Recently I helped by dear friend Shane Phillips set up a website for his newly founded charity Paws4PTSD.org. In the process of setting up his WordPress site I added the plugin SEO by YOAST. I really like it and find it very simple to use while gaining a better understanding of SEO.
Let’s take a look at keywords.
The post Shane wrote was titled: The Finch. As I’m reading I realize that the word “Finch” isn’t found until the end of the post. I don’t like to write at the mercy of keywords but I do get that you would like to use what is most searched for. In this case the story took place in Haiti.
Using Google keywords I decided to put both key words, Haiti and Finch in the search option to see what the results would be. (Please click on the images to enlarge them.)
In this case the word Haiti is searched more on a monthly basis than the word Finch. Because the story was already published and fed to his various social media sites I left the url (permalink) alone and made changes within the post. First I added an (h2 Heading ) in the body of the post and gave it the title The Finch: My Time in Haiti so that the SEO plugin would pick up the keyword in the beginning of the post. The article heading doesn’t have the word “Haiti” nor does the url.
If I had changed the url then anyone clicking on those previous links that had already been shared would have gotten a 404 error message instead of being taken to the post. The preferred method would have been to use “Haiti” in the Article Heading and the Page URL.
Moving further down I can customize my SEO Title and the Snippet Preview is what viewers will see in Google as they search and find results. They will see my customized SEO Title rather than the post title.
When the option is left blank and I hit the Generate SEO Title option it will generate what I wrote as the title of my post at the very top.
Further down you will see the Meta Description. This section is a summary of the post and you want to be sure you use that same keyword that you focused on, in this case “Haiti.” On the right side of your screen in the option side bar you can click check next to the word SEO and a green light means you have zero SEO errors! You have done a proper SEO for your post. You will have to hit Save Draft before you see results.
This is a screen shot of the Page Analysis that will give you more details and ways to improve your SEO. I’m sure there are many ways to do this for this post but for training purposes I wanted to give you an idea of the basics. Enjoy this plugin. You will find it on many bloggers must have plugins list for WordPress.
If you have any questions or suggestions that you would like to see please leave them in the comment section below. To learn more simple ways to navigate your online projects visit more of my How To Tips <—-here!
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