In this article, we are going to look at on site SEO with WordPress. In particular, we will examine Yoast SEO for WordPress, as well as some other leading WordPress SEO plugins.

Basically, SEO is broken up into to four major areas.

  1. Keyword research
  2. Onsite SEO
  3. External link building
  4. Social media integration

The main area that Yoast’s plugin helps the most connected to WordPress is with onsite search engine optimization element of SEO.

I’m going to look at all four key SEO elements and then give some particular advice on how Yoast SEO and some of the other SEO plugins can help you connected to effetely optimization of some of these key SEO elements.

I’m going to start with how Yoast SEO for WordPress can help you with the onsite SEO optimizing problems you might be facing at the present moment. We then will look at one of the leading off-site areas that are key to building traffic to your WordPress website.

Why is onsite SEO important and what are some of the key areas you should concentrate on, connected to onsite optimizing?

1-page and post titles are important

2 –each page/post should have a main H1 title however this is dependent on the theme you are using.

3 – keywords in the URL are pages and posts

4 – meta tags don’t directly affect onsite page SEO however if you are using Yoast’s plugin and you want to get that great green light feeling you will have to concentrate on this particular area also its important connected to a powerful description that get users to click on your website link in Google page listing.

Page & Post Titles

Most people who regularly work with page title have their own ways of setting them up however here some general guidelines that I got from an excellent article on Search Engine Watch by Kristine Schanchinger “How to Write Title Tags.”

Quick Checklist

When you’re writing your title tag what do you need to know? Here’s a quick checklist with some tips on how to write optimized title tags:

Length: Title tags should be a maximum of 70 characters long, including spaces.

Keyword Placement: Your most important words (keywords) need to be first in your title tag, with your least important words being last in the title tag (most to least). However, if you’re working in a language that reads right-to-left, then it is reversed, and it would be least important to most important.

Keyword Separation: Use pipes | to separate important (keyword) phrases (no commas, underscores, dashes or any other punctuation unless the keyword is written that way).

Wording: Keep your important phrases short and simple. Leave out words that would make it read like a sentence. (e.g., and, if, but, then, etc.)

Company Name: If your company name is not part of the important (keyword) phrases, put it at the end of the title tag; if it is part of your important words, put it as the first words in the title tag.

Some SEOs will tell you to leave it out. You can leave it in for branding purposes – so people will see the brand and click. This isn’t valid for all sites.

DON’T DUPLICATE Title Tags: They must be written differently for every page. Don’t mass replicate your title tags.

Make It Relevant: Title tags must be written to be descriptive of the content on the page. (e.g., the About Page would be:

About | Important Keywords | Company Name

or

Important Keywords | About Us | Company Name

H1 tag

It has been started as good SEO practice for a number of years that every page or post should have individual H1 tag. With different keyword phase, that should be different than the main title tag.

How has this change in 2015?

Well, some SEO experts have said recently that H1 tags were not that important and you could achieve the same SEO factors in having some text at the beginning of the page text in just a larger size.

However, more experts have started that H1 are still very important but things have changed. Basically, you main H1 tag should be worded as the question that your main text answers.

Keywords, Canonical and Paginated URLS

Ugly Parameter URLs

One of the things that newbies or intermediates to WordPress must understand that the page URLs that WordPress normally produces is not that SEO friendly. You can quite easily end up with a set of a page that have URLs like mysite.com/?storeId=10151 or even longer and stranger URLs structures. However, you don’t see this too often nowadays.

Here a great article on WPbeginner that explains how to setup your URL structures on a WordPress website

What you really looking is having URL that have some of the keywords in the URL however on the other side of the fence you can have very long URL with long streams of keywords in it which on the usability front is not that friendly..

Each page should have only one URL

Make sure that all you pages and blogs have only one URL it quite common to find WordPress sites with pages and post that have multiple different URLs

The canonical URLs

This is the most difficult subject for me personally to understand and I get the impression most WordPress website owners struggle with this particular subject connected to URL structures which are called the canonical.

If you have more than one URL for the same page then the main version is called the canonical.

If you have no choice but to create content that has more than one URL then make sure either:

A 301 redirect rule is added to point the duplicate to the canonical, or

A rel=”canonical” tag (aka ‘relcanonical’ or ‘relcan’ for short) is added to the duplicate. This tells Google to treat the duplicate as the same as the canonical.

Tracking parameters

This is a really important area that most WordPress websites owners don’t know or do tracking parameters connected to Google Analytics. So what are they and why should you develop tracking parameters. Here a great article on the subject.

Why Tag

I’m not going into too much detail connected to tagging and Google Analytic. This is an important subject, but it’s a quite complicated subject. One thing that I have learnt in working with client over 6 years is most business owners have want GA data but have no real idea on what do with the data and even if the data is giving a true impression on what going on connected to traffic and where this traffic is coming from. One of the only ways to get honest data from GA is real to understand how to us GA tracking parameters. Here some quick info on some of the key points that you need to understand connected GA tracking.

There are a number of reasons you want to tag your links, as well as a number of reports that are impacted by campaign tagging. (Learn more in the Reports Impacted By Campaign Tags section of the guide.) But here are a few top reasons:

Campaign tagging consolidates all campaign data in a set of campaign reports (found under Acquisition Campaigns).

If you’re running paid search campaigns outside of AdWords (or AdWords campaigns with auto tagging disabled), those visits will show up as organic. (I’ve seen this happen. It’s ugly

Meta Tags

There three sub main areas connected to Meta tags

1 – Meta Keywords Attributes

2 – Title Tags

3 – Meta Description Attribute

4 – Meta Robots Attribute

Basically, I feel that only two of these four sub-areas are really important in 2015 Title tags, and “Meta Description Attribute.”

Meta Description Attribute.”

It the Meta description attributes are in my mind just important as the page title. It’s the page titles that gets Google attention but it the meta description attributes that gets real people’s attention.

The Meta description should employ the keywords logically, but also create a convincing description that a searcher will want to click.

Direct relevance to the page and exclusivity between each page’s Meta descriptions is key. The description should optimally be between 150-160 characters.

External link building

About from SEO keyword phase research and online SEO there are no other areas as important as who is linking to your website connected to where you going to end up in Google search results.

This was at the core of the founders of Google insights on how to improve search engines results in the late nineties to the early two thousands. I could write a how article on this particular subject. However to give you some insight into this important subjects here’s a couple of online recourses that I have found really helpful.

https://moz.com/beginners-guide-to-seo/growing-popularity-and-links

https://backlinko.com/seo-techniques

https://www.seomark.co.uk/backlinks/

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