SEO WordPress - step-by-step optimization guide. Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin

WordPress for 2019 occupies more than 30% of the CMS (content management system) market - systems for managing the content of website pages. Such popularity is due to: ease of use, wide application potential and extensive opportunities for website promotion on WP.

CMS is actively developing - updates are rolled out almost weekly. Recent updates (like "Gutenberg") open up new opportunities in the placement and promotion of content on the Internet. In this article, we have compiled an extensive list of SEO recommendations for website promotion on wordpress.

What is SEO

SEO or search engine optimization is a set of measures to influence search engines in order to bring a site to the TOP of search results. Is it so important to get into the TOP? According to the American company imFORZA, 70 to 80% of users ignore advertisements and immediately go to the organic search section - the one that starts right after the paid block. These people are maximally interested in satisfying their needs right now, so being at least in the TOP-3 is what most of the owners of commercial sites aspire to.

And WP today allows you to get into the “top three” of search results. Therefore, most resource owners trust their site to WordPress.

Factors affecting seo optimization of a website on wordpress

In this section, we will list both the factors that have a significant impact on the position in the SERP, and those whose influence is greatly exaggerated or even false.

Website with www is better to promote

It is a myth. There is absolutely no connection between the spelling of the name of the site (www.site.ru or site.ru) and the success in promotion. There is only a difference in convenience when typing an address in the search bar. But, it is important for you to decide how you want to appear in the search with or without www. The fact is that the same site with www and without a search engine perceives as two different resources. In addition, starting this year in Google Chrome browsers, the www prefix is ​​automatically removed and over time it will also be in the search engine, we recommend setting up redirects to addresses without www right now.

You can select the required site address in the WP admin panel in the Settings> General section and specify your version of the site address.

Who definitely shouldn't go to a non-www address? If you are just planning or have already started creating a website. Well, or your site is still very young, then the transition will pass almost imperceptibly for your site. If you have an “old man” and he has a share of traffic from search, then this option is not for you. Here's the thing:

• If you transfer the site to an address without www at once, then all the pages will disappear from their places in the search results - in fact, you will become a new player for the search engine with a zero level of trust. And, as a result, you will lose all visitors and profits for a long time.
• If you translate a website page by page, you risk spending months or years doing this. And incur tangible cash costs.

If you nevertheless decide that you want a short and neat website address, then follow the instructions above and register your website in the services: Yandex.Webmaster and Google Search Console. Both services have the ability to specify how you want to see the address of your resource:

• Everything is simple in Yandex - section “Indexing settings”> “Moving a site”> and select “add https” or “add www”.
• In Google Search Console, you can register through your google account. Then you need to confirm ownership of the domain. Go to the “site settings” section and specify the main domain.

Add SEO plugin

If you are creating a large-scale resource, then you definitely need an assistant in order to keep track of the appearance of duplicates, the correct indexing and many other parameters. You can delegate this - install special programs - plugins for SEO promotion:

• All in one SEO pack / SEO Yoast for WordPress. The most important plugins for SEO optimization. Which one should you choose? It's hard to say - both are worthy competitors. The first has been successfully operating since 2007, and the second has a higher rating. You can read about the settings of these plugins
• Akismet is one of the best anti-spam solutions and is easy to set up.
• Security is important and Sucuri is one of the best WordPress plugins for this.
• Hyper Cache - for caching. This plugin speeds up and facilitates the interaction between the WordPress engine and the browser, reducing the load on hosting.

XML sitemap

An XML sitemap is a kind of instruction for a search engine about what to crawl and index. It is created using the All in One SEO add-on in your WordPress admin panel. Go to the All in One SEO> Manage Modules section and turn on the map with the Activate button.

Robots.txt

Another important factor in optimization. If the sitemap points to the pages available on the resource and asks the search engine to index them, then Robots.txt has the ability to prohibit indexing of any pages or sections. This is important to preserve the confidentiality of personal data: yours and your users.

For configuration, we use the same All in One SEO plugin. To do this, go to the All in One SEO> File Editor section. Here we select Robots.txt and you can copy the following there, simply replacing the domain with yours where necessary.

User-agent: Yandex

Allow: * / uploads

Allow: /wp-*.png

Allow: /wp-*.jpg

Allow: /wp-*.jpeg

Allow: /wp-*.gif

Disallow: / cgi-bin

Disallow: / search /

Disallow: / author /

Disallow: / users /

Disallow: * / trackback

Disallow: * / feed

Disallow: * / embed

Disallow: * / wlwmanifest.xml

Disallow: /xmlrpc.php

Clean-param: utm_source & utm_medium & utm_campaign & utm_term & utm_type

Clean-param: _openstat & gclid & yclid & ymclid & from & cid & frommarket

User-agent: GoogleBot

Allow: * / uploads

Allow: /wp-*.png

Allow: /wp-*.jpg

Allow: /wp-*.jpeg

Allow: /wp-*.gif

Allow: /wp-admin/admin-ajax.php

Disallow: / cgi-bin

Disallow: / search /

Disallow: / author /

Disallow: / users /

Disallow: * / trackback

Disallow: * / feed

Disallow: * / embed

Disallow: * / wlwmanifest.xml

Disallow: /xmlrpc.php

Disallow: * utm * =

Disallow: * openstat =

Disallow: / cgi-bin

Disallow: / search /

Disallow: / author /

Disallow: / users /

Disallow: * / trackback

Disallow: * / feed

Disallow: * / embed

Disallow: * / wlwmanifest.xml

Disallow: /xmlrpc.php

Disallow: * utm * =

Disallow: * openstat =

Sitemap: https://site.ru/sitemap.xml

Select link format

An important question is the choice of how to display links to your pages on the Internet. See what a link to any of your pages looks like now? Something like site.ru/?p=123? It will be correct to create human-like urls (CNC). So that each visitor, even without going to the page, can understand from the text in the link what awaits him there.

Writing links in Latin letters

We already know that it is important to create links that people can understand. Take the title of the article “What flowers to plant in spring” as an example. Your address can be of the form: site.ru/what-flowers-plant-spring.html. If you choose an address in Russian, then there will be difficulties in its encoding and your beautiful "url" will turn into a set of numbers and letters.

In order for your address to be and remain understandable, we recommend that you always use Latin letters when writing the address. This is how the address of your page about flowers will look like: site.ru/kakie-cvety-posadit-vesnoy.html.

Using keywords

Today it is not enough to stuff texts with keys in order to be in the TOP. With this approach, you can only find yourself under sanctions. Today, the rules for using keys in their texts are as follows:

• The text should be useful, interesting and readable. What does it mean? This means that if you are writing about how to choose a bathroom faucet, then in the article you should give reliable, practical information and present it in the form of structured text with lists, opinions (experts), facts, and more. Ideally, after reading your text, the user should go and choose the mixer himself and it is simply excellent if, on your tip, he does it in your or the recommended store.
• Keywords and expressions should be distributed evenly throughout the text, and not collected in one paragraph. Keyword spam should not be allowed - this is fraught with sanctions for the site.
• The text should be voluminous. For Google, the minimum volume requirements are around 3000 characters, for Yandex 800-1000.

Using and optimizing headers

The absolute factor in its importance is the use and optimization of H1-H6 headings. H1 - characterizes the content of the page. It is displayed in the search results and in the browser tab (for ease of orientation in many tabs). H2-H6 - levels of text nesting and characterize only the material embedded in them. There can be only one H1 on a page, while there can be as many other headings as you like. Why are they so important?

The fact is that the better you customize the titles to the user's requests, the more often they will be clicked on. It also plays a role in the fact that visitors do not read articles, but "scan" them, going over the headings, and read only those parts that interest them.

What advice can you give for heading? In Title, try to include your high-frequency keyword or expression there. And test different options until you hit the right pain for your target audience. In h2-h6 headings, include slightly less meaningful words and phrases that detail the topic of your article.

Description

Today, Description does not affect the position of the site, but it is responsible for an attractive snippet (a short description of the page under the title). A very important fact - search robots do not care about the description. You fill it out solely to inform users about the content of the page. There are several guidelines:

• Text no more than 156 characters long. More is possible, but the text will not be displayed in full.
• The text should clearly and clearly make it clear what the user will see on the page and what is the benefit to him.
• Include keywords in the text and, if it matches the user's request, the search engine will highlight the matched text in bold.

Meta Keywords

These are the old people of the SEO world. To date, filling them out is an absolute waste of time. Meta tags keywords have ceased to be a mandatory element of SEO promotion since the early 2000s. Google says that the search engine has not taken them into account since 2009, and Yandex still indicates that keywords can be used in the formation of a snippet of search results. One way or another, today it is much more correct to pay attention to the correct filling of Title, Description and keywords in the text.

Using Alt and Title Descriptions in Images

When uploading graphics to the site, do you prescribe alts and titles for images? No?! But in vain! They play an important role in promoting your website and here's why:

• Sometimes people are looking for something not through the search, but in the section of pictures. And, thanks to the fact that you will now fill in these parameters, they will quickly understand that they are in the right place. If the pictures do not have signatures, then your potential visitors and customers may simply pass by, because they may not understand that this is the very thing you are looking for.
• With a poor Internet connection, if the graphics are not loaded, the title will appear instead of your picture - so you can understand the contents of the picture.

Internal linking

Another important ranking factor. The first thing it affects is the completeness of indexing of all pages of your site. The search robot will follow all the links on the page and index those sections that it has not yet reached.

The second important aspect of the influence of linking is the improvement of behavioral factors. The time of the user session and the depth of page browsing give the search engine information that your resource is interesting and in demand (it remains on it for a long time and many pages are viewed, which means it is interesting). If you improve these factors, then your chances of getting your site high on the search engines are very high.

Outbound links to authoritative resources

• Search engines will see that you are linking to authoritative sources for your topic, and not to any dubious portals.
• It may be that the owners of these reputable sources can do a good deed and link back to you.

Use social media

Promotion of a resource with HTTPS

There is a hypothesis (with confirmed cases) that Yandex ranks sites on https higher than without. If the site is completely new, then the translation to https must be done first. If your site is not young anymore, then changing the protocol will result in a sharp loss of positions in the search for you.

Post content that does not lose relevance

You will have less work in the future if you post articles on your resource that do not lose relevance.

Remember the dangers of gray and black SEO

He advises you to play by the rules of search engines and not indulge in various "schemes" of deceiving search engines:

• Don't rely solely on link promotion. If earlier those with more links moved faster, today those who have more interesting content and better optimization. The punishment for link abuse is the Minusinsk algorithm (it will bring down your traffic for several months).
• Do not use too many keywords (overspam can lead to sanctions).
• Do not use various content spoofing and redirection (doorway and cloaking).

Outcome

SEO promotion of a wordpress resource can be successful if you take it seriously. WordPress is a very flexible and reliable system with many opportunities for promoting your resource on the Internet. You just need to properly develop and optimize it in time.

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Improving your site's SEO is a direct path to more traffic. In this article, I will talk about how to optimize your WordPress site SEO and get more organic traffic.

SEO WordPress for Beginners

You may have heard the expert opinion of WordPress as a well-optimized SEO platform.

Even though this CMS generates code that meets the latest search engine requirements, there are still a number of steps you can take to refine it.

In this article, we'll take a look at every aspect of SEO optimization:

• definition
• importance of using
• basic aspects of WordPress SEO
• best SEO plugins and strategies to optimize your website.

What is SEO?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) Is search engine optimization. This is a strategy for getting more traffic and gradually bringing the site to the first lines. in the search engines.

it creating a resource with optimized code and formatting that allows search engines to easily find your site.

Your optimized content will be displayed higher by search engines, which will bring more users to your site.

Why is SEO important?

Most sites get the most traffic from search engines. Google and Yandex use advanced algorithms to understand correctly and rank pages for search results.

But these algorithms are not perfect - they still need your help to figure out what this is about.

If your content is not optimized, search engines won't know how is it right rank.

In other words, your site will not appear in the SERP.

WordPress SEO Basics

By examining a few basic SEO optimization tips, you can noticeably increase the traffic to your website.

Let's start optimizing the site :)

Check your site's visibility settings

By default, WordPress hides site from search engines.

To give you time to prepare the site for opening.

However, even after all the work is completed, some site owners forget to disable this option.

How can I check that this parameter is not set?

In the administrative panel, go to the Settings - Reading tab.

You need to scroll down to the "Search Engines Visibility" section and check that the checkbox next to "Ask search engines not to index the site" not installed.

Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress

SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page. They are easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of friendly urls:

https: // site / kak-dobavit-reklamu-na-sajt

https: // site / kak-sdelat-sajt-na-wordpress

Important!

These urls are readable. NSthe user can understand what he will see by clicking on the link.

And here are some examples of bad URLs:

https: // site /? p = 10467

https: // site / archives / 123

Please note that these URLs use non-content numbers.

What follows from this?

The user will not be able to understand the content of the article.

Using the correctpermalinksimproves your chancesto get high positions in the search results.

How to check and update the link structure for site?

In the admin panel, go to the Settings - Permalinks tab and select the Post name option. Click the "Save Changes" button.

Important: If the site has been operating for more than 6 months, you should not change the link structure. E if only you don't use numbering.

Using Day and Title, Month and Title? Go ahead and don't change.

If you do change your permalink structure, you will lose all links that you shared on social media.

If you cannot do without changing the link structure, I recommend using the services of a professional who will set up the correct redirects.

Sad but true.

WWW vs non-WWW

When you first create your site, you need to choose whether you will use www(http://www.example.com) or not (http://example.com) in the url.

Search engines perceive this as two different sites.

In the admin panel, go to the Settings - General tab and specify the site address in the "WordPress Address" and "Site Address" fields.

WITH From a WordPress SEO point of view, there is absolutely no advantage to using one method or the other.

Best WordPress SEO Plugin

Good news!

As well as for expanding the functionality of the site, and for optimization, WordPress offers ready-made plugins.

There are many plugins out there that are geared towards a specific SEO purpose, but I will help you choose the best one - the one that will do the trick.

Choosing the best SEO WordPress plugin

There are two popular plugins: Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.

In our article we made a detailed comparison and listed the pros / cons of each.

At Azbuka WordPress we use Yoast SEO - I will show all screenshots in this article using Yoast SEO as an example.

If this is your first time installing the plugin, watch the video where we show you 3 ways to install the plugin.

Adding an XML Sitemap

An XML map is a file that contains all the pages of a site. It makes them visible to search engines. Adding XML Map is not raises the rating, but simplifies the process.

The Yoast SEO plugin generates an XML map automatically.

You can find it at:

https: // sitename.ru/sitemap.xml

Adding a site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console provides a set of tools that site owners can use to track how their resource is viewed by a search engine.

What do you learn?

Using the console, you will receive the following information:

• how your site is displayed in search engines
• what search conditions are set by users
• how all pages of the site are displayed
• how often these pages are clicked.

That is, you will understand what is already working well on your site, and what needs to be fixed.

Google Search Console will also warn you if the site has problems:

• search engines will not be able to access
• find duplicate content
• will find limited resources.

We have a step by step guide

How do I verify a site?

If you decide to use Yoast SEO plugin, in your dashboard go to SEO - Console - Settings and confirm your site.

Go back to the site and paste the code into the settings page.

From now on, Yoast SEO will pull data from the dashboard to the WordPress site.

Various tabs will be available to you: PC, tablet, mobile phone. (Google tracks traffic from all carriers differently.)

Here you can also fix any errors (scanning errors) that may appear.

This can be done through the redirect settings using the paid advanced version of the plugin - Yoast SEO Premium. This version adds the redirect manager function.

So, for example, you can fix the 404 error in Google Search Console by setting up a redirect.

If you don't want to work withYoast SEO, you can use an alternative way.

After you add your site to Google Search Console, select Sitemaps from the menu.

Click the "Add Sitemap" button.

It will now appear as pending. It will take Google a while to crawl your site.

In a few hours, statistics will be available to you.

Check your Google Search Console regularly to gather information and see your site's SEO progress.

Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO

Often, users mistakenly think that a plugin is enough to install and activate.

SEO is an ongoing process of working with a website.

Yoast SEO allows you to add a title, description, and focus keyword for every blog post and page. The plugin will also show you how the site will be displayed in search engines.

All of this can be done in the Yoast SEO section, which is located on every page / post.

A keyword is a query that your potential customers will use to find you.

You can use the Yandex.Wordstat service to guess keys.

How to improve WordPress SEO

If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO, your site will already be ahead of most of the competition.

Want more?

Then you need to know other aspects of optimization as well.

Categories and tags. How to use it correctly?

WordPress allows you to sort your content by category and tag. This makes it easier to manage the site, and it becomes easier for your users to find the articles they want.

Newbies to WordPress often don't know how to use categories and tags correctly.

For example, in a personal blog, you can assign the following categories: music, food, travel, etc.

And tags are more specific keywords that describe the content of your posts.

For example, for entries in the food heading, you can use the following labels: breakfast, salad, snacks, etc.

You can read more about WordPress taxonomy in our article.

Internal links on the site

Search engines rank every page on your site.

The algorithm, alas, is not known for certain.

But we can definitely say that internal links play an important role in this.

This will help you increase page views and the total time the user spends on the site.

Optimizing WordPress Comments

The presence of comments indicates the presence of users on your site.

But you need to make sure that all comments are real and not spam. Spammers write comments with bad links that can negatively impact your site's ranking.

External links in WordPress

When you link to a site, you are transferring some weight to your site. This SEO ranking is called "link juice".

For a website to rank well, you need to make sure that you are getting more link power from other sites than you are giving back.

Adding the "nofollow" attribute to external links (links to other people's sites) tells search engines not to click on them. This will help you maintain your own link weight.

Example Website

rel = "nofollow"> Example Website

You can also add a rel "nofollow" flag to the popup when you set the link. For this you need a plugin Title and Nofollow For Links.

Full record vs. preview

WordPress displays and links to your posts from multiple pages such as home page, category archive, tag archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the entire article on all of these pages. This affects your site's SEO as search engines can find duplicate content. The full article also slows down the loading of archive pages.

The display of full articles affects page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to immediately read the full article without visiting your site (inYou can change the settings in the Settings - Reading menu).

Speed ​​and security SEO WordPress

Even if you follow all of the tips above, but your site will be slow or regularly exposed to hacker attacks - alas, your site's search engine rankings will steadily drop.

You need to ensure high performance and safety.

Optimizing website speed and performance

To interest the user and prevent him from closing the site, you only have a few seconds. Search engines recognize that they rank the fastest sites higher.

Optimizing images in WordPress for SEO

If you don't keep track of the size of the images being loaded, they can slow down your site.

The optimal size of images for a website is 35-70 Kb.

The most popular image formats are jpeg and png.

PNG format implies a higher quality image, respectively, and the image size will be larger.

The JPG format is a compressed version of the image, which lowers the quality slightly in order to be small in size.

It is better to use compressed images for the site.

Here are the services to help you do this:

• TinyPNG
• iLoveIMG

or Photoshop.

Another must-have when optimizing images for search engines is the use of headings and alt tags.

Tags help search engines understand what is at stake.

WordPress allows you to add titles and alt tags when uploading images.

WordPress site security

Every week, Google blacklists over 20,000 sites for malware and 50,000 for online fishing.

When a site is blacklisted, it doesn't appear in any search results at all.

It means thatthe security of your WordPress siteis crucial for good rating.

So that all the SEO work done on the site is not wasted, please secure your site and install the Wordfence plugin.

This plugin:

• detects suspicious traffic and blocks attacks
• protects against brute force attacks (when the simplest password is selected to enter the site admin panel)
• blocks IP ranges, web browsers, referring sites, or a combination of the above.

Using an SSL certificate

UPD: If your site does not have an SSL certificate, from July 1, 2018 Google will mark it as insecure.

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encryptsthe connection between your browser and the server to which you connect.

it is additionallevel of security for your site.

Protected with using an SSL certificate, sites are marked with a special icon that is visible in the address bar.

If you have an online store and accept online payments, you must have an SSL certificate.

I hope this article was helpful to you, and now you know how to set up SEO on a WordPress site.

If you have any questions, write in the comments.

(Last update: 01/01/2020)

Hello again, friends! Welcome to my blog to learn with me the intricacies of the popular WordPress platform. Matt Cutts, a leading internet spam and optimization specialist at Google, said that WordPress is a great CMS for a website in search engines. You, ladies and gentlemen, have made the right choice by deciding to create your project on Wordpress. Today we have an important topic - setting up the Yoast SEO plugin correctly.

Now is the time to talk to us about SEO optimization of your WordPress blog / site. At different times, for these purposes, it was necessary to use several plugins, for example, such - Platinum SEO or All in One SEO Pack, Breadcrumb NavXT and others. I present to you the best SEO plugin in the universe - Yoast SEO.

Ranked as the best WordPress SEO plugin - Yoast SEO

Time does not stand still, and instead of good plugins, even better ones appear. One of these plugins that have appeared is Yoast SEO for WordPress site(old name WordPress SEO by Yoast). One of the best SEO plugins will now take over all the tasks to optimize your site. Post updated.

WordPress Yoast SEO plugin is an automatic creation (sitemap) for Google, Bing and Yandex search engines; the ability to confirm your site for the webmaster's office (add a meta - verification tag to your home page).

Setting up the display of your site in search results (register an SEO title and Meta description description; "Breadcrumbs" for your blog; setting up an RSS feed, editing files and htaccess directly from the admin panel; analyzing the page when writing an article and much more, about than will be discussed below.

SEO Yoast WordPress Plugin

Yoast SEO Plugin # 1

Yoast SEO is the # 1 plugin of other WordPress SEO plugins. It has been installed by over 5 million users, wow, yeah! It is updated very often, in my opinion more often than the others installed with me. Comrades, improve your WordPress SEO: work on content quality and get a fully optimized WordPress site with the Yoast SEO plugin. The module is installed as usual, from the WP admin panel, in a standard way. Plugins section - Add new. In the plugins search field, enter SEO Yoast, the first will be in the list of plugins. Click Install:

SEO section with subsections

Setting up Yoast SEO

What Seo plugin settings can you make? Naturally, we go from the very beginning: we press General. The tab is the console. You should see a notification about the start of the Yoast SEO setup wizard, as well as the problems of your site and notifications (if any) that you will fix when configuring the plugin. Let's make the initial seo settings first. Click the link: Get started quickly with Yoast SEO Setup Wizard!

Initial SEO setup

After that, a special page will open in a new browser tab where the plugin will help you customize SEO to the needs of your site!

Choose Yoast SEO settings according to your preference

Go through all 12 steps, checking the settings you want. Then go back to your admin area and continue with the settings. The next tab is Features. Yoast SEO offers many different services. You can activate / deactivate some of them below. Click on the question mark for more information about the service:

General - Yoast SEO - Features

Enable everything, though, everyone should decide for themselves, and by default all services are enabled. Here many ask how to include in yoast seo sitemap xml sitemap for search engines? Here, here it turns on. It also says in Russian letters: XML Sitemap - Include the XML Sitemaps that Yoast SEO generates.

An XML sitemap (sitemap.xml) tells search engines which pages on your site need to be indexed, when they were last updated, how often they were updated, and their importance relative to other pages on the site. The sitemap.xml file can help crawlers find all the pages on your site and correctly determine the importance of the pages. To tell search engines the location of the sitemap.xml file, you need to specify the file's URL in tools for webmasters (Yandex.Webmaster, Google Search Console or Bing Webmaster Tools) and add a link to the map in robots.txt.

You can even see it right away (not yet configured) by clicking? and the corresponding link. And later on, you can find your XML sitemap right here:

yoast seo create sitemap

Move on. Tab - Webmaster Tools. Use the following blocks to verify your site on different search engines. This setting will add a verification meta tag to your home page. This is when the search engines ask the webmaster to confirm the rights to the site. Get the meta - tags and insert the digital part in the required fields. Only e-mail ru is missing. Yes, by the way, he told in great detail how to verify the rights to the site in different ways, read. This setting will add a meta verification tag to your site:

Enter verification code to verify your site with webmaster tools

Remember to save all changes - blue button. Go to the page: Display in search results, General tab. Here, select the header separator. It will be shown between your post title and the site name. The characters will appear in search results. And be sure to specify the SEO title for your site, as well as, importantly, the meta description.

Meta description is the meta description of a page on a site. The meta description tag, in contrast to meta keywords, is an effective and fairly effective way of influencing the presentation of a site in search results. The meta name description content is used when forming a snippet to describe a site in search.

For example, I have it written like this:

Display in the search results of your site

And in Yandex search my blog is presented as follows:

Blog WordPress Mania in Yandex search

You can define the title and description for the main page of the site as you wish.

Then, there is the "Content Types" tab. From this moment, the configuration of the xml sitemap in Yoast SEO begins. Previously, it was different, now they have made it much clearer and easier. Now it all comes down to answering a simple question: do you want this or that to appear in the search engines (to include in the sitemap or not)?

Yoast SEO sitemap xml setup

The settings on this page let you specify how the default search result will look for any type of content. You can choose what type of content appears in search results and a default description option. You can make individual settings in the appropriate sections of Yoast SEO in order for your content to be available for indexing by search robots.

For example, answering "Yes" to the "Show posts in search results" question in your post preferences will ensure that your articles appear in the XML sitemap and therefore in search results.

Include the posts and pages in the XML sitemap, and the date whatever you want.

URL Settings for Individual Entries

You can of course exclude individual posts from the XML sitemap in the Yoast SEO meta box under the post editor. Clicking on the gear and select the one you want:

It is possible to exclude a post from the XML sitemap in the Yoast SEO meta box

In the Media tab, you need to - Redirect the attachment URL to the attachment file - enable Yes. If you upload a media file (such as an image or video), WordPress not only saves your media file, but also creates a URL for it. Pages with these URLs are almost blank: they only have your media and possibly your title (if you've added one). For this reason, if you never use these URLs, it is best to deactivate them and redirect them to the media object itself.

Media and Attachment URL

In the Taxonomy tab, you need to choose: to include in the sitemap xml or not - categories, tags and archives by format? You can add categories to the map, but the rest, I think, is not needed. As for the labels, I still have not found an answer, whether they are needed in the map or not. Decide for yourself.

The next tab is the Archives. There is a hint through the archives: If you run your own blog, the author's archive will be exactly the same as the home page. This is called a duplicate content problem. If you have such a situation, you can either disable it (it will take place on the home page), or add noindex, follow to the link to exclude it from the search results. Note that links to archives may still be out of your theme and you will need to remove them individually. Archive by date, in some cases, can also look like duplicate content.

Setting up archives

If your theme is missing breadcrumbs, then you can customize them - Tab - Breadcrumbs, and then embed the code in your template (for advanced users):

Yoast SEO Breadcrumbs Settings

How to add Yoast breadcrumbs to a theme, I told a long time ago. RSS feed settings. RSS Tab: This feature will automatically add content to the RSS feed, you can add links to your site to each entry, protecting the content from automatic aggregators, and giving the search engines the source URL. Whether you need it or not, decide for yourself. And I will go further.

It's good that the plugin is in Russian and the settings with prompts (we click the question mark), which makes it easier for us to configure the module. The next subsection of the plugin is Search Console. You can connect the plugin to Google Search Console so you can track how Google indexes your site. By giving Yoast SEO access to your Search Console account, you can see and fix crawl errors right from the plugin!

Search Console - Yoast SEO

And now we will take a look at the Social networks subsection - the Accounts tab. List your social media profiles. In order to inform search engines about which social media profiles are linked to your site. Enter your links, save your changes and go to the Facebook tab. Activate Open Graph metadata if you want Facebook and other social networks to display images, and a snippet of text in the preview if someone shares a link to your site. That is, it is beautiful to post / share on social networks - Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and Pinterest:

Add Open Graph metadata

• Import and Export - Import settings from other SEO plugins and export settings for reuse on a (other) blog.
• File Editor - This tool allows you to quickly edit important files for your SEO, such as robots.txt and .htaccess (if available).

The tool will allow you to edit important files for your SEO, like robots.txt and .htaccess

• Group Editor - This tool will allow you to quickly change the titles and descriptions of your posts and pages without editing individual pages.
• Counter of text links.

We're done with the settings. Now how to use the SEO plugin. When creating a new post, the SEO Plugin adds useful features under the post editor. Snippet - how a fragment of a record will look in search results. Change the snippet as you need. The plugin's trick is this is a keyword, it will check it in the title of the article; page title; Page URL; content; in the meta description:

Analyzing your text for readability

Click on the Eye icon (highlight the result in the text) and the plugin shows / highlights the places for correction on the page. Here, perhaps, we will finish our story at this point. Learn, use, improve SEO and come first - Welcome.

Modules such as Breadcrumb NavXT, Category SEO Meta Tags, Google XML Sitemaps and others can be replaced with one Yoast SEO plugin. Personally, I have already switched to WordPress SEO Yoast. Which I wish you too. Just for us, beginners and not only, that's it.

P.S. The popular WordPress plugin Yoast SEO has released an update (version 11.0) that allows for the correct implementation of Schema.org markup.

What sets this proposal apart from other available options is that it solves two problems:

• Simplifies embedding markup;
• Combines the scattered pieces of markup generated by most Schema implementations to form a nested structure.

Finally

Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack () are two of the best SEO site optimization plugins. Choose based on personal preferences, but do not forget that you cannot install both plugins on your resource (not recommended).

And that's all for me. There will be questions, please feel free to ask them in the comments. Good luck.

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WordPress is a great platform. I consider it to be one of the best for small to medium sites, but you will need to learn how to do some basic SEO SEO for a WordPress site or blog for search engines.

We will not dwell on what WordPress is, Wikipedia will tell you about it better.

Most useful plugins for WP:

• All in one SEO pack / SEO Yoast for WordPress. Very important plugins, which will be discussed a little later;
• Spam damages websites. Akismet is one of the best anti-spam solutions and is easy to set up;
• Security is important and Sucuri is one of the best WordPress plugins for this. After all, no one wants to fall victim to a cyberattack;
• YARPP is one of the best options for preparing related posts, supports many formats: from text links to thumbnails;
• Hyper Cache - for caching.

I am not suggesting to install all the plugins from the list. But I advise you to study each plugin from the article in more detail and choose what you like. After all, every little thing in WordPress optimization will affect.

CNC setting

• site /? p = 1329
• site / vybiraem-domennoe-imya-dlya-sajta /

Which one would you prefer to click on? One is like redirecting an affiliate link from a product page to a blog post. Another one pretty clearly refers us to the blog page, and we can even tell on what topic the content it contains. Comfortable?

These are called human readable URLs. Changing the WordPress URL management path is part of the permalink structure. This is an important SEO factor for two reasons. The first reason is that Google and Yandex like permalinks with human-readable URLs (and users, too). In particular, users prefer URLs that don't have question marks, numeric strings, or weird suspicious parameters.

The second reason is that it will be very difficult to change the structure later and, naturally, it will not do without traffic subsidence for some time. The search engine works so that pages are identified by URLs. Changing the URL essentially resets the page's ranking history; if the content is still available at the old URL, the new one can be considered a copy and you will be punished for it. Canonicalization will help avoid this.

I prefer to use a plugin to implement CNC - RusToLat. Permalink entry name - simple URLs like www.site.ru/blog-header/. If you want to include the post category in the URL before the title, then you will need to make a custom structure with /% category% /% postname% / at the end.

In my case, it just goes /% postname% /, without displaying the category (set in the menu - Permalink Settings).

Site mirrors

The www prefix in the URL is not technically necessary for the site. Many simple sites have a simple domain, which means that the URL looks like http://example.com, not http://www.example.com. The choice for most bloggers is purely stylistic.

I am a supporter of versions WITHOUT WWW. Also in WordPress there are duplicates of the main page like /index.php.

It is described in great detail how to do this in my article -. Read carefully and glue the mirrors.

SEO plugins for WordPress website optimization

After installing plugins Seo by Yoast or All in one SEO pack (my choice) you can work with the metadata of each post and write a unique Title tag. Something went wrong with Yoast and I only use the second option: AIOSP.

Each plugin allows you to create a template for generating your title. It can be either writing it by hand (my choice), or generating it in the style of “Page title | Name of category". But I always urge you to do all titles manually, this generation is flawed due to the fact that you do not control each page.

It is not difficult to understand the plugin settings, because everything is translated into Russian. But if necessary, I will make a selection of plugins for popular SEO plugins and their settings. Write your answer in the comments 😉

Sitemap for WordPress

A sitemap is essentially a listing of links to pages on a site. In the simplest case, it contains the title of the post and the URL of the same post. The more refined sitemap includes the time the post was published and the time it was last modified. It is the last point that is very important, since if you do not use the "Lastmod" tag, you will clog the search crawler's indexing limit.

The main power of the sitemap is not directed to the user at all. Most users will never see your sitemap. This is why it is usually done in XML (markup language), which does not require human readability. This is raw code that you can pull information from, but it is not meant to be viewed randomly.

A sitemap is significant because it is the first profile document a search engine will turn its attention to. She can compare it to her index and identify inconsistencies. If a post has been published, and the search engine has not yet found and indexed it, it can find it through the sitemap and immediately put it in the indexing queue. If a post has a modification date that is more recent than the last one when it was indexed, then Google or Yandex can index it again and bring the sitemap results to match the changes.

You can get a dedicated sitemap plugin if you want, the above SEO plugins for Wordpess actually do it for you. XML Sitemaps settings are located in the general settings menu and all you have to do is enable them.

After that, you just have to copy the url of your Sitemap and add it to Yandex and Google Webmasters.

Robots.txt

The default robots in WordPress is pretty good and you can use it. But since I do not like everything ready-made, then I suggest you look at my post -. By the link you will find my robots from this blog and you can easily take it for yourself. The only thing that I have closed from indexing categories and archives. You may not close the categories if you optimize them.

Bread crumbs

Breadcrumbs - User Experience, Navigation & SEO Advantage. If you have a blog post about SEO and it's in the SEO category, you should have a header line like Blog Title> SEO> Post Title. Each of the three values ​​is a link (except for the last "crumb"). The SEO link leads to the category page and the Blog Title leads to the blog home page.

It is very useful! Users can see where they are, can quickly navigate the site and deeply explore the content if desired. Therefore, again with regards to Yoast, you can go to the SEO settings menu - Internal Links and enable breadcrumbs, configuring in any convenient way.

My choice is to generate breadcrumbs without plugins. The method is well described.

Correct use of h1-h6 headers

The title is what refers to THIS page.

Any block names that are cross-cutting should not be formatted with h1-h6 tags.

h1 - there should be only 1 on the page and is at the top of the page, before the main content is displayed. The entire hierarchy of heading levels must be respected. Those. you cannot put h2, and then h4, then h1.

Incomplete duplicates problem due to images

Faced with such a problem. Those. if you have 10 pictures in an article, each picture creates a duplicate of a page, that's not very good.

Install YARRP (the blog has Related Posts) so that it matches your site template and can be used to promote the rest of your content. Nothing beats comparison, but the related posts plugin will help you better reveal your content, it is.

But Related Posts is of no value if your site has just been launched. Because you stupidly do not have "similar posts" and the plugin will not be able to help you with this. Therefore, we get by with the manual option and save up the material.

Editorial calendar

An editorial calendar doesn't help you with SEO, or at least not in the literal sense of the word. The calendar helps you plan what content will be published and when. It visually displays the days on which the content has already been published, and how it is still needed.

In general, I do not recommend the Editorial Calendar plugin, because its functionality can be implemented in other ways. But depending on the size of your organization, how serious about your content, how clearly you want to plan it, you may need the Editorial Calendar features.

I recommend setting up a process and sticking to it every week. Create content, proofread it, schedule it for publication in a free slot on your calendar. Once the content itself is scheduled - don't publish - optimize the metadata for it. The habit of creating custom meta titles, descriptions, and other fields for your content is an important part. If you are lazy to do this, then the potential will be lost. Considering that you are creating a new site, potential is all you have and it is up to you to decide whether to use it to the maximum.

Ping services

There is very little sense from them, but maybe at least a little faster they will help your records get into the index. Plus, it's not costly, so we'll take advantage of that.

Here is my ping list (paste in Publish Settings, below):

Http://rpc.pingomatic.com/ http://blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2 http://blogsearch.google.com.ua/ping/ RPC2 https://feedburner.google.com/fb/a/ping http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2 http://rpc.twingly.com http://services.newsgator.com/ngws/ xmlrpcping.aspx

Caching

One of the important points in internal website optimization is loading speed. Because WordPress is not a small CMS - we use the Hyper Cache caching plugin. The settings, again, are pretty easy to figure out.

Open Graph Protocol Implementation

In AIOSP, you need to enable the module so that you can see the settings:

Video on creating an SEO-optimized WordPress website without coding

I once held a webinar on WordPress site development for beginners, I'm sure it will be useful for you to look at:

Part 1

Part 2

On that note, we will end my post on SEO optimization of a WordPress site for search engines.

WordPress is one of the best SEO website building engines out there.

Before we dive fully into WordPress site optimization, let's talk about why WordPress is becoming such a powerful platform by analyzing the site ranking system of Yandex and Google.

Relevance

The most important challenge for search engines is to provide the most relevant search results to Internet users. Since Google and Yandex cannot independently visit every site in the world to install it "", special algorithms have been created for this to calculate the relevance of such sites.

Below are a few of the main factors that a search engine takes into account when crawling a site:

1. Keywords and their density
2. Title tag and meta descriptions
3. Content update frequency
4. Traffic volume
5. Relevancy of incoming (back) links.
6. Overall Unique Content Score
7. Site navigation and structuredness
8. Website loading speed.

Each of these eight factors affects the overall relevance of a site and its position in search engines. A well-structured site with high traffic and frequently updated content, optimized keywords and solid inbound links is what determines relevance. Thus, it has very little to do with the site's own ambitions or size.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Basic SEO settings.

There are several important parameters in WordPress site settings that are critical to SEO. Before performing any other operations, make sure that these parameters are configured properly.

1.1. Permalinks

A permalink is the final URL associated with a site page. It is important that such links reflect the content of a particular page or post. To set up permalinks correctly, go to your WordPress site's dashboard. In the Console section, select Permalinks (Settings> Permalinks) and set up your site's link structure.

Select "Post Title" in the settings for your links view:

1.2. "Www" or without "www"

Before launching a WordPress site, it is important to decide whether you will be using the www version of it or not. This parameter can be set in the settings by selecting the General category where you can specify what kind of site the site will have:

1.3. Site name and description
The most important keywords for your site are the words that are included in the title and descriptive part. Such keywords determine the main topic of the site and are taken into account by search engines when ranking search results. Make sure that the main keywords you want users to find your site by are included in the title and the descriptive part.

To change the name and description of the site, go to Settings - General and make changes in the appropriate columns:

2. Content writing

The ability to write effective content is fundamental to developing a successful WordPress website. In this section, we'll look at how to create SEO-optimized content to popularize its content and drive internet traffic.

2.1. Developing a plan

One of the main tasks when writing content is to develop a plan that would answer two important questions:

• Who is my target audience?
• What will my target audience want to read?

Defining your target audience and what they want to read will help create a long-term vision for your site's development. This helps tremendously, since readers will come to your site in search of interesting information for themselves, about various products or services. Once you carefully plan your work for the target audience, you can start writing content.

2.2. Optimizing keywords

Thinking about optimizing the keywords of the next post or page of the site, one of the most important questions becomes "What should be the correct density of keywords on the page?"

However, such an indicator as the density of keywords in the text is nothing more than another myth about search engines, which for no reason has spread in the SEO community. Google used to use the keyword density level as a means of determining if a site is spam. Now this indicator has very little effect on the overall ranking.

But it does matter if the keywords are included in the title and subheadings of the article. Subheading such as h1, h2, h3, etc. is essentially the name of a section or subsection of a website page or blog post. It is very important that the main keywords appear in the h1 subheading. However, be careful not to overly site, remember to write for people.

To format the heading tag, you can select the text that you want to make the heading, and then in the drop-down list of options in the formatting tools menu, select the appropriate type of heading:

A well-formatted post or web page should look something like this (the header is shown in red brackets).

2.3. Editing title tags and descriptions

By default, most WordPress themes create title tags that contain the name of the site itself. As you can see, the new pages on this site contain the name of the site itself in their title. Taking into account that the name of the page is primarily taken into account by the search engine when determining the content of the page of the site, the system may consider that such a site contains duplicate content. And this can lead to a serious decrease in the position of the entire site in the search results.

The easiest way to fix this problem is to install the plugin All in one seo pack

This plugin will help you edit your title and description tags, which will allow you to shorten your titles to large sizes. Below is an example of setting up titles and descriptions using the fields that will appear at the bottom of the editor after:

3.5. Re-linking pages and posts
One of the latest SEO features is between pages and posts on a site. This not only allows you to keep old articles and pages up to date, but also provides significant SEO benefits. If you have old pages and posts on your WordPress site, keep them relevant by pasting links to them in newer posts or pages, and also use for linking.

4. Increase the loading speed of your WordPress site

In the world of SEO, most webmasters miss out on the opportunity to take advantage of simply increasing their site's load speed. Google, and Yandex, also perceives the page load speed as a critical indicator, and actively uses it when ranking sites. and then use the following tips to improve page load speed on WordPress sites:

4.1. Caching

Since the search engine considers page load time as one of the main significant factors in determining its relevance to users, it has become very important to make a site that loads quickly. One of the simplest) way in this case is caching.

Caching takes a snapshot of a page or file in real time, which can then be easily played back. Correctly cached resources of your WordPress site can improve its loading speed by 40%.

The easiest way to do site caching is to use a good plugin like.

4.2. Compressing images

Another way to improve your site and optimize page loading speed is to compress images. Large image sizes have become the most common cause of slow page loading and increased server load. To compress images, you need to find a suitable tool that will reduce the image size losslessly. There are many similar WordPress plugins that can do this, however some of them are quite difficult to install.

For optimization from Google.

4.4. Disable unnecessary options
Most WordPress themes are built using various features in jQuery and JavaScript without considering their impact on site load speed. Remove all unnecessary functionality on your WordPress theme to increase site load speed and minimize HTTP requests.

4.5. Storing scalable images

WordPress allows you to compress images before they are inserted into the page. However, this is not the best way out in terms of optimization and site loading speed. The image should be uploaded in the same size as it will be displayed on the page and already at that moment contain the optimized sizes.

4.6. Dedicated server or virtual dedicated server
The next way to work with hosting, which affects the website loading speed, is to place it on a dedicated server or virtual dedicated server. A virtual dedicated server is a server that is suitable for hosting only one site, and not several sites on one hosting. This allows for more visibility into the content and helps to reduce server lag.

• In much more detail, we touched on the topic of increasing download speed in, more recently.

A virtual dedicated server is a cross between shared hosting with a public account and a dedicated server. There is no big difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting. However, in the latter case, each individual user has a certain fixed percentage of the processor, RAM and disk space. In this case, the work of some sites will not affect the work of others. You can change your VPS at any time and get administrator rights on it.

5. External SEO optimization

While most SEO tips are about improving your site internally, you shouldn't forget about external optimization as well, which is great for getting rankings.

5.1. Backlinks
Backlinks continue to be a critical factor in determining the relevance of content by the search engines. In the latest Google update - Penguin, links from link farms or other similar schemes are severely punished. Instead, focus on linking to sites with high PR and fewest outbound links. Such work will be an invaluable resource for improving your site's rankings and will have a positive SEO effect. Just yesterday, I published an article about non-anchor links, they are much more natural than those with keywords.

5.2. Creating a network of links
One of the most effective ways to create a constant flow of visitors to your site is to attract loyal readers and subscribers. To do this, use 4 effective methods:

1. Good content
2. Subscribe to news
3. RSS feed