WordPress SEO Plugin optimization
A WordPress SEO plugin is an added benefit of using WordPress. The WordPress SEO Plugin gives the ability to work on Search Engine Optimization (SEO) “as you go”. A plugin is developed by one of the hundreds of contributors to the WordPress environment, . This extends the core of WordPress, similar to a software vendor such as Microsoft upgrading Outlook with a new feature.
Daryn Harpaz at Consulting Group, helped me located an SEO plugin. We installed WordPress SEO by Yoast.
After the WordPress SEO Plugin is installed, here’s the way it works. Let’s take this post, for example. Below the post there is now an area that gives you critical SEO information and guides you along to make sure the post (or web page) is created properly. Initially the SEO information appears as follows:
Notice that just by starting the post, that the WordPress SEO Plugin begins building the snippet for me. You may recognize the snippet as the search result in your search engine results such as Google search.
The green wording “www.solvconsulting.com/1945 is the default URL for this post. However, as we will see in a minute I can change that. In fact I want to change it because it’s critical for SEO purposes that the URL reflect the keyword you choose for this post.
The description in the snippet beginning with “20 Mar 2012″ is automatically inserted as a default by taking the first line of text and inserting it here. But, we also want to change that, which we will also do later.
I have chosen “WordPress SEO Plugin” as my keyword phrase.
Note, that below the Focus Keyword is key information that needs to be present in this post to satisfy the proper SEO rules. Everything is “no” and is indicated in red. I have some more work to do.
Filling in the blanks
First, I will enter the Article Heading of the post, in this case ” Worpress SEO Plugin”. Then, I want to make sure that the URL for the post matches the keyword phrase which is WordPress SEO Plugin (this should be done for every post and page if you are also using WordPress for your website). The following image shows the results before I change the URL. Note that the WordPress SEO Plugin attaches “1945″ to the URL, which you do not want because it is meaningless for search.
Clicking Edit will allow you to change the URL to match the keyword phrase, as follows:
I now enter my Meta description which is inserted into the snippet and replaces the default text that you saw earlier. Let’s now look to see how I am doing to get rid of all those red “No’s”. See the following image.
So now, my SEO effort are looking pretty good, since I have all green and the “WordPress SEO Plugin” in the text 3 times, which Google likes to see. On the next screen, though, I am going to see if I have the keyword in the post the correct number of times.
We now select the Page Analysis menu option and look at an overview of how we did….as follows:
Please note that I still have some work to do.
- I have not used the keyword/keyphrase in any heading in the copy. This means that I need to go to the top of the post and include a heading phrase and mark it as Heading 1 or other heading.
- I have not used my keyword phrase WordPress SEO Plugin (but I just used it again here, so that is good) enough in the text. It was only found 4 times and Google likes to see a higher density…somewhere around 3-5%.
So I will go back and do that work now. Here are the results which look pretty good. There are more elements of this than discussed, but drop me a note at charles@solvconsulting.com if you have questions.
