Transcripts
1. WordPress SEO Class Overview: Welcome back to another awesome
class with me can best. I have a question for you. Do you have Wordpress website? And if you do, have you
been wondering what you need to do to improve
that website SEO? I mean, you probably already know that there are
several things you need to do to lay a proper foundation for your WordPress website SEO, but you've probably
been confused by all the SEO information you found scattered all
over the Internet. There is a disconnect.
On the one hand, the information is available, but on the other hand, you don't know exactly
where to start working on your SEO and what
to do after that, and what to do after that, you've not found a simple
step-by-step guide that specifically shows you how to implement an SEO strategy to position your WordPress
website for success. I was once exactly where
you are right now, confused and without a
roadmap to guide me. So I used to just put it
off for a future date. And so through lots of trial and learning over the
last five years that I've been working
with WordPress, I was able to narrow it down to a number of crucial steps that anyone can follow today and lay a proper foundation for
their WordPress website. A very easy, simple steps. So that's why I created this class to specifically
help you understand the most important parts that
you need to start working on to improve your
WordPress website SEO. Now, I use very simple
explanations and illustrations all
throughout the lessons to make them as non-techie
as possible. If you're ready to start optimizing your
WordPress website. Right now, I welcome you to join me in the class and
let's start learning. Let's jump right into Lesson
one. I'll see you shortly.
2. WordPress is Amazing, But...: If you visit the official
WordPress website, you will discover that one
of the main reasons why it's such a popular web design
tool among web creators is the fact that it's
designed to be SEO friendly. Wordpress offers a
powerful way to create websites that search
engines will love to crawl, index, and displayed
to people when they're searching for
information online. As a WordPress user, you have access to many free and easy to use tools
that make it easy for you to take care of most
of your websites SEO needs without the need to hire a professional for the job. Today, anyone, including you, can use WordPress to
build a website and leverage these
free SEO tools and features to improve your
website's visibility without spending hundreds
or thousands of dollars. But to do this the right way, you will first need
to understand what SEO is, how SEO works. Some of the SEO actions
you can take on your website and the best
ways to execute them. A beginner, this might sound a bit confusing and overwhelming, but as you will find
out in this class, WordPress SEO is easy and straightforward if
you have the time and willingness to learn with WordPress and the
tools it provides. Growing organic traffic from search engines is not
a complicated concept. In this class, I'll
be showing you a very simple step-by-step
approach to WordPress SEO. We'll go from the
fundamentals to intermediate to advanced
SEO strategies. And by the time we finish, you will have optimize the
website you built with Elementor for visibility
in search engines. Now I have to mention
that this is not a guaranteed that by the
time we finish the class, your website will
instantly start ranking highest in
search engines. But this is more of
a guide or roadmap on the best SEO practices
that you can implement on your website to
increase the chances of your content showing up on search engines to
potential visitors. And while it's very likely that you've already come across the term SEO in your day
to day online activities. I don't want to assume that everyone taking
this class already understand exactly what
SEO is and how it works. So let's get started
with the basics. What is SEO? Let's learn that in
the next lesson. See you shortly.
3. What is SEO?: Seo stands for search
engine optimization. According to Wikipedia, SEO is the process of
improving the quality and quantity of website traffic to a website or a webpage
from search engines. These traffic may originate from different
kinds of searches, including Image
Search, Video Search, Academic Search, New
Search, and so on. The first part of the
definition talks about the quality and
quantity of traffic. This means your SEO
efforts are not just about increasing the number of people visiting your website
from search engines, but also the right
type of people. The reason why you
would want to implement an SEO strategy on your
website is to rank higher on the search
results pages of these search engines so that more people can
see your links and click them to visit
your website. And not just any people, but the kind of people
who will most likely be interested in what your
website is all about. So for example, if your
website is all about extreme sports and you
sell extreme sports gear, you probably want to make sure your SEO strategy is targeting people who are interested in extreme sports and sports gear. Not busy lawyers, magistrates, or doctors who don't
like extreme sports because no matter how
powerful your SEO is, you'll be wasting your time and efforts on the wrong audience. So you have to target
the people who will most likely be interested
in your content. The second part of the
definition talks about the type of search that leads
people to your website. When people type
a search term or phrase in a search
engine like Google, to look for information, we call that a search query. Some search queries
might be about music, so some people might
be looking for music. Some might be about images, some might be about the
latest news, and so on. Most of the time,
most people only open the content that shows up on the first search
engine results page. I can almost bet that even
you rarely opened the second, third, or fourth pages
over Google search. So your ultimate goal with SEO is to make sure your
website appears on the first page in
search results pages when people do a search related to the
content you create. But why do you
need to understand WordPress SEO? Let's see why. In the next lesson,
I'll see you shortly.
4. Why Should You Learn WordPress SEO: Why do you need to
understand WordPress SEO? Implementing an effective WordPress SEO strategy increases your contents chances
of making it to that covariate first results
page in search engines. But you can't implement
what you don't understand. Although WordPress and labels
you to save time and money when implementing SEO
strategies for your website, it is still very important
for you to learn why the SEO tools
and features it provides you with are
actually working. Furthermore, WordPress does
not make your website rank high in search engines out
of the boss or by default, just because you've built
your website with WordPress. And we all know wordpress is
an SEO friendly application. He doesn't necessarily mean your website is
automatically optimized. You still need to
actually put in the work and tweak the various
settings it provides, as well as the settings provided by other third parties
that work with WordPress to optimize your
website for search engines. Wordpress helps you
take care of most of the most important basic
settings through easy to use plugins that have
beginner friendly interfaces. And this ensures that you
have a strong foundation to build on top of
when you get to the application of the more
advanced SEO strategies that we will cover
later in this class. But how to search engines
find the content they displayed to users in
search engine results page, how does Google
know what to show about websites when
you do a search? Let's find out in
the next lesson. I'll see you shortly.
5. How Search Engines Find New Content to Show: How do search engines
find the content they displayed to users in search
engine results pages? Well, Google and other
popular search engines like being and Yahoo have
automated scripts called crawlers or web robots or simply bought that
automatically scour the Internet on a daily
schedule looking for new webpages to include in
their search algorithms. This act of marking new
content as important and adding it to the search
algorithm is called indexing. When these crawlers
or bought find a new and indexed webpage that
they beam to be important. There job is to index
that page immediately. The crawlers also follow
every link they find on that page to see which
other pages are linked to. And then they submit all
that data they find on those webpages back to
the service at Google. If the links they find 0.2 pages that had
already been indexed, the crawlers want
index them again, because every search engine
has designed its crawlers to look at several different
factors when crawling a site, the search results served
to a user when they typed the same search query into different search
engines may vary. It may look different. In one of the main reasons why the Google search engine is
very popular is because it provides the best and
most relevant results because of the way it's
crawlers do their job. Now that we have a general
idea of how crawlers or bought work under the hood to
find an index new content. Let's now see what we can do on our WordPress website
to help the crawlers find an index our pages for better visibility
in search engines. Let's implement a
practical SEO strategy for our WordPress website.
6. Level 1 - Basic SEO: Now that we have a
general idea of how crawlers or robots work
under the hood to find an add new contents to the search engine
algorithms that offers search results
to Internet users. Let's now see what we can do on our WordPress website
to help the crawlers are robots find an
index our pages for better visibility in
those search engines. Let's implement a
practical SEO strategy for our WordPress website.
7. Choose a Reliable Web Host: Choose a reliable web host. Search algorithms always
favor websites that have a consistent uptime,
fast, and secure, good WordPress Web
hosts will provide you with fast web page
loading speeds, reliable 24 hours acuity,
and continuous uptime. That means if your
site is never down, it's consistently up and running and available
for the customers. When your website has
performance issues due to failure in any
of these aspects, your site's SEO is
affected negatively. Although getting the
most affordable services makes sense for businesses, in most cases, it's not always the best option when it comes to delicate matters
like web hosting. The cheapest is not
always the best solution. Represent actually has
a few specific web host on their official website. And you can use these
recommended web hosts or others that are at the same level or much
better that's hosting. What about the WordPress theme? Does it have an impact on
your WordPress website? Of course it does. Let's look at that
in the next lesson.
8. Install an SEO Friendly Theme: The second thing we
need to look at in our WordPress SEO
strategy is the theme. Virtually every new WordPress
installation comes with a default team that's named after the year in
which it was released. For example, in 2021, the default theme was 2021. And this year the team
is aptly named 2022. But in most cases, these defaulting is not what you will end up using
for your website. One of the greatest
things about WordPress is that it offers thousands of free themes to choose from depending on your
specific websites needs. You can do this right
inside your dashboard, in the team's
repository or library. Oftentimes the developers of almost every WordPress team you come across will say that
their team is SEO friendly. But sometimes some of these
teams come bloated with unnecessary code that you might
not need on your website. Some paints might also
require you to install specific third-party
plug-ins to work fully. And many times these additional
plug-ins might not be necessary for your
specific website needs. Additional scripts and plug-ins that you are not going to need might have a negative impact on your speed and
general performance, which can in turn have
a negative impact on your SEO efforts. So as you look for a WordPress
theme for your website, you can check if it has any possible SDOF general
performance issues. Personally, I built
almost all my websites using the reliable
asterisk theme, which is lightweight,
secure, as friendly, and offers tons of
settings to give you full flexibility when
building your website. But don't take my word for it. You can visit the
official Astro website to learn more about
why it's one of the most popular and recommended WordPress themes out
there in the marketplace. You can also keep digging
and reading reviews about the different popular themes to see which one fits
your specific needs. But remember, the WordPress
theme you choose to use has an impact on
your websites SEO. So now that that's done, let's install a free
WordPress SEO plugin. And there are many, which one shall we choose? Let's see that in the next
lesson. I'll see you shortly.
9. Install an SEO Plugin : To be able to do effective SEO
on your WordPress website, you will need to
use an SEO plugin. And there are many just in case you're new to WordPress and
don't know what a plugging. Iz you can think of it
as an app for WordPress. Just like you have
different apps on your smartphone to help
you do different tasks. You can install various
apps or plugins to help you do different tasks inside
your WordPress website. In this case, you
need a plugin or app that helps you
with your SEO. One thing you have to
bear in mind though, is that by simply installing an SEO plugin on your website, it doesn't mean your website is not automatically optimized. Installing it is
just the first step. The next step is to
use the plug-ins simplified user
interface to control the different parts
of your website that are working under the
hood to improve your SEO. From my experience, a descent free SEO plugin
should at least help you analyze your content
as you compose it and provide you with actionable tips on how to improve your content. For SEO, you should generate Meta tags and descriptions
based on your content keywords into regenerate a
proper XML sitemap for your website to allow
search engine crawlers to index your content and
issued assist you in configuring schema for the different parts
of your website. And we'll see how to do
all that. Don't worry. If you've been
watching my classes, you know that I've always been insisting on publishing classes that don't require you to
buy expensive plugins. And for that reason, it will use a great
free SEO plugin that provides all these features that I've just mentioned, and it's called Rank Math. Of course, there are many
other SEO plugins like Yoast, all in one SEO, SEO press and many more. These are Premium SEO plugins. You have to pay for them. But because I don't want
to assume that everyone taking this class has
the money to buy them. We'll be using the free
version of Rank Math. And besides many of the premium features that you
have to pay for in those other plug-ins
are actually free in the free
version of Rank Math, but feel free to use
any other that you live according to rank Matt,
official website. Rank Math is a search
engine optimization plugin for WordPress that
makes it easy for anyone to optimize
your content with built-in suggestions based on widely accepted best practices, you can easily customize
important SEO Settings, control which pages are indexable and how you
want your website to appear in search with
structured data, aka schema. And we'll see how
to do all that in Rank Math when you
first install rank map, it automatically checks
your entire website and suggests the best
settings that you can tweak to improve your
website's performance instantly while
installing rank map, he provides you with an
intuitive step-by-step wizard that allows you to
optimize your website SEO, social profiles,
webmaster profiles, and other SEO settings. It also automatically generate a sitemap for your website. And you can submit that
sitemap to search engines when you're ready to initiate the
indexing of your content. Now, let's see how to install Rank Math and start
optimizing our website. Let's do that in
the next lesson.
10. Demo - Install RankMath SEO Plugin : Here we are. We're just about to install the Rank Math plugin. We're inside the
WordPress Dashboard. The first thing we
need to do is of course go inside plugins. I'll go ahead and click
Add New. In here. I'll search for Rank Math. Alrighty, So as you can see, it has more than a million
active installations at the time of recording this. So I'll click install now. Let's activate.
Basically the first step here is to sign into
your Rank Math account. So if you don't already
have a Rank Math account, you can sign up with
Google or Facebook. Or if you already
have an account, all you need to do is connect. So let's click
connect your account. Of course, I think I already have an account with Rank Math, so I'll just click Google login to Rank Math login with my, with one of my emails. Now, I just need
to confirm that I would like to
activate the plugin. So I'll click okay, Activate. Now, here we have the few steps that we need
to take before we're ready. In most cases, my
assumption is that most of the people taking this
class are beginners. So let's go with the easy
option where we will only set the basics and let Rank Math do most of
the heavy lifting. But you can always
have access to all these settings that are
in the advanced section. After setting up everything, you can always access it from
the WordPress dashboard. For now, let's go
with the easy option. And remember, I already mentioned
that this is a roadmap. So of course we will not
go deep into setting up everything in Rank Math because that would be
a class on its own. The second step here
is about our site, basic information about
what our site is all about. So choose the type of
website you want to set up. For. Now, most people's websites would fall under the small
business side category. And of course here
the business type, choose from this list. I'll just leave it
as organization. Then let's give the
website a name. Elementor. Simply downloads. Let's assume that the
name of my company. And then of course we need to
upload a logo that will be showing up when people Google or search for our
company or website. So I'll click Add
or upload file. And of course, Let's go
with this logo here. I'll go ahead and
choose that logo. It's one hundred, ten
hundred by 500 pixels. Use this file. As you can see, the minimum size is
160 by 90 pixel. Maximum size needs full HD. Here we have the default
social share image. So basically what happens in
normal circumstances is when someone decides to share some content that they
like from your website, they want to share
it on social media. If you've not set a
default image that will show up as a thumbnail
for that content. Sometimes you might find that the image that will show up is a little bit weird or
is an image that you wouldn't want to show up. But if you set this up, it means if you've not set a specific image for that content that
they want to share. This is the image that
will always show up. So you can choose a
nice image that will be a true depiction of the
kind of business you do. So let's say, for example, I want to go by that. So anytime someone
shares content from my website to
social media end up not specifically decided on the kind of image that will show up when they share that content. This is the image that
will show up by default. So I'll save and continue. Now this is a step
where we connect to our Google Search Console. But basically this step is
not crucial at this point. If you already have a Google
Search Console account, this is the time
to connect to it. And basically what the
Google Search Console does is it gives you analytics and report on how your website is performing
in search engines. But at this point, we will not connect
because we've not even set up a Google
Search Console. We'll talk about
Google Search Console a little bit later in the class. So for now, I'll just
click skip step. And then if you want,
you can obviously enable auto update
of the plugin. I'll click that and then
return to the dashboard. Ryan, congratulations
now Rank Math is installed on your website. This is the Rank Math
SEO plugin dashboard within the WordPress dashboard. And in here by default, we are taken to
the local SEO tab. Local SEO is also
known as on-site SEO. We'll get to learn more about on-site SEO as we
progress in the class. As you can see, we have
very many settings here, social Meta homepage
post formats, authors. We have a post types
category here. Of course, this
gives you a lot of flexibility and you're able to set up your website to perform
in the best way possible. And of course, as I mentioned, this glass is a roadmap on
the different aspects of SEO that you need to implement
in your SEO strategy. And installing and setting up Rat mat is one aspect of SEO. There are still plenty
of things we need to do, so we cannot possibly
have the time to go into detail on how to
set everything up here. But there are several
tutorials on YouTube on how to set up The Rank
Math that go into detail. You can go ahead and search for Rank Math settings or
something of that sort. And you will find something like complete Rank Math SEO plugin. Basically a lot of information
that will teach you how to set everything up for
maximum performance. Now that we've
installed Rank Math, let's move on to the next
step. I'll see you shortly.
11. Update Your Permalinks: When you first
install WordPress, your URLs will look
similar to this. As you can see, this URL
does not make it easy for search engines or even humans to understand what
the page is about. Having a URL structure that he's simple for
search engines and humans to understand is important
for your websites. Svo. With WordPress, you
have a great level of flexibility when it comes
to structuring your URLs. These are called
permanent links. You can choose the structure
you want from a list of options provided in
your WordPress dashboard. So to do that in our dashboard, let's simply go to Settings, perma links, and then choose
post name from the list. This will display the post
name as the extension of our URL rather than random numbers that
don't really make sense. Now, this is a better
URL structure. It makes sense to both
search engine crawlers as well as users. That's how to save
your pyrimidines.
12. Is Your Website Indexable: As a WordPress user, you might at times
wanted to prevent search engines from indexing
your website for some time. For example, if your website
is under-development and you're trying out some
settings before going live. You might not want
their website indexed in that condition
or in that state. Workers enables you to disable index ability until you're satisfied with how
your website looks. And while that's an
awesome feature, you might sometimes forget to
change that feature or that setting when you're done with development in ready to go live. So you might leave that setting on telling search
engines node to index your website and leaving the setting active means
your website will still not be indexed and therefore not show up on search
engines as expected. So let's make sure you
know where to change the settings when you're
ready to go live. So to do that, go to
Settings, Reading, and then let's uncheck
the box that says discouraged search engines
from indexing this site. Once that's done, our
website is now indexable.
13. Verify Your Website on Google Search Console: According to Google,
verification is the process of proving that you own the property that
you claim to own. In this case, the domain that's holding your WordPress website, google Search Console
needs to verify ownership because verified
owners have access to sensitive Google search data
for a website and can affect a site presence and behavior on Google Search and other
Google properties. As a verified owner
of a property, you can grant full access to the property to other people. For example, you
can grant access to the employees or
external designers who are working on your website. And they can be able to
view reports and analytics about how your website
SEO is performing. Once you've verified your
Google Search Console, you're immediately
granted access to a wide array of powerful SEO, diagnostic, and performance
tracking tools. With these tools,
you can monitor and maintain your search presence
and rankings in Google. Right now, I recommend you take a moment and pause this video. You can verify your domain name on the Google Search Console. Now it goes without
saying if you go to YouTube and search for verify Google Search Console for WordPress or something
of that sort. You will find several
tutorials showing you in detail how to do that. So I suggest you pause
the video and do that right away before we
move on to the next step. So while I wait for you,
go ahead and do that.
14. Submit Your XML Sitemap to search engines: Now that we're verified
on Google Search Console, it's now time to submit a
website sitemap to Google. Remember, Rank Math
generated an XML sitemap, my default when we installed it, without wasting any time. Let's go ahead and submit
a sitemap that was generated by rack
map to Google and searching for Rank
Math submitting sitemap to Google will
be presented with several results here with very short tutorial showing
you how to do the submission. And in fact, the
first two results here are from Rank Math SEO, the official rank
map YouTube channel. So go ahead and click
on any tutorial here and see how to do that
in a few minutes. Then let's move on
to the next lesson. Once you're done.
15. Install Site Kit: Verifying your website
with Google Search Console also enables you to use scikit. Sidekick is Google's
official WordPress plugin, which was created to provide you with important
insights about your website traffic right inside your WordPress dashboard. These reports show you how
visitors found and used your website and how you can enhance your content
and earn money from it. The plugin pools,
all these data from the several web tools
that Google has created to help webmasters understand how the
website is performing. As you can see, at the time
we're recording this lesson, the plugin has more than 2
million active installations. That tells a lot
about its popularity. And if you jump inside
YouTube and search for Google psyche for WordPress
or just Google site kit. You will get several
tutorial showing you how to set it up properly. You can go ahead and
watch as many of them as you want to understand
how to do that. Once you've done that, we're ready now
for the next step.
16. Level 2 - Intermediate SEO: With a fundamental sorted out, it's time to apply
our SEO efforts on our content and webpages. Let's understand a few
key concepts that will enable you to have a
better shot at capturing and maintaining traffic
with the content you publish and the pages on
which you published them. One of the things you
will do as you implement your essay IT strategy
is called on-site SEO. Local SEO, according to most, which is one of the
leading SEO companies on the internet today. On-site SEO is the practice
of optimizing elements on a website in order
to rank higher and earn more relevant traffic
from search engines. In short, it's optimizing
the content you've created, such as text and images within your website for the
best SEO performance. Let's see how to do that.
17. Do Proper Keyword Research: When planning about
the type of content you'll be publishing
on your website. Keyword research
will help you know exactly which search terms you should optimize
your content for. Keywords are the words or
phrases that people type into search engines when looking
for information online. For example, how to design a landing page or how
to design a font. Once you know which
search terms you are potential visitors will be
typing in search engines, you can now start
making plans about how your content will match
those search queries. How you will create content that serves those particular people. One of the tools you can use for effective keyword
research is Uber suggest a powerful free keyword
research tool that was created by an SEO expert
called Neil Patel. He's a very famous
dude in the SEO space. Wilbur suggests
helps you identify the keywords you should be
optimizing your web pages and posts for and how
many times they keyword appears in search
engines per month. It even shows you how your
competitors are using those keywords to
succeed in the industry. At the time of
recording this lesson, we'll suggest is only available
as a Chrome extension, but they have plans to
make it available in other major browsers.
My kids had theme. Chrome is a free browser, so you have no excuse
to not use it. I already have it installed on my Chrome browser and I
use it almost every day. Feel free to check
out the full benefits of over suggests on the official website
and take advantage of these free but powerful
keyword research tool. And of course it has
a premium version. But the free version has more than enough
tools to help you get started and lay a firm
foundation for your keywords. I should also mention
that Uber suggest is not the only keyword research
tool you can use. The industry has several other powerful and awesome
tools you can use, such as SEMrush, moths and ASH reps. But these are usually used by larger organizations that
have a lot of money to spend. So I'd say they're a bit expensive for the
average small business, which is what I assume your
website or business ease. If you're curious, you
can just take them out. But in the end, Uber suggest is your
best bet if you're running a small business or
if you're just starting out, go ahead and visit
the official website and take it for a spin.
18. Write High Quality Content: This might sound rather obvious, but if you'd like your
WordPress website to rank higher on Google and other
popular search engines, you must ensure
that the quality of your content is top-notch. Search engines like to show
content that is relevant, well-written, easy
to understand, and helpful to the users. In short, there is a search
engine friendly way to write your content and you need
to make sure you put it into consideration when
creating your content. A powerful WordPress
plugin that can help you write better
blogposts is cold. Seo Writing Assistant. It's plugging that was created
and is managed by SEMrush, which is another one of the leading SEO
companies in the world. The plugin was specifically created to help
you structure and optimize your WordPress posts to be search engine friendly. As you write your blog posts, it gives you suggestions on more keywords and
phrases that you can add to your posts to
sound better and richer. So take a moment and installed the SEMrush SEO Writing
Assistant right now, and start improving
the quality of your WordPress posts
for better SEO.
19. Set SEO Friendly URLs for Pages and Posts: This lesson is related to the permalink I mentioned
a little bit earlier. When you create a page
or post in WordPress, the title you give it is also
used as a URL extension. For example, if you have
a webpage with a title, how to get free Elementor
template downloads. If you had already saved your permanent
links to post name, the URL of that page will most likely be
something like this. Some page and post titles
can sometimes be very long, meaning your URL may
also end up being long, and therefore it might
be partially cut off to fit search
engine results pages. If your keywords are on their
part that has been cut off, it's not good for SEO. In the example we just saw, the keywords you'd like
for your page would be elementary template download. Now if the URL is
cutoff or truncate it, the keywords might
be cut off because they're on the second
half of your URL, meaning potential
customers will not be able to immediately know that the page is about elementary
template downloads as you expect. The great thing about
WordPress is that you have the option to change the
default URL that was set according to the
title that you set for the page or
blog posts change. It's one that looks much better in search engine results pages. So you can rearrange
the keywords to be in the first half of
the URL extension so that even if the URL is
cut off or truncated, they are still visible. And to do that, That's first
collapse all these settings. Then let's go inside permalink. And let's cut the keywords
and put them first. Then let's make a
few edits right here to make it make more sense. Let's update the post.
There we have it. Now the keywords are on the first half or
the URL extension. And therefore, we now don't need to worry about the keywords being cut off in search
engine results pages, and that's how to do it, guys. Let's move on to
the next lesson. See you shortly.
20. Use Proper Hierarchy for Your Headings: Html, which the
programming language that defines the content structure of any webpage on the internet provides you with six levels
of headings to help you make your page more understandable to search
engines and users, helps you organize your content. These levels of heading start from the
largest, which is H1, the second largest
which is H2, H3, H4, H5, and then
the smallest is H6. H1. Heading tells search
engines and users what your webpage or
blog posts is all about. Let's look at this analogy. If your website is a book, an H1 heading is like the name
or by chapter in the book. Seo experts recommend
that you use just one H1 for your
webpage or a blog post. It's the same as
having one chapter nine for each chapter
in your book. You can't have two
names for one chapter, one H1 per page, or per blog posts. You can then break
up the content on that webpage or
blog posts with H2, H3, H4, H5, and H6 headings. These are like the subheadings
in each book chapter. A book chapter can have
multiple subheadings, but only one name
for each chapter. And so these headings create structure and hierarchy
and help search engine crawlers to understand
how the text blocks in your contents follow each other to make sense to the user. It makes the text easy to read for both search
engines and people. Wordpress, page or post title is used as the
default H1 heading. But you can always
change it if you want. So as you're composing
your WordPress blog posts or creating a WordPress page
when you give it a title, it will also be used by default as the pages or
posts H1 heading. It's highly recommended that
you make sure your headings containing the keywords
that you want to rank for, but make sure they
sound natural. In other words, not use
keywords on headings just for the sake of having them there with the hope that they
will improve your SEO. Every heading and subheading you use on your content has to make grammatical and contextual
sense and feel natural. And the user is
reading over using keywords or forcing keywords in places that they
shouldn't be in and do more harm than good
to your SEO efforts. Search engines can support keyword stuffing
from a mile away. So make sure you use your
keywords in your headings, but use them carefully.
21. Set SEO Friendly Title Tags: Wordpress, the title tag is
an HTML element consisting of the webpages title and shows up in search
engine results pages. On the other hand, what
appears at the top of the WordPress webpage when users are reading the content
on your website, for example, on a blog
post is a H1 heading. And we've just looked
at headings in detail in the previous lesson. So a lot of times we're
press beginners confused the H1 heading of a webpage or a blog post with
the title tag. Although these two have
the same wording for now, it doesn't mean that these
title tag is drawing it's wording from
this H1 heading. The wording might
be different on this H1 tag than
on this title tag. So there's a difference. And so WordPress allows
us to be able to make changes to the title tag to
make it more SEO friendly. And we already saw how to set the H1 header to understand what a title tag really ease when you search for any information
on a search engine, it is what you usually
see and read on the search engine results
pages to decide if a particular page contains
the information you're looking for before clicking
it to open the page. Your page's title tag
is widely considered to be unimportant
ranking factor. And the ability to set an edit
your title tags is one of the features that
should come with the SEO plugin you
chose to install. In this case, we chose
to install Rank Math. So you will use Rank Math
to say your title tags. It's a pretty simple
and easy thing you can do in a few minutes. So simply go to YouTube and search for Rank Math title tag. And you'll find plenty
of results that show you how to do that
in a few minutes. As you can see, their
first result here shows you how to do
that in two minutes. Second one in one minute. Take a moment and set
up nice title tags for all your web pages and posts and optimize them
for higher-ranking. Before we move on
to the next step.
22. Use Internal Links: As you prepare content
for your website with on-site SEO in mind, one of the most important
things you will have to do is to link various parts of your website to other parts of your website. This will help create effective connections
between related topics on your website and allow visitors to navigate your
website with ease. It also prevents visitors from navigating away
from your website to look for more information on the content they are
reading on your website. Search engine algorithms
love websites that can sustain people's attention
for a prolonged period. Adding internal links to your WordPress website
content is really simple. Make sure every single
blog posts on your website contains links to other
parts of your website, like other blogs or
other web pages. That's how you make
sure users stay on your website for a
prolonged period of time.
23. Update Image File Names Before Uploading: Sp or experts have
always recommended using at least one
image or reach media in your website
content because it has a positive impact
on your page ranking. But with this in mind, it's not enough to just
upload an image without optimizing the filename
assigned to it. In many cases, an image saved on your computer might go by an
irrelevant name like this. This means if you
upload the image on your WordPress media library, it's URL will be
something like this. As you prepare to upload
the image to your website, it will be advisable to first change that
name from this name, a name that's relevant to the content you're
about to publish. For example, if
the content you're creating is about how
to make a font and the image you want to
upload is an image of a sample fonts you
had made earlier. First change the
name of the image to something more relevant like my sample font dot JPEG, while it's in your computer. Before you upload it. This will ensure that once
you upload the image to the media library will
have a URL like this. This is how to make
your images and rich media SEO friendly because the names you've
used for them are a true reflection
of what they show. And search engine crawlers
can read them easily.
24. Use Alt Text on Your Images: Another concept related to
the images and rich media is the use of alt-text for all
your images and rich media. Alt-text is the short name
for alternative text. Search engines
love websites that are accessible to everyone, including people
with these ability. Alt-text is body's read
out two persons with visual impairment
when they are using screen readers to
browse the Internet. In addition, alt-text is what search engine
crawlers read to understand the context
and description of the images you use
in your content. The more you help
search engine crawlers understand your content, the more likely
your content will rank higher in search results. Just like we saw in
the previous lesson on how to name your images. He goes without saying that
your alt text should also be a true reflection of
what the image shows US, concise but brief
descriptions and make sure each alt-text is not
repeated on other images. So let's see how
to set an image as alt-text on your
WordPress website. So going inside the
WordPress dashboard and clicking media to
upload a new image. I'll say Add New. Then select Files. Let me select an image
here. Let's see. Let's go with this
one. All right, so now that it's
uploaded, Let's click it. And as you can see, the default title
is the name that the image had when it was
still on the desktop. Seo reports. But we need to set a descriptive alt-text
of what's on the image. Let's go with something like hands pointing at SEO
reports on a laptop. Notice that we have
SEO reports with gain, the alt text and SEO
reports right here would be our key word that improves
our SEO drastically. I'll exit from there. And now anytime you open it, it still has that out.
25. Help Me Teach Elementor to 10,000 Students: Hello my friend. First of all, I just want to say thank you very
much for joining me in this class and
choosing to learn from me. And also want to
say congratulations for coming this far
into the class. The fact that you've
come this far into the class means you're
gaining value from the class. And so I really appreciate you and I hope you are
enjoying the class itself. That being said,
I need your help. I'm on a mission to teach at least 10 thousand
entrepreneurs like you to use elementary to build
their own websites or landing pages to
sell their products. And here's how you can help. You see when a new
student joins a class on Skillshare and then likes that
class and leave a review. It helps other students know what to expect
from the class. And when a class is getting a lot of reviews from students, Skillshare says,
Hey, you know what? This class is getting
a lot of engagement and a lot of reviews
from students. So it must be helpful. So it must be useful. And so let's push it upwards in the library to make it more
discoverable by new students. So the Skillshare
algorithm pushes that class upwards and
makes it more visible, more discoverable
to new students. Because it's been receiving
positive reviews. And that's where you come in. Please join me in this
mission and helped me teach at least 10 thousand
students how to use Elementor, how to build beautiful
landing pages, functioning websites
by leaving a review in this class and letting them know what to expect
from this class. It'll only take you about
two minutes and you're done. But your review will go a long way in helping
new students, prospective students, know
what to expect from the class. Class meet your expectations. Did it exceed your expectations? If you have any
questions, remember, you can always drop them
in the discussion area below this video and I will
be able to help you out. I always respond to
every single question or comments that students
leave in any of my classes. And with that being said, I just want to say
enjoy the class and I'll see you in the next lesson. Peace.
26. Level 3 - Advanced SEO: By now, all the tips and tricks
you learned have already turned you into a pro in the fundamentals
of WordPress SEO. And if you apply all
those tips and tricks in all your WordPress, webpages, blog posts, and
all your content, your website SEO would
be way above average. You might be wondering, is that all there is or
is there something you can do to push a website
St. Paul to the next level. Are there more
things you can do to improve your ranking product? And the answer is yes. So let's have a look at a
few more advanced tips and tricks that can help you
take it a notch higher. Let's go.
27. Boost Speed with a Cache Plugin: Search engines love to display fast loading websites to users when they're
searching for information. And so your website speed has a very strong impact
on your rankings. And that reminds me of one of the aspects we mentioned
about what makes a reliable web host
they have to provide you with fast loading
speed on their service. One of the main features
of WordPress as a web design application is
that it's light and fast. It's less than ten
megabytes in size. But this doesn't mean that
the website you build will be automatically optimize
to load fast by default. But what can you do to
improve your speed further? You can install a third-party
cash plugging that can help you tweak and
improve certain areas of your website that
are usually slow and therefore drastically boost
their sites loading speed. Caching plug-ins are created
to minimize the amount of data that is transmitted between the visitor's browser, the WordPress database, and the web server on
the host machine. On the web hosts machine, there's a ton of popular
caching plug-ins on the WordPress
plugins repository. And WordPress recommends
a few of them. But of course, feel free to
choose any that you like. So make sure you take a
moment and learn a little bit more about the
best cached logins in the marketplace or in the WordPress plugins repository
and install it that will drastically help you improve
the speed and performance of your website than you've been able to improve it
up to this point. So take a moment, do that before we move
on to the next lesson.
28. Optimize Image Size: While we're still talking
about your website speed. Another factor that
causes web pages to load slowly ease an optimized images and reach medium if
your webpage has lots of large images
or one large image, the webpage is likely
to be larger than a normal webpage
because each image on the webpage is a file
stored in your database and needs to be loaded onto the page when the
page is requested. The larger an image files
stored on your database, the longer it takes
to load it onto your page when the
page is requested, and the slower your website B's. Most people don't reduce
the dimensions of the images they want to upload
their WordPress website. And the larger the dimensions of an image on your computer, the larger the image file
size in MBAs are megabytes. To solve this problem, the trick is to manually
edit and reduce your image dimensions
in software like Photoshop that will reduce their file size before you
upload them to WordPress. Another way to solve
this problem is to use a plugin that can
automatically be size and reduce all your images even though you uploaded
them as large files. And a good example of
such a blocking is smash. And it's very easy
to use plugin that compresses your
images and optimizes them with lazy loading and other technologies
that are meant to make your images load faster. And as you can see right now, it has more than a million
active installations. But of course, as with every
other WordPress plugin, there are other options
that you can explore, an eventually decided
one you're going to use. So you're not constrained
to use in smash only, although as you can
see by the numbers, it's the most popular plugin
for compressing images. So go ahead and do that. And then let's move on
to the next lesson.
29. Use Proper Schema on Your web Pages: Using schema on your
WordPress website helps search engines understand, organize, and interpret
the vast amount of information on your
WordPress website, which in turn improve the
information that uses C when your content shows up in
search engine results pages, the search engines use
the data organized by schema to display which results in search engine results pages, thereby improving the user
experience for searches. When you do a Google search
about your website content, the better your schema, the better the information
that will be displayed about your content in search
engine results pages. So as an example, I did a quick search of
WordPress on Google. And as you can see, this is just a normal
search results page with several search results, but there are differences in the different search
results we're looking at. So notice that some
of these results have some additional
information like the ratings. So this tells you
that WordPress has a 4.4 rating on Google Play
on this website here. But when you look at
a website like this, there is no additional
information about WordPress contained
in this information. This tells us that Google Play
has gone the extra mile to provide some additional
information about WordPress. Now looking at a
website like Wikipedia, wikipedia has gone
the extra mile to provide us with an
initial release, stable release of the software, the language it's written in, and the operating system. So these websites shows schema and it will be very
nice for your website to provide schema about the
different things you write about all the different types of content you have
on your website. Proper implementation
of schema also increases the likelihood of
users clicking your pages when they show up on search engine results pages
because they can already see more information about
what to expect on your website while they're there on the search engine
results pages. The great news is that Rank Math has made
it easy to select a default schema type to appear on all your
posts and pages. And you can edit that schema
type for better performance. You can edit that schema type to suit your specific needs. So take a moment and search for rank Matt schema and
understand how to set up your website
schema using the plugin. And once you're done with that, let's move on to the next step.
Ken Mbesa, Web Designer | 3D Artist
