One of the main questions that a novice webmaster faces when creating a site is the choice of CMS. In this article, we will look at the main features of CMS Wordpress in terms of SEO promotion.
Let's start with the main advantages that determine the wide distribution and popularity of CMS WordPress:
- A simple, intuitive interface that makes it easy to post articles / blog posts even to a completely unprepared person.
- A huge number of free templates and modules, and not paid too.
- Convenient text editor.
- Great Community, very easy to find the answer to any question.
That is why WordPress is so popular for creating blogs, article/news sites.
But, of course, it is worth noting also the shortcomings. The main ones are probably the following:
- Difficulties when adding any non-standard functionality to the site.
- The versatility of the system, which often leads to the presence of a large amount of unnecessary content on the site. At the same time, all the functionality is written in the core of the CMS and is difficult to remove.
- The free solutions already mentioned above. As you know, free cheese is only in a mousetrap, so in many modules, developers sew in the possibility of unauthorized access to the site by the owners. Any installed module is a potential security threat, even among paid add-ons there are unsafe ones.
- The reverse side of popularity: constant problems with spam, hacking sites.
As you can see from the list of disadvantages, for a large and even medium-sized online store, you should not use Wordpress.
And now let's move on to the actual issues of promoting sites on WordPress.
Template source code optimization
CMS WordPress in general is not very SEO friendly, and in any free WP template you will find a huge number of “jambs”.
External links. Almost always, the developer of the template (also applies to plugins) leaves a link to his own site in the code, often in a hidden form. Why you need to remove it: part of the weight is passed by reference, hidden code sections are generally bad for promotion.
It can be very difficult to get rid of such links, often developers make them as elusive as possible.
Duplicates/useless content. WordPress constantly creates duplicate pages, which can also negatively affect promotion - the overall quality of the site decreases. What can be attributed here: separate pages for each comment, separate pages for pictures, archives. All these pages are not of any use to promote your VP site, so you need to get rid of them right away.
Wrong placement of h1, h2, h3 tags. In SEO-promotion of a WordPress site, you may experience difficulties due to the incorrect use of headers in the template. In the vast majority of templates, you can see spamming (for example, the title of all articles on the heading page in h2) or incorrect use of headings in cross-cutting elements (some forms, menus). You need to remove all unnecessary h tags: h1 - always once on the page as the main heading, h2 and h3 - subheadings of content blocks, using h4-h6 does not make sense at all, so it is better to refuse these tags.
Choosing the main mirror site on WordPress
In principle, it is not important to use the site address with or without www, the main thing is to stop at one option so as not to create a duplicate of the site. Here you can praise the optimization of WP for having a built-in functionality for setting the main address “in one click” (In the Wordpress admin panel, go to Settings > General).
Installing the necessary plugins for promotion
Unfortunately, you can hardly do without plugins for SEO website promotion on WordPress, however, due to the popularity of the engine, a plugin can be found for almost any occasion. Of course, if you have sufficient skills in development, then all the functionality can be added on your own, but for an ordinary user, at least the following additions are needed:
- RusToLat/CyrToLat. CNC (links containing human-readable text) must be on the site, and this plugin will allow you to transliterate the title of your articles in the URL.
- All in One SEO Pack/SEO by Youst. The standard functionality for managing headers and metadata in WordPress is very poor, so you will need “crutches”.
- Akismet. In order not to drown in spam (comments and any other forms will constantly be filled with bots), some protection is simply needed, this plugin will save you from problems for the most part.
- GoogleXMLSitemaps. A plugin for creating an XML sitemap, if you chose Yoast to manage SEO, then it already has such functionality.
Addressing setting
By default, the URLs of the pages of a WordPress site look like this: site.ru/?p=123, which is not very correct for SEO. To customize the display of links, you need to go to Settings > Permalinks. It is better to choose the option "Post title" - then after the domain, the title of the article will be displayed, which, as we remember, will be translated into transliteration by the plugin.
When posting an article on the site, you must follow these recommendations:
- It is advisable not to copy from the article and Word to the WordPress editor, because in this case the engine creates extra code. You need to get rid of them. This happens only when copying is done in a visual editor, not a text one.
- The main image of the article should not contain a link to the page. On many blogs, clicking on a thumbnail will open the full article. You should not do this, because the weight will be divided immediately by 3 links: To the “Read more” button, to the Title of the page and to the picture. By using images as a link, we lose the weight that could be given to the keyword in the Title.
- When adding a main image to an article, you need to use the “Thumbnail” function. Adding an image without this function will not allow you to keep track of all the main images.
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Improving your site's SEO is a direct way to increase traffic. In this article, I will talk about how to optimize the SEO of your WordPress site and get more organic traffic.
SEO WordPress for Beginners
You may have heard experts say that WordPress is a well-optimized SEO platform.
Even though this CMS generates code that meets the latest search engine requirements, you can still take a number of steps to improve it.
In this article, we will cover every aspect of SEO optimization:
- definition
- the importance of using
- basic aspects of WordPress SEO
- best SEO plugins and strategies to optimize your website.
What is SEO?
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is search engine optimization. This is a strategy for getting more traffic and gradually bringing the site to the first lines. in search engines.
it creating a resource with optimized code and formatting, which allows search engines to easily find your site.
Your optimized content will be displayed higher by search engines, which will bring more users to your site.
What is the importance of SEO?
Most sites get the most traffic from search engines. Google and Yandex use advanced algorithms to correctly understand and rank pages for search results.
But these algorithms are not perfect - they still need your help to understand what they are talking about.
If your content is not optimized, search engines won't know how to correct it rank.
In other words, your site will not show up in the SERPs.
WordPress SEO Basics
By learning a few basic SEO optimization tips, you can noticeably increase traffic to your website.
Let's start optimizing the site :)
Check your site's visibility settings
By default, WordPress hides site from search engines.
To give you time to prepare the site for launch.
However, even after all the work is completed, some site owners forget to disable this option.
How to check if this option is not set?
In the administrative panel, go to the Settings - Reading tab.
You need to scroll down to the "Search Engine Visibility" section and check that the box next to "Ask search engines not to index this site"" not installed.
Using SEO Friendly URL Structures in WordPress
SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page. They are easy to read for both humans and search engines.
Some examples of friendly URLs:
https://website/ kak-dobavit-reklamu-na-sajt
https://website/kak-sdelat-sajt-na-wordpress
Important!
These URLs are readable. Pthe user can understand what he will see by clicking on the link.
And here are examples of bad URLs:
https://website/ ?p=10467
https://site/archives/123
Note that these URLs use non-content numbers.
What follows from this?
The user will not be able to understand the content of the article.
Using the rightpermalinksimproves your chancesto get high positions in search results.
How to check and update the link structure on site?
In the admin panel, go to the tab Settings - Permalinks and select the Post name option. Click the "Save Changes" button.
Important: If the site is more than 6 months old, you should not change the link structure. E unless you use numbering.
Use Day and Title, Month and Title? Keep going and don't change.
If you do change your permalink structure, you will lose all the links you have shared on social media.
If you cannot do without changing the link structure, I recommend using the services of a professional who will set up the correct redirect.
Sad but true.
WWW vs non-WWW
When you first create your site, you need to choose whether you will use www(http://www.example.com) or not (http://example.com) in the URL.
Search engines perceive it as two different sites.
In the admin panel, go to the tab Settings - General and enter the site address in the "WordPress Address" and "Site Address" fields.
FROM From a WordPress SEO standpoint, there is absolutely no advantage to using one method or the other.
The Best WordPress SEO Plugin
Good news!
As for expanding the functionality of the site, and for optimizing WordPress offers ready-made plugins.
There are many plugins that are designed for a specific SEO purpose, but I will help you choose the best one that will solve all the problems.
Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin
There are two popular plugins: Yoast SEO and All in One SEO Pack.
In our article we made a detailed comparison and listed the pros/cons of each.
We use Yoast SEO on Azbuka WordPress - I will show all the screenshots in this article using Yoast SEO as an example.
If you are installing the plugin for the first time, watch the video where we show 3 ways to install the plugin.
Adding an XML Sitemap
An XML map is a file that contains all the pages of a site. It makes them visible to search engines. Adding an XML map does not raises the rating, but simplifies the process.
The Yoast SEO plugin creates an XML map automatically.
You can find it at:
https://sitename.ru/sitemap.xml
Adding a site to Google Search Console
Google Search Console provides a set of tools with which site owners can monitor how their resource is viewed by the search engine.
What will you learn?
Using the console, you will receive the following information:
- How does your site appear in search engines?
- what search terms are set by users
- how all pages of the site are displayed
- how often clicks are made on these pages.
That is, you will understand what is already working well on your site, and what needs to be fixed.
Google Search Console will also warn you if the site encounters problems:
- search engines will not be able to access
- find duplicate content
- find limited resources.
We have a step by step guide
How to verify a site?
If you decide to use yoast seo plugin, in the dashboard, go to the SEO tab - Console - Settings and confirm your site.
Return to the site and paste the code on the settings page.
From now on, Yoast SEO will pull data from the console to the WordPress site.
Various tabs will be available to you: PC, tablet, mobile phone. (Google tracks traffic from all media differently.)
Here you can also fix any errors (scan errors) that may appear.
This can be done through the redirect settings using the paid extended version of the plugin - Yoast SEO Premium. This version adds the redirect manager feature.
So, for example, you can eliminate the 404 error in Google Search Console by setting a redirect.
If you don't want to work withYoast SEO, you can use an alternative method.
Once you've added your site to Google Search Console, select the Sitemaps section from the menu.
Click the "Add Sitemap" button.
It will now show up as pending. Google will take some time to crawl your site.
In a few hours, statistics will be available to you.
Check Google Search Console regularly to collect information and see the site's SEO progress.
Optimizing Blog Posts for SEO
Often users mistakenly believe that it is enough to install and activate a plugin.
SEO is an ongoing process of working with a website.
Yoast SEO allows you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. The plugin will also show how the site will be displayed in search engines.
All this can be done in the Yoast SEO section, which is located on each page/post.
A keyword is a query that your potential customers will use to find you.
To select keys, you can use the Yandex.Wordstat service.
How to Improve WordPress SEO
If you follow the WordPress SEO basics, your site will already be ahead of most of the competition.
Do you want more?
Then you need to know other aspects of optimization as well.
Headings and tags. How to use correctly?
WordPress allows you to sort content into categories and tags. This makes site management easier and makes it easier for your users to find the articles they need.
WordPress newbies often don't know how to use categories and tags correctly.
For example, in a personal blog, you can assign the following headings: music, food, travel, etc.
And tags are more specific keywords that describe the content of your posts.
For example, for entries in the food category, you can use the following tags: breakfast, salad, snacks, etc.
You can read more about WordPress taxonomy in our article.
Internal links on the site
Search engines evaluate every page of your site.
The algorithm, alas, is not known for certain.
But we can definitely say that internal links play an important role in this.
This will help you increase page views and the total amount of time a user spends on the site.
Optimizing WordPress Comments
The presence of comments indicates the presence of users on your site.
But you need to make sure that all comments are real and not spam. Spammers write comments with bad links that can negatively affect your site's ranking.
External Links in WordPress
When you link to a site, you are transferring some of the weight of your site. This SEO ranking is called link weight.
To rank well for a site, you need to make sure you're getting more link juice from other sites than you're giving away.
Adding the "nofollow" attribute to external links (links to other sites) tells search engines not to follow them. This will help you maintain your own link weight.
You can also add a "nofollow" rel flag in the popup when you set the link. For this you need a plugin Title and Nofollow For Links.
Full Record vs. preview
WordPress displays and links to your posts from multiple pages such as the home page, category archive, tag archive, date archive, author pages, and more.
By default, it shows the entire article on all those pages. This affects your site's SEO as search engines may find duplicate content. The full article also slows down the loading of archive pages.
Displaying full articles affects page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to immediately read the full article without visiting your website (inYou can change the settings in Settings - Reading).
WordPress SEO Speed and Security
Even if you follow all the tips described above, but your site is slow or regularly hacked - alas, the site's ranking in search engines will steadily fall.
You need to ensure high performance and security.
Site speed and performance optimization
In order to interest the user and prevent him from closing the site, you have only a few seconds. Search engines recognize that they rank fast sites higher.
Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO
If you don't control the size of your uploaded images, they can slow down your site.
The optimal size of images for a site is 35-70 Kb.
The most popular image formats are jpeg and png.
PNG format means the image is more High Quality, respectively, and the size of the image will be larger.
The JPG format is a compressed version of an image that reduces the quality somewhat to keep it small.
For the site, it is better to use compressed images.
Here are services to help you do this:
- TinyPNG
- iLoveIMG
or photoshop.
Another mandatory item in image optimization for search engines is the use of headings and alt tags.
Tags help search engines understand what the content is about.
WordPress allows you to add titles and alt tags when uploading images.
WordPress site security
Every week, Google blacklists more than 20,000 sites due to malware and 50,000 due to online fraud (fishing).
When a site is blacklisted, it does not show up in any search results at all.
It means thatsecurity of your WordPress siteis critical for good rating.
So that all the work done on the SEO of the site is not in vain, please protect your site and install the Wordfence plugin.
This plugin:
- detects suspicious traffic and blocks attacks
- protects against brute force attacks (when the simplest password is selected to enter the site admin panel)
- blocks IP address ranges, web browsers, referring sites, or combinations of these.
Using an SSL Certificate
UPD: If your site does not have an SSL certificate, from July 1, 2018 Google will mark it as insecure.
SSL (Secure) Sockets Layer is a technology that encryptsconnection between your browser and the server to which you are connecting.
it is optionalsecurity level for your site.
Protected with Using an SSL certificate, sites are marked with a special icon that is visible in the address bar.
If you have an online store, you accept online payments, you must have an SSL certificate.
I hope this article was useful for you, and now you know how to set up the SEO of a WordPress site.
If you have questions, write in the comments.
WordPress is one of the best engines for creating a site designed for SEO promotion.
Before we dive into WordPress site optimization, let's talk about why WordPress is becoming such a powerful platform by analyzing the ranking systems of Yandex and Google.
Relevance
The most important task for search engines is to provide the most relevant search results to Internet users. Since Google and Yandex cannot independently visit every site in the world to set it to "", special algorithms have been created for this, allowing them to calculate the relevance of such sites.
Below are a few of the main factors that a search engine takes into account when crawling a site:
- Keywords and their density
- Title tag (title) and meta descriptions
- Content update frequency
- Traffic volume
- Relevance of incoming (back) links.
- Overall unique content score
- Site navigation and structure
- Site loading speed.
Each of these eight factors affects the overall relevance of a site and its position in search engines. A well-structured site with high traffic and frequently updated content, optimized keywords, and solid incoming links is what determines relevancy. Thus, it has very little to do with its own ambitions about the site or its size.
| TABLE OF CONTENTS |
Basic SEO settings.
There are several important settings in the WordPress site settings that are critical for SEO. Before performing any other operations, make sure that you have such settings properly configured.
1.1. Permalinks
A permalink is the final URL associated with a page on the site. It is important that such links display the content of a particular page or post. To properly set up permalinks, go to your WordPress site's dashboard. In the Console section, select Permalinks (Settings > Permalinks) and set the link structure of your site.
Select "Post Title" in your link appearance settings:
1.2. "www" or without "www"
Before launching a WordPress site, it is important to decide whether you will use the version with or without the “www” prefix. This parameter can be set in the settings by selecting the General category where you can specify what kind of site the site will have: 
1.3. Site name and description
The most important keywords for your site are those words that are included in its title and descriptive part. Such keywords determine the main theme of the site and are taken into account by search engines when ranking search results. Make sure the main keywords you want users to find your site for are included in the title and descriptive part.
To change the name and description of the site, go to Settings - General and make changes in the appropriate columns:
2. Content writing
The ability to write effective content is the basis for developing a successful WordPress site. In this section, we will look at how to create SEO-optimized content to popularize its content and attract Internet traffic.
2.1. Plan development
One of the main tasks when writing content is to develop a plan that would answer two important questions:
- Who is my target audience?
- What will my target audience want to read?
Definition target audience and what she wants to read will help create a long-term vision for your site. This helps a lot, as readers will come to your site in search of interesting information for themselves, about various products or services. Once you have carefully planned your work for the target audience, you can start writing content.
2.2. Keyword Optimization
When thinking about optimizing the keywords of the next post or website page, one of the most important questions is “What should be the correct keyword density on the page?”
However, such an indicator as the density of keywords in the text is nothing more than another myth about search engines that has spread in the SEO community for no reason. Google used to use keyword density as a means of determining if a site is spam. Now this indicator has very little effect on the overall ranking.
What matters is whether the keywords are included in the title and subtitles of the article. A subtitle such as h1, h2, h3, etc. is essentially the title of sections or subsections of a website page or blog post. It is very important that the main keywords appear exactly in the h1 subheading. However, be careful not to overdo the site, do not forget that you write for people.
To format the title tag, you can select the text that you want to make the title, and then in the drop-down list of options in the formatting tools menu, select the appropriate type of title:
A well-formatted post or web page should look something like this (header type is indicated in red brackets).
2.3. Editing title and description tags
By default, most WordPress themes create title tags that contain the name of the site itself. As you can see, the new pages on this site contain the name of the site itself in their title. Given that the title of the page is primarily taken into account by the search engine when determining the content of the site page, the system may consider that such a site contains duplicate content. And this can lead to a serious decrease in the position of the entire site in search results.
The easiest way to fix this problem is to install the All in one seo pack plugin.
This plugin will help you edit title and description tags to reduce large titles. Below is an example of setting up titles and descriptions using the fields that will appear at the bottom of the editor after :
3.5. Linking pages and posts
One of the latest features of SEO is between pages and posts of a website. This not only allows you to keep old articles and pages relevant, but also provides significant benefits in SEO optimization. If your WordPress site has old pages and posts, keep them relevant by linking to them in newer posts or pages, also use for relinking.
4. Increase WordPress Site Load Speed
In the world of SEO, most webmasters miss the opportunity to take advantage of simply increasing their site's load speed. Google, and Yandex, also perceives page loading speed as a critical indicator, and actively uses it when ranking sites. , then use the tips below to improve page loading speed in WordPress sites:
4.1. caching
Since the search engine considers page load time to be one of the main significant factors in determining its relevance to users, it has become very important to make a site that loads quickly. One of the easiest) way in this case is caching.
Caching takes a real-time snapshot of a page or file, which can then be easily reproduced. Properly cached resources of your WordPress site can improve its loading speed by 40%.
The easiest way to cache your site is to use a good plugin like .
4.2. Image Compression
Another way to improve your site and optimize page loading speed is to compress images. Large image sizes have become the most common cause of slow page loading and increased server load. To compress images, you need to find a suitable tool that will reduce the image size without loss. There are many similar WordPress plugins that can do this, but some of them are quite difficult to install.
For Google optimization.
4.4. Disabling unnecessary options
Most WordPress themes are built using various jQuery and JavaScript functions without regard to their impact on site loading speed. Remove any unnecessary features on your WordPress theme to increase site loading speed and minimize HTTP requests.
4.5. Scalable image storage
WordPress allows you to compress images before they are inserted into the page. However, this is not the best solution in terms of optimization and site loading speed. The image must be loaded in the size it will be displayed on the page and already at this moment contain optimized sizes.
4.6. Dedicated server or virtual private server
The next way to work with hosting, which affects the site loading speed, is to place it on a dedicated server or virtual dedicated server. A virtual private server is a server that is suitable for hosting only one site, and not several sites on one hosting. This allows you to make the content more popular and helps to reduce the backlog.
- We touched on the topic of increasing download speed in much more detail, most recently.
A virtual private server is a cross between shared hosting with a public account and a dedicated server. big difference between shared hosting and dedicated hosting does not exist. However, in the latter case, each individual user has a certain fixed percentage of CPU, RAM, and disk space. In this case, the work of some sites will not affect the work of others. You can change your VPS at any time and get admin rights on it.
5. Off-page SEO
While most of the SEO tips relate to internal site improvement, we should not forget about external optimization, which is a great help in obtaining positions.
5.1. Backlinks
Backlinks continue to be an extremely important factor in determining the relevancy of content by search engines. In Google's latest Penguin update, links from link farms or other similar schemes are severely punished. Instead, you should focus on placing links on sites with a high PR score and a minimum number of outbound links. This work will be an invaluable resource for improving your site's rankings and will have a positive SEO effect. Just yesterday, I published an article about anchorless links, they are much more natural than those with keywords.
5.2. Creating a network of links
One of the most effective ways creating a constant influx of visitors to your site is to attract its permanent readers and subscribers. To do this, use 4 effective methods:
- good content
- Subscribe to news
- RSS Feed
I usually don't write 4500 word posts (13 pages of pure copywriting), but today there will be an exception 🙂 I started publishing video tutorials on WordPress - setup, optimization, promotion ... all aspects and subtleties that are needed in order to create and promote a blog on the Internet , not a shit site, but a blog that you can proudly show to friends and acquaintances, as if you ordered it from Artemy Lebedev's studio. I post videos on your YouTube channel(subscribe to new releases and write your wishes about new videos in the comments), and I will post individual videos here on the blog. This is the first video in a series about WordPress SEO optimization, in it I talk about the internal optimization of the blog, it didn’t work out in 5 minutes, so the video is quite long - 30 minutes (therefore 4500 words), I hope that you will get a couple of ideas from it that will help you get more traffic, subscribers and comments. Below is the full text transcript, in case you have any questions or need a code snippet in plain text.
Text transcript of the video:
My name is Dmitry, and in this video you will learn how to SEO optimize any WordPress site for effective promotion in Google and Yandex in 30 minutes. I will tell and show you how, with the help of a completely free, simple and powerful plugin, you can:
- Improve site indexing
- Increase traffic from search engines and social networks
- Automate the creation of optimized titles and descriptions for pages that attract clicks in the SERPs
- Save time on page optimization
- Get more followers, likes, retweets and reposts
- Improve image indexing
- Get additional links
- Improve website ranking in search results
- Protect your content from scrapers, autoblogs and bots that steal your content
By the end of this video you will have step by step instructions for optimizing any WordPress site for effective promotion in Google and Yandex, as if you ordered site optimization from a TOP SEO agency.
So let's get started! For search engine optimization of all my and client's WordPress sites, I use the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast - this is one of the most powerful and popular WordPress SEO plugins. Over 5.5 million downloads (downloads) and high ratings from thousands of users speak for themselves.
Now I will cover the basic settings and subtleties of Yoast WordPress SEO, which will allow you to maximize the return from this plugin. To install this plugin, click "Plugins>>Add New", type "WordPress SEO by Yoast" in the search field, click the "Install" link and activate the plugin. If you are already using another search engine optimization plugin, such as All-In-One SEO, then you should disable it to avoid conflict and duplicate meta tags. Just in case, do backup your blog.
Headers and Metadata
The Titles and Metadata section allows you to set title and meta description templates for the different types of pages that are used on your WordPress site, such as posts, pages, tags, categories, and any other custom taxonomies. Taxonomy in WordPress is a method of grouping posts according to certain criteria, for example, a group of posts “Portfolio” or “Products”, etc…
The title and meta description are used by search engines to display your page in search results. On the SERP page, the title becomes a clickable link, and the meta description becomes the text below the link. Meaningful and relevant titles and descriptions capture the attention of users and, accordingly, attract more clicks to your site.
Take a look at these two SERPs, one of them had a title and description, and the other didn't, and now guess which of these results users will click on more if they get them in the SERPs? Of course, they will click more on the result that is relevant and understandable and where the description and title clearly and clearly explain what's what, and not the result where some abra cadabra and code are written.
In order to write effective titles and descriptions for your pages, imagine that you are writing a mini ad, where your main task is to attract the attention of the user, so to speak, to sell him your page so that he is interested and visits your site.
Yoast WordPress SEO allows you to set title and description templates that will be used by default unless you set a custom title and description in the page settings. In templates, you can use various variables, the values of which the plugin substitutes in the title or description. The list of variables that can be used can be viewed on the "Help" tab.
These variables can be used in templates, and then the value of this variable will be dynamically substituted in the title or description. For example, if I use the %%currentyear%% variable in the header template, then instead of this variable, the current year will be displayed in the header when the page is displayed. And if, for example, I use the %%searchphrase%% variable, then the current phrase that the user entered when searching the site will be displayed in the title or description.
To make it clearer how to use templates and variables, let's take a look at an example. One of my clients has an online store fashionable dresses- where wedding, evening and cocktail dresses are sold. Instead of writing titles and descriptions for several hundred products in the catalog, we simply set a title and description template and saved several tens of hours of time.
For example, the title template for products looks like this: "Buy %%title%%. All sizes, special prices, 100% quality guarantee.", and the meta description template looks like this: "%% title%% - a large selection of fashionable dresses in St. Petersburg at affordable prices, free shipping in the Russian Federation, payment upon receipt, 100% quality guarantee. Instead of the %%title%% variable, the title of the post title is dynamically substituted, if you look at this example: the title of this post is “Jovani Cocktail Dress”, respectively, in the meta description and title, this data is substituted and it turns out: “Buy Jovani Cocktail Dress. All sizes, special prices, 100% quality guarantee.", description "Jovani cocktail dress - a large selection of fashionable dresses in St. Petersburg at affordable prices, free delivery within the Russian Federation, payment upon receipt, 100% quality guarantee."
As you can see, firstly, this description will be relevant to the person who is searching, if we optimize this page for the query “Jovani cocktail dress”, then here the key query is present in both the title and the description, that is, it will be relevant for the query and looks very informative and accessible, clearly explains what this page is about. This title and description is written as a mini ad.
For example, for the "Product Category" taxonomy, the title template is: "%%category%%. Large selection, special prices. Online store FashionDresses.com", description template "%%category%% - a large selection, the latest novelties %%currentyear%%g. in St. Petersburg at affordable prices, free delivery within the Russian Federation, payment upon receipt, 100% quality guarantee.
In this case, the variable %%category%% is replaced with the category name, category name title, and %%currentyear%% is replaced with the current year. If we go to the category of wedding dresses and look at the meta description and title for this page, it will turn out like this - the name of the category we have is "wedding dresses" - the title is: " Wedding Dresses. Large selection, special prices. Online store ModnyePlatya.com”, description “Wedding Dresses - a large selection, the latest novelties of 2013. in St. Petersburg at affordable prices, free delivery within the Russian Federation, payment upon receipt, 100% quality guarantee. Using such relevant and informative titles and descriptions, we were able to increase the number of clicks from search engines by several times.
When used correctly, templates can save you a huge amount of time and drive more clicks from your SERPs.
Section "Clearing Section Links"
» allows you to remove a number of unnecessary links that WordPress adds by default from your site code.If you edit and publish entries on your blog through a browser, and not through a client program or third-party service that uses the XML-RPC protocol, you can check the box - " HideRSDlink«
If you are not using Windows Live Writer to publish posts on your blog, you can check the box - " HideWLWManifestlink«
If for some reason you do not want to display in the section
link to the RSS feed and short links for posts - check the corresponding boxes (“Hide short link of posts” and “Hide RSS link“).Social networks
The "Social networks" section allows you to set settings that maximize traffic from social networks. Today, integration with social networks is very important for site promotion, it allows you to attract targeted traffic to your site and helps you receive social signals (likes, retweets, reposts), which, in turn, improves your position in search results. To be able to control how your pages appear on social networks, Yoast WordPress SEO supports several standards - Open Graph and Twitter Cards. Since the technical gibberish about standards is likely to be of no interest to you, let's use an example to analyze which settings in the "Social Networks" section will allow you to get more traffic from social networks and search engines.
Tab «Google+»
The Google+ tab allows you to specify an author for your site. Why is this needed? If you link your site to your Google+ social media profile, then Google search results for pages from your site will show your photo, which increases the number of clicks to your site.
Here's how it will look in the search results: as you can see, the results with the author's photo clearly stand out from all the other results on this page, and this helps to get more clicks.
In order for your photo to appear in the Google results next to the pages of your site, go to your Google+ profile https://plus.google.com/ if you do not have one, then create, upload a photo. In the section "About" (About yourself) in the section "Links" (Links) indicate your site or sites, if you have more than one. Then, on your site, in your WordPress profile, link to your Google+ profile and in the Yoast WordPress SEO settings, select yourself as the front page author. Here you can also insert a link to your profile in the "Google Owner Page" field. Google+ setup is complete.
Tab «Twitter«
The "Twitter" tab allows you to "enable" the meta tags required to display Twitter Cards or Twitter cards for your site. Why is this needed? Twitter cards attach additional information to all tweets that mention pages on your site.
Here's what Twitter cards look like in action - now every tweet that mentions a page on your site is automatically attached with additional information that is contained in a Twitter card. Because Twitter has a 140-character limit, tweets often don't come out very informative, and summary or quotes that show information about your pages can increase the amount of traffic you get from Twitter, because people can always open and see what this page is about. And, of course, such text is much more interesting, inviting and telling what your page is about than just a tweet with a link.
In order to enable Twitter cards for your site, in Yoast WordPress SEO social settings, check the "Add Twitter Meta Data" checkbox. And set your username on the Twitter site. After that, go to the Twitter Developer Center https://dev.twitter.com/cards and click the "Validate your meta tags" link, after that you will need to enter the username and password that you use to enter the Twitter website. After that, a window will appear in which you can select the type of card you want to use for your site. Currently, Yoast WordPress SEO only supports summary cards, so select the summary card, then the data validation page will open - go to the "validate and apply" tab. Enter the address of the page where the Twitter card meta data is located, that is, it will be a link to the post, click "Go", after the validator checks all this data, the "Submit" button will appear and you can submit your site for moderation. After it passes moderation, Twitter cards will be enabled for your site.
Tab «Facebook«
XML Sitemap
The XML Sitemap tab allows you to control which sections of your site you want to include for indexing by search engines. An XML sitemap allows you to inform search engines about the URLs available for indexing on your site.
If you are using standard post types and not using custom taxonomies, then I would suggest including in your sitemap:
- records
- pages
- headings
- labels
To improve indexing on category and tag pages, I would advise you to display not the full text of your posts, but only brief announcements. If you display the full text of posts on category or tag pages, then many users will read it there, but if you display only summary, then most users will want to read full version and will follow the link, so you can increase the number of page views of your site, which positively affects the ranking in the SERP, plus you will get more comments, since the comment form is not displayed on the tag and category pages.
To display summary content on archive pages, open archive.php and category.php files
- http://YourSite.ru/wp-content/themes/YourTheme/archive.php
- http://YourSite.ru/wp-content/themes/YourTheme/category.php
for your theme, find the code
and replace it with
Now the archive pages will display the text that you write in the "Quote" field, if you do not see the "Quote" panel, then open the "Display Settings" and check the "Quote" box. By using unique quotes, you will improve the number of indexed pages on your site and will attract additional visitors from search engines, since your tag and category pages will contain unique content.
I would also advise excluding “Media” from the sitemap, by default WordPress creates a separate page for each media file from your library, which does not have any unique content and which, by and large, does not provide any benefit to the visitor. In the next section, we'll set up automatic redirects from attachment pages to parent pages.
Another nice feature of Yoast WordPress SEO is improved image indexing. The plugin automatically recognizes the images used on your blog and adds them to the sitemap for the corresponding page or post. Your drawings are displayed in image searches like Yandex Pictures or Google Pictures, and if you use relevant descriptions, this will definitely attract additional traffic.
Permalinks
The Permalinks tab allows you to control individual options for displaying URLs on your site. Most of the settings on this page do not require changes, the only thing is to check the box "Redirect attachment URL to parent post URL". Media files attached to entries are stored in the database as separate entries. They are available under their own URL, and this item will redirect their address to the post they are attached to.
breadcrumbs
Breadcrumbs are a website navigation element representing the path through the site from its "root" to the current page on which the user is located. If your theme already has breadcrumb functionality built in by default, then you can skip this tab. If you want to add breadcrumbs to your theme, then you need to add the code to single.php if you want to display breadcrumbs for posts and to page.php if you want to display breadcrumbs for pages.
RSS
The RSS tab allows you to automatically add content to the RSS feed. Why is this needed? If you publish worthwhile content, then, whether you like it or not, it is relayed to other sites, most often an RSS feed is used for this - these can be content aggregators, scraper bots, autoblogs, news resources, etc. an article on a site that aggregates content from your RSS feed earlier than on your blog and recognize the aggregator site as the original source. As a result, your main blog may be downgraded in the SERPs, as the search engines will consider that it is copying content.
To ensure that when your content is automatically republished by other sites, your blog is always recognized by search engines as the primary source, you can add links to your site in each entry, protecting the content from automatic aggregators and indicating the source address to search engines. To do this, simply add the following code to the template before and after each entry:
Source %%POSTLINK%%
This is how the posts will look when republished by third-party resources, as you can see, they contain a link to the original post, so by adding only 2 lines of code you will receive additional links on autopilot that will increase your site's position in search results.
Import and export
The "Import and Export" tab allows you to import settings from other SEO plugins, such as HeadSpace2, All-in-One SEO, WooThemes SEO framework. If you have used some other SEO plugin, then you can use the SEO Data Transporter plugin. You can also automatically import settings from other Yoast plugins - Robots Meta, RSS Footer, Yoast Breadcrumbs.
The "export SEO settings" section allows you to export the Yoast WordPress SEO settings. This can be useful if you want to use the same settings on another site.
Editing files
The Edit Files tab allows you to make changes to your robots.txt and htaccess files directly from your WordPress dashboard. As an example of a robots.txt for WordPress that minimizes unnecessary file indexing by search engines, you can use the following template:
User-Agent: * Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/ Disallow: /wp-content/themes/ Disallow: /wp-admin/ Disallow: /*.swf Disallow: /*.flv Disallow: /*.pdf Disallow: /*.doc Disallow: /*.exe Disallow: /*.js Disallow: /*.htm Disallow: /*.html Disallow: /*.zip Allow: /
Let's take a look at what is written here. The line User-Agent: * says that this applies to any agents, to any search engines, to any bots that visit the site. Lines starting with Disallow: are directives that prohibit indexing of any part of the site. For example, the line Disallow: /wp-admin/ disables indexing of the /wp-admin/ folder, any files that are in the /wp-admin/ folder. Now we have forbidden folders for indexing - plugins, themes and wp-admin (/plugins/ /themes/ /wp-admin/). Disallow directive: /*. and the file extension prohibits indexing of a certain file type. AT this moment.swf, *.flv, *.pdf, *.doc, *.exe, *.js, *.htm, *.html, *.zip are not allowed to be indexed. The last line Allow: / allows indexing of any other parts of the site and any other files.
If you are using a caching plugin that generates static versions of your pages or a permalink structure ending in .htm/.html, remove the lines
Disallow: /*.htm Disallow: /*.html
In general, if your browser address bar ends with .htm or .html, then remove these two lines from robots.txt, otherwise you will prohibit most of your site from being indexed.
basic settings
In the main settings, you can verify site ownership for Google Webmaster Tools, Bing, and Alexa. I usually don't fill out this section, but prefer to verify ownership of the site by uploading a file to the root of the site's package, so it's less likely that due to a plugin conflict or some kind of bug I will need to verify ownership of the site again.
Next, in the "Security" section, you can check the "Disable Extended Part of WordPress SEO meta box" box if you want only site administrators to have full control over how the page appears in SERPs. In this case, editors and authors will not have access to the Advanced Settings tab when editing posts and pages. We will talk about the "Advanced Settings" tab in more detail a little later in this video.
Page customization
The Yoast WordPress SEO settings panel for individual posts, pages and taxonomies allows you to control all settings for search engines and social networks at the page level. Let's take everything in order.
The General tab allows you to set the SEO title and meta description for any page, post, or taxonomy. The SEO title and meta description is the text that appears in the SERPs, with the SEO title becoming the clickable link and the meta description becoming the text below it. The SEO title is limited to 70 characters and the meta description is limited to 156, so to maximize the number of clicks from the SERPs, try to keep within this limit when compiling your titles and descriptions.
The Focus Keyword field allows you to specify a keyword or phrase for which you are optimizing your page. Then on the page analysis tab you can see a detailed report - how well your page is optimized for a given query or key phrase and understand for yourself whether your page really matches the material and the query you are promoting it for. I rarely use this function, because taking into account the morphology of the Russian language, it works rather poorly, and for English-language sites this is a very useful function.
The Advanced Settings tab gives you an extra level of control over how pages appear in search results.
You can prohibit a separate page from being indexed using meta tags, for this, select “noindex” from the drop-down list, if you want to prevent search robots from following any links on the page, then check the “do not follow” checkbox.
In the additional meta tags section, you can:
- NO ODP option - prevent search engines from using the page description from the DMOZ catalog as a snippet to display the page in search results
- NO ODP option - prevent search engines from using the page description from the Yahoo catalog as a snippet to display the page in search results
- Option Do not archive - prevent search engines from displaying the cached version of the page
- Option No snippet - prevent search engines from showing the snippet for this page in search results
You can also include or exclude a page from the XML sitemap and set different priorities for importance.
Yoast WordPress SEO supports generating an HTML sitemap that looks something like this… You can insert an HTML sitemap anywhere using a shortcode
Shortcode for displaying the sitemap in posts and pages
The "advanced settings" tab allows you to control whether a page is included or excluded in the HTML sitemap.
Because the same content can be accessed through different URLs, for example, a page on your site can be accessed at
- http://www.example.com/page.html
- http://www.example.com/page.html?parameter=1?query=x
then in order to avoid duplicate content, you can specify the preferred version of the page to be indexed. The Yoast WordPress SEO plugin automatically adds an appropriate canonical URL for pages on your blog, but if you need to specify an alternate version of a page to index, you can do so using the Canonical URL field in the advanced settings. For example, if your server does not support 301 permanent redirects, and you have moved your site to another domain, then you can enter a new page address in the "Canonical URL" field.
In the "301 Redirect" field, you can specify the URL where the page should redirect to. If your blog has authors that you do not fully trust or unmoderated registration with the ability to publish, then I would recommend disabling the "advanced settings for authors" tab, as this tab allows you to redirect from your site pages to any other resources and, if desired, can be used to redirect users to malicious resources.
If you don't want to use the default description, the Social tab allows you to set a description for social networks such as Facebook and Google+.
WordPress setup
Yoast WordPress SEO allows you to control most aspects of the internal optimization of your WordPress site, but for effective promotion in Google and Yandex, there are a few more settings that we need to adjust.
Permalinks
The Permalink Settings section (Settings>Permalinks) allows you to control how the URL of your pages will be displayed in the address bar of the browser. By default, WordPress uses links with a question mark and numbers, but this is not very convenient, since such a page address does not tell the user anything. I prefer to use the post title as a permanent link - this address is much more informative for the user and attracts more clicks in the SERPs, plus, if the keyword from the user's query is present in the address of your page, then it will be bolded in the SERPs, which makes additional emphasis on your page.
Since in most cases the domain name consists of Latin letters, in order for the addresses of your pages to also use Latin letters by default, install the Cyr-To-Lat plugin, it automatically converts Cyrillic characters to Latin.
Discussion settings
In the discussion settings (Options>Discussion), check the box "Try to notify blogs mentioned in the article", now if you link to other blogs in your articles, they will receive notifications, the so-called pingbacks. If the author of the blog you are linking to approves your pingback, then you will receive a link from his site, in most cases it will be a nofollow link, but if you mention articles by popular bloggers in your niche in a relevant and appropriate way, you can get high-quality traffic by placing just one checkbox in the settings.
Publication settings
The next step in the publication settings (Options>Writing) in the Update Services section, add a list of the main update services:
http://ping.blogs.yandex.ru/RPC2 http://blogsearch.google.ru/ping/RPC2 http://www.blogsearch.google.com/ping/RPC2 http://ping.feedburner.com http://www.rpc.technorati.jp/rpc/ping http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/ http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
Why is this needed? After you publish a great post on your blog, do you want search engines to index it and show it in the SERPs as soon as possible in order to get traffic? If you are the owner of a popular blog that is more than 6 months old and you regularly publish unique high quality content, then you should not have problems indexing new articles. But if your blog is relatively new, then indexing new articles can take up to several days, and the update services that you just added will help speed up the indexing process. Now every time you post new article, WordPress will automatically notify search engines and tracking service sites using XML-RPC ping. On the Internet you can find lists of ping services for WordPress from several hundred positions, I would not recommend using them, so if you are trying to notify all search engines in all known languages, and your blog publishes articles only in Russian, then this can be regarded as ping spam and can backfire, plus you needlessly increase the load on your server.
Internal linking
Internal site optimization is impossible without good page linking. Links from internal pages count for ranking just like links from external sites, so you can significantly improve your position if you strategically relink internal pages using key queries in the link text for which you want to improve your position in the SERP. Linking can be done manually, or automatically using plugins. Since I'm a big fan of automation, I use the Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP). YARPP shows a list of relevant posts for the current page, the post title is used as the link text, so if you use keywords in post titles, you automatically get optimal internal linking, plus for added effect I use manual linking of relevant posts. YARPP also increases the number of page views on your site, as it introduces the visitor to other relevant content on your blog.
Here are some basic settings that will help you get the most out of it:
I usually set the similarity threshold low so that relevant posts are displayed for all pages. The higher the similarity threshold, the stricter the selection, if it is too high, then it may turn out that for most of the records there will not be enough relevant matches.
I usually set the "treat with extra weight" settings for texts and headings, since that's where all the essential information is.
I set automatic display for posts, the maximum number of related posts is 6. I use 6 related posts because it fits into the design of my theme, but you can put a different number if you wish, I would recommend keeping the maximum number of related posts in the range from 3- 6 because if the number is much more than 6, then it starts to smell like spam, and if it is less than 3, then you will not get the maximum benefit from using the plugin.
Conclusion
So we have highlighted the main points of internal website optimization for effective website promotion in Google and Yandex. If you apply the principles and methods that we discussed in this video, then you are guaranteed to improve your positions in search results and increase traffic from search engines and social networks. Also, do not forget about external optimization - these are links from other sites, and social signals (likes, retweets, reposts), but we will talk about this in another video.
If your goal of website optimization is to create or increase income and sales, then for complex website promotion, as I said, you should not forget about conversion optimization, creating a list of email subscribers and external optimization, if you don’t know how best to do this, then I can help you with this. Since I and my team do all the work on a turnkey basis, in order to ensure high level service, I take on business consulting only 1-2 new clients per month, so if you are interested in increasing traffic, sales and growth of your business, follow the link in the description under this video and leave a request for a confidential consultation. We'll discuss how I can help your business and if we're a good match, we'll get to work right away to attract interested buyers to your business.
Mass check of TIC and PR - How to find out TIC and PR of a site Interview: SEO Postgraduate (seo-aspirant.ru) Optimizing conversions and increasing sales - a practical guide on how to apply colors correctly
Let me tell you, you did right choice, deciding to create your project on WordPress. Matt Cutts himself (Google's lead internet spam and optimization specialist) said that WordPress is a great CMS for search engines.
An analogue of WordPress SEO by Yoast and also a very popular SEO plugin: all changes are implemented on one page. Make settings by analogy with the previous plugin, since the names of the functions are the same.
Paid SEO Plugin SemanticWP SEO
SemanticWP SEO has similar features to the free plugins we talked about above. But! If you have a large project with many sections and subsections or an online store with product filters - this plugin is indispensable, as it has the Multi Taxonomies function (meta tag template for all possible URL generation options).
Yes, this plugin was developed by our company. We have been working for a very long time and a lot with the promotion of sites on WordPress, projects of varying complexity (portals, shops, corporate sites. In this plugin, we took into account all the problems and difficulties of the CMS that we encountered in the work. We also added functionality that we really don’t Enough free options.
BUT plug-ins are just a tool and opportunities for implementing the tasks that a specialist sets for himself. Having a plugin alone does not solve problems or achieve results.
What else do you need for initial SEO optimization?
You will need the following plugins:
apple-touch-icon.png (and variations).
favicon.ico (and variants).
browserconfig.xml
feeds that don't/shouldn't exist.
invalid page/date ranges.
broken internal links and missing http links (broken internal links/ missing http links)
Alternative sitemap URLs and meta data.
Pages and images with broken parameters.
security threats (security probes)
To promote the project, you need to integrate it into search engine services, you need to add YANDEX METRIKA, GOOGLE ANALYTICS, YANDEX WEBMASTER, GOOGLE WEBMASTER to your wordpress site.
There are several ways to add Yandex Metrica and Google Analytics
1. By FTP to the template itself
Folder WP-CONTENT , then to the THEMES folder, then to the folder with the name of the template, to the file FOOTER.php
2. In the template(especially in premium themes) there are always special fields where you can add Yandex Metrics and Google Analytics code.
3. In all SEO plugins there are also special fields for inserting Metrics and Analytics code.
Ways to add your WordPress site to Yandex Webmaster and Google Webmaster
1 option- Opportunities provided by search engines themselves
Option 2- in most seo plugins there is the possibility of integration in the plugin itself
3 option- special plugins Webmaster Yandex and Google Webmaster Tools
And now you have made the initial settings of the project, worked on SEO optimization, then you already need to start working on promoting the project. Without buying links, it is possible to achieve good performance in website promotion only by working on:
- content relevance;
- behavioral factors;
- redistribution of weight between pages and records (relinking).
To achieve a successful result on all these three points, you will need additional plugins.
WP-PageNavi - pagination output plugin - improves the indexing of your project.
SEO Smart Links is a plug-in for relinking on your site.
Yet Another Related Posts Plugin (YARPP) - "related posts" - will also help to relink the project.
Broken Link Checker - plugin checks broken links.
Cross-linker - plugin automatically replaces words with links.
Simple Tags - expands the possibilities of adding information to tags - which will improve their textual relevance.
Look like that's it! If you have other useful and interesting WordPress plugins or optimization techniques for this CMS up your sleeve, it will be great if you share them in the comments.
