How To Get Your Website Ready For The Search Engines
In this video, I want to show you how to get your website ready for the search engines. Recently I created a video and blog post on how to start a web business – setting up your WordPress website. At the moment, I’m going through a series on building a website from scratch and taking you through the process.
Let’s come back to the Wealthy Affiliate training page. I am on a website called Wealthy Affiliate, you can see my profile page here. I joined the platform in November 2014, which means I have been on the platform for eight years. It’s a great platform which teaches you how to start an online business. Many people come to the website who have absolutely no knowledge of how to start a web business. However, I was already making money online when I joined the platform. However, I like the idea of having regular training and being able to speak to like-minded people. The platform also gives me the opportunity to ask questions and much more! If you want to find out more about the Wealthy Affiliate platform, I have more videos on my website.
Getting Your Site Ready For The Search Engines
So we are now going back to the training page at Wealthy Affiliate, entitled getting your site ready for the search engines. Let’s talk about what SEO means etc. SEO stands for search engine optimisation, I have a snippet below that gives a definition of what search engine optimisation means.
“Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of orienting your website to rank higher on a search engine results page (SERP) so that you receive more traffic. The aim is typically to rank on the first page of Google results for search terms that mean the most to your target audience.”
Natural Results And Paid Results
I have entered a search into Google using the term “tree stump grinding”. As you can see, the first four results are all from paid advertising. So, in other words, each website has paid Google to be at the top on page one. We refer to this as a Google ads campaign.
When we scroll down the search page, the first natural result is actually one of my websites. I haven’t paid to be in this position, I am just on page one from posting regularly. You can see that I also show up below on my Facebook page.
The good thing is that I haven’t had to pay to get to this position, whereas the four websites above have all paid to be on page one of Google.
Finding An SEO Plug-In
To help us with our SEO, we can use a WordPress plug-in. In the previous video that I created, I mentioned about plug-ins. You can see the SEO framework plug-in that is already installed on my website. In my case, the plug-in was already installed on the website by default.
I did say in my previous video that I may try the SEO plug-in. However, I am going to use my regular SEO plug-in as I’m familiar with all the settings.
Adding An SEO Plug-In
I’m now going to go to my plug-ins page and click on “add new” I am going to put SEO into the search box. As you can see, quite a few options have appeared for an SEO plug-in.
The first one you can see is the Yoast SEO plug-in; I use this plug-in on all my websites. I’m not saying that the other plug-ins are not good, I’m just saying this is the one that I am familiar with, and it is very easy-to-use.
Before installing a plug-in, I normally look at the statistics. Yoast has the most reviews, with 27,500 five-star reviews. All-in-one SEO has 2658 reviews, and the SEO framework has 311 reviews.
So let’s have a look at some of the statistics; the all-in-one SEO has mainly five-star reviews, with a few one-star reviews, which I don’t take too much notice of. The SEO framework has 300 five-star reviews, so it looks like people are liking the plug-in. So for a new product, it sounds like it’s doing quite well. However, I’m going to stick with what I know and install the Yoast SEO plug-in.
Installing the plug-in
I’m now going to install the Yoast SEO plug-in; just before we do, I’m going to look at some more details. It’s always good to check that plug-ins have been regularly updated. I know that I’m fairly safe with the Yoast plug-in. We can see it was last updated two weeks ago, which is good. It tells us that there are 5 million active installations. The average rating is five stars, which suggests to me that it is a very good option. Not only because I am familiar with the Yoast plug-in but due to its popularity and excellent reviews.
So we are now going to go to “install now”, so that’s now installing, and now we are going to activate our plug-in. We will now go to our install plug-ins, where we can see the Yoast plug-in. You will see there is an option to get the premium edition, I’m sure it has some good features, but I will stick with the free version for the time being.
How The Yoast SEO Plug-In Works
I will go to a page on one of my websites to show you how the Yoast plug-in works. So we are in the dashboard or back-office, and I am in the edit mode on one of my blog posts. As we scroll down, you can see the Yoast SEO plug-in.
The Yoast plug-in tells me what I need to do, to improve my page performance. You can see that the SEO and the readability tab are both glowing green, which is a good sign. If I hadn’t completed all the necessary tasks, they could be glowing orange or even red.
If we click on the SEO analysis, it tells me that the title is too long; try to make it shorter. I’m actually going to leave it as it is for this blog post. It then tells me to use more key phrases in the subheadings, which I haven’t carried out. The good thing is that Yoast advises me on what to do. You can also see the previous tasks that I carried out to improve the SEO.
We will now have a look at the readability tab, it’s telling me that I’m speaking in passive voice, which is always something that I struggle with! Yoast will allow me to underline everything where I am speaking in passive voice, which is very useful indeed. It will also do the same with other tasks that need to be carried out, making it easier to see where the issues are.
If you don’t know what passive voice means, Yoast will take you to their website and explain things like passive voice and transition words etc.
Changing To The WordPress Classic Editor
The last thing I will do that isn’t connected with SEO is install the WordPress classic editor. If I go to my posts and click on “add new”, I will open the block editor. Although the block editor is probably very good, I prefer to use the classic editor.
So I will go back to plug-ins, I will then go to “add new”, I will then install the classic editor. It looks like the classic editor is fairly popular, as it is the first plug-in that appears! I have actually created a video on installing the classic editor in a previous video. I am now going to click on “install now”, which is now installed, and I will then activate the plug-in. I will just refresh the dashboard and then go to a new post. You can see that the post page looks different to the previous post page that we were on. It’s very simple, put the title at the top of the page and then your content below. Further down, you can see the Yoast SEO plug-in.
If you have any questions about the video, I am here to help. If you haven’t signed up for Wealthy Affiliate you can sign up for a free account here. The best place to contact me is on my Wealthy Affiliate profile, which you can find Here.