How to boost traffic to your WordPress website by optimizing WordPress for SEO and using Yoast SEO
Getting more traffic is the ultimate thing every WordPress website owner wants. It can be done through many ways, improving SEO is one of them . The sad thing with most SEO tutorials is that it’s too technical for a beginner to understand. If you are really serious about increasing traffic to your website, then you need to practice applying SEO best practices. In this article, I will share with you basic SEO materials to help you optimize your WordPress website better and get more traffic.
SEO – Search Engine Optimization
A approach used by means of site owners to get greater visitors with the aid of getting greater search engine rankings. SEO fundamentals is no longer a trick to idiot Google or a device game. It’s certainly about developing a internet site with optimized code and formatting that makes it less complicated for search engines to crawl your site.
When humans search for search engine phrases and key-word phrases, the fine optimized content material will show up at the pinnacle of the search engine, and you will get greater clicks. its website.
SEO in WordPress
You might also have heard from someplace that WordPress is very search engine marketing friendly. That is precisely why humans pick out the WordPress platform to start a weblog or website.
While WordPress ensures that it is made to optimize the exceptional with SEO, there are nonetheless many matters that you want to do, if you desire to recognize the fundamentals of WordPress then proceed studying this article.
Don’t discourage search engines from indexing your site
When you’re on first page when installing WordPress, there is a option to hide your site from search engines if you are not ready to be viewed by your reader. Some of the time you incidentally select this element, causing your site to vanish from web indexes.
In the event that your site doesn’t show up on web indexes, the primary thing you want to contemplate is to ensure that you don’t really look at this case.
To see if it is disabled or not, go to the WordPress admin dashboard, under Settings » Reading.
Uncheck if enabled then scroll down to click Save changes.
Using SEO friendly URL for your posts, pages, …
As its named, It should friendly to search engines to understand like we human read
Examples of SEO friendly URLs:
https://mayviti.com/how-to-do-wordpress-seo/
Examples of SEO not friendly URLs:
https://mayviti.com/?p=1 https://mayviti.com/tag/123
Changing Permalink structure is the most effective way to further develop your site’s internet searcher rankings. It’s additionally one of the fundamentals of SEO you want to apply to your website.
This is the way you can check and refresh the permalink design of your WorPress site.
If you don’t have those friendly URLs, go to the WordPress admin dashboard, under Settings » Permalinks.
Check Post name and click Save changes.
Add your site to Google Search Console
Google search console, previously Webmaster Tools, is a server offered by Google that provides website owners with an outline of how their website is shown on the web search google.com.
Google search console gives reports and information to assist you with seeing how your page will appear in web search engine indexes. You can likewise see the genuine pursuit words and expressions individuals are utilizing to observe your site, how each page shows up in the indexed lists, and how regularly the pages are tapped on and many more.
To add your site to google search console:
- Go to https://search.google.com/search-console
- A popup form like image above if you never successfully add and verify your websites to it before or if not above Overview Menu, click Add Property the same pop will open
- Enter your website domain and click continue
- Click VERIFY LATER
It’s time now to verify you own this website and add your sitemap.xml to Google Search console. And here comes Yoast SEO will do that for you and other great features.
Yoast SEO
The best thing about using WordPress is that it has all the necessary parts for everything your website needs which are called plugins, and doing SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins that make it difficult for beginners to choose which one is the best.
In this article, we are gonna chose Yoast SEO, a really powerful and famous in the WordPress community.
Inside WordPress Admin dashboard, go to Plugins » Add New » Search for “yoast seo” and install then activate.
After successfully, your default Yoast SEO settings should be set. Now you need to do:
Google Search Console Website Domain Verification
- Verify your website on Google Search Console
- Go back to your Google Search Console, You previously added your website domain, now appears a text called Already started? finish verification click on it » click the domain » copy the code after google-site-verification=
- Switch to WordPress Admin dashboard, go to SEO » Generals » Webmaster Tools
- Paste the code to Google verification code input
- Click Save changes
- Switch back to Google Search Console click VERIFY
- Wait and the website is added successfully
Sitemaps
XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file to list all the links present on a website. It makes it easier for search engines to crawl your content. While adding an XML sitemap doesn’t affect your search rankings, it does help search engines find those pages faster and start ranking them right away.
By default when successfully activated successfully, Yoast SEO automatically generates a sitemap xml for your WordPress Site website at https://<your_domain.com>/sitemap_index.xml
- Add your sitemaps to Google Search Console
- Go to your Google Search Console,
- Under Index expanded, click Sitemaps
- Paste your https://<your_domain.com>/sitemap_index.xml to the input under Add a new sitemap
After successfully added a sitemap, wait a little time because following a couple of hours, you should see some status about the site. Once you have successfully added a sitemap, it will take some time for Google to crawl your site. After a few hours, you should see some status about the sitemap. It will show the number of URLs it found on the sitemap, and among them how many are indexed, the number of images and the number of pages..etc…etc..
Set SEO for your articles title, description on web search engines
Besides, you can benefit from a great feature to preview how your post, page looks like on web search engines, allowing you to define a focus keyphrase, meta search description so your visitors know where they are heading and overall a good SEO trick.
Scroll down to the bottom when writing your articles and you will see a full table of basic SEO functions for that.
Final thought
Aha you have reached here, then you have started gradually getting familiar with SEO already and ready to start publishing your article for Google to crawl but lastly just set your article Categories and Tags where they belongs. This should organize your posts and increase your SEO overall since its keywords still are related.
There are also some SEO techniques like internal links, outbound links, nofollow links, comments optimizations, … we intend to cover in the future. But with all that above is enough for you to started your first SEO supported article after you successfully setup your WordPress website.