress plugins below:
Add Meta Tags
All In One SEO Pack
CommentLuv
Google XML Sitemaps
Related Posts Thumbnails
Shareaholic
SSL Insecure Content Fixer (*if you have an SSL certificate)
WP Force SSL (*if you have an SSL certificate)
WP Sitemap Page
WP Smush
In the next chapter, I’ll show you how to optimize your homepage.