Our Favorite WordPress SEO Plugin by Yoast
Are you ready to do seo for your next wordpress project?
Here at wordpress design shop we get emails often that ask, “what is the best way to setup wordpress for seo?” Our answer is really simple and confuses most people, Know who you are serving and install the yoast SEO plugin. In the old days many of us web developers would have 5, 6, 7 different plug-ins to do SEO for our client websites, but after the penguin update we pretty much only use one.
Is yoast seo the right wordpress plug-in for me?
Yoast WordPress SEO Features:
- Post titles and meta descriptions – Ability to create and use templates, or modify the SEO of an individual page or post with ability to check density and more.
- Robots Meta configuration – Modify and configure robots meta tag information
- Canonical – Ability to manage all canonical urls for categories, posts, archives, and pages: the search engine friendly URL that you want the search engines to treat as authoritative. In other words, a canonical URL is the URL that you want visitors to see.
- Breadcrumbs – easy to manage breadcrumb setup. Allows you to easily let users know where they are in your site at any give time.
- Permalink clean up – Make simple SEO friendly url structures for your site.
- XML Sitemaps – Include sitemaps for pages, categories and more easily formatted to read by major search engines.
- RSS enhancements- setup and manage your website feed contents and format.
- Clean up head section - With recent releases, WordPress has added more and more bloat to the
<head>section of WordPress installs. Luckily it also has methods to remove those. Checking a few boxes in the backend will make sure your blog doesn’t give out any of its secrets.
How we Setup most of our clients with the Yoast wordpress SEO plug-in!
Title and Description
- We first train our client to know who their market is and what they are looking for.
- We teach them how to write the title of the post, or page so that it speaks to their target.
- We teach them to write the first paragraph so that it has the correct information for their target and would look good to google if google read the first part of the post.
- Make sure your wordpress permalink structure is setup to postname only.
- Next in the wordpress backend goto SEO menu item then titles and metas and then post types
Set every title to: %%title%% – %%sitename%%
Set Every Description to: %%excerpt%%
Sitemaps
- Next under SEO in the wordpress backend we set the sitemap to enable site maps and pink yahoo and ask.
That is pretty much it for the average client that is not going to make seo a full-time job. Remember if you want a great wordpress seo plug-in that is simple to use and works with almost every them we have tried use the FREE yoast wordpress seo plug-in.
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