Each time we finish drafting a post in WordPress, we go through a few simple steps to make the post SEO friendly. For those of you who aren’t familiar with SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. It refers to the process of increasing a website’s visibility on search engines. Improving your SEO settings can play a huge part in helping people find your site. That’s always the goal, right? Today, I thought I’d share a super quick rundown of how we configure our SEO settings before scheduling each post. To begin, make sure you have the WordPress plugin Yoast SEO installed and activated. This is the top rated plugin for all things SEO and we recommend it to anyone and everyone.
Once you have the Yoast SEO plugin activated, all of your post drafts will include a handy section called “Yoast SEO” at the bottom of the page. There are two tabs here – Readability and Keyword. We don’t pay too much attention to the Readability section, but it is insightful in some ways. For example, it’ll let you know if your post is too short or if your sentences are too long. These are things we don’t always think about when we’re blogging straight from the heart so it’s nice to add some structure.
However, I want to mainly focus on the keyword section right now. The Yoast SEO plugin allows you to define a keyword for each post. You can also add a meta description, which will show under your post url in Google search results. Additionally, you have the option of creating a custom blog post title just for search result pages.
Once you add your keyword, meta description, and title, you’ll notice that the plugin gives you several suggestions on how to format your blog post around your specific keyword. From this SEO analysis section, you can learn quite a few different dos and don’ts to keep in mind while creating content in WordPress. For instance, if your keyword is found in the first paragraph of your post or at the beginning of your url slug, your SEO will be better. If your keyword isn’t found anywhere else in the body of your text, your SEO will be pretty poor. These details may seem insignificant but they can actually help us create well-structured articles that search engines happen to love.
Once you’ve gone through your suggestions from Yoast SEO and tweaked your post accordingly, you’ll see that satisfying green light that says your SEO is good. Our posts don’t have perfect SEO 100% of the time, but we try our best. Seeing some of our posts listed high on Google search results is so exciting!
I should probably note that configuring your SEO settings for each post doesn’t guarantee that your post will be found. It definitely makes it more likely, you’ll still have to focus on creating good content. :)
Do you have a similar process (maybe the same one) for making your posts SEO friendly? Feel free to share your methods in the comments!
Roxanne says
Very helpful thank you!
Dan Sifuentes says
Yoast SEO is definitely a very helpful tool for WordPress websites. There have been many times when I thought my page web optimized only to find Yoast giving me some good tips.