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Want To Optimize Your WordPress Website For Search Engines – Learn How To use Yoast For It

It’s easy to create and develop a WordPress website as there are many free and premium themes which can be used. One can easily get hosting for the website and can start publishing content. But the problem arises when you want your target audience to reach to your website, browse it and allow you to propagate the message which you want. For this, you need to optimize your websites for its online viewers as well as search engines.

Why Do You Need to Optimize Your Web Content For Search Engines?

In order the visitors to visit and browse your website, they should know about it. For this, either you can tell all your target audiences about your website or let “Search Engines” do this for you. For instance, if you have developed a website for selling clothes, or you own a web development business, you will want your potential customers to visit the website that either they can purchase your products or avail your services, you have to find out some results-oriented way in which you can let your potential customers know about it.

The search engines can do this for you by listing your website in the search results. For example, if someone types a keyword “best web development company”, the search engines list all the websites which offer this service, but, they rank the websites first and then list them in the chronological order of ranking.

This is why you need to optimize your website content for search engines so that they can rank your website well and list it in the top search results, from where your potential customers would know about it. Search engines help you attract the organic web traffic and increase the ROI of your WordPress website.

How To Optimize Your WordPress Website Content For Search Engines?

Though, there are various techniques for optimizing your WordPress website content for search engines, but, one of the most prominent techniques is by performing an “On-Site” SEO on it.

If you have a WordPress website, the on-site SEO can be performed using the plugins, and among the best SEO plugins is “Yoast”.

Yoast is a free WordPress SEO plugin which helps in optimizing the content on a website by making it easier to read and comprehend for search engines. So, if you want to optimize your content for the search engines, install Yoast and begin optimization.

The “Content Optimization For Search Engines”, implies preparing the content in a way that it becomes easier for search engines to read it, understand its context, and relate it to the queries being made by users on the search engines. When search engines like Google are able to relate the search queries with your content, they will list your content or web page in their search results from where visitors can click the URL and get redirected to your WordPress website.

XML Sitemap Generation

In order to let the Google and other search engines like Bing, it is important that you create a sitemap for your website which possesses the list of all the content that’s present on your WordPress website.

When you generate and submit your sitemap, every new content that you will upload on your website will be notified to the search engines and they will be able to list your content in the search results.

If you are wondering that how can you generate a sitemap for your WordPress website, then you can use Yoast for it. Yoast will create an XML sitemap for you.

Login to your WordPress and click SEO.

yoast seo

Now click “XML Sitemaps” from the menu

Click Enabled and then “Save Changes”. It will generate and activate your sitemap.

how to enable xml on yoast

If you want to customize the sitemap settings, it can be done from the given menu.

xml sitemaps settings

Once generated, submit your sitemap to all the search engines. As you add or remove some content from the website, Yoast will automatically update your sitemap.

Adding Meta-Tags And Meta Descriptions With Yoast

The meta tags and descriptions make it easier for the search engines and users understand that what your content is all about. It is one of the best things you must do if you are trying to optimize your content.

Yoast enables you to add this information easily to enhance your content.

The meta descriptions which you add to your content are actually the explanatory summary of the content in a few characters. Though it does not offer any direct SEO benefit because Google does not consider meta descriptions in its ranking algorithms, but it offers an indirect advantage. The Google checks the “Click Through Rate” of a page, and the more users click on your page, the higher ranking it gets. One of the best ways to persuade the users to read the content is by adding the lucid and concise meta description. It is shown in the search results. You can check how the meta descriptions are exhibited in the below-given image.

yoast seo 1

How To Add Meta Information Using Yoast?

a) Log in to your WordPress account

b) From the left side menu, select “Posts”

c) To optimize an already existing post, click “All Posts”, and then click the title of the post for which you would want to add the meta information.

d) Once the post is open, you would be able to see the content of the post. Scroll down and look for the section “Yoast SEO

all posts in wpe) Now, you will get the menu where you can add the required information under specific fields

edit snippet in yoast

f) After you finish adding the meta information, click “Close Snippet Editor”

g) To check if the changes you made have come into effect, click “Snippet Preview”

Filling Social Data Using Yoast

Using Yoast, you can also optimize your content for the social networks. There is a tab for the “Social Data” in Yoast where you can fill out a title or description for the social media networks. This implies that the image, title or description added in this section would be shown when yo or someone else would share this post on a social media network.

While these descriptions are to be written in the same way as you write the other meta description for the post, but, these can be a bit longer as they would be exhibited on the social networks. These should give a clear idea to the visitors that what to expect from the content and why they should click on the link.

In the below-given image, you can see how the data for Facebook can be added. Also, there are tabs for adding info for the other social networks like Twitter, Pinterest, Google+ etc. You can click the relevant tab to add the required info pertaining to meta descriptions, titles, and images etc.

seo yoast for social

Designing Perfect Permalinks With Yoast

Permalink Structure, also known as “WordPress SEO URL” is the URL of the post that is shown in the browser when you are viewing a page. For example, .

Now, you might be wondering that how does it matter that what URL is being shown in the browser, but, it is significant from the SEO perspective and thus, Yoast allows you to set the URL the way you want. With Yoast, you can customize your permalink structure, and it will ensure that all the posts have the URLs as per the given permalink structure.

There are four types of permalink structures in WordPress from which you can choose the best:

  • WP Default
  • Post name Type
  • Date/Post Type
  • Category/Post Type

Any of these can easily be chosen from the Yoast, and once you select one category, it will start showing the URLs of all the posts in a similar manner.

yoast seo advanced setting for permalinks

Now, the question arises that which one of these is the best and what type of permalink structure you should select.

Well, the answer is that select the one that contains more relevant key phrases or keywords, and less stop words or fillers, because when Google and the other search engines crawl the content, they also crawl the URL, and if your URL has relevant keywords, it becomes easier for the search engines understand what the post or page is all about, and with which all contents can search engines relate your content.

So, the best structure is the one with the Category and Post Name. Date acts as a stop word so it should not be included and the default WP structure does not give any idea about the page’s content to the search engines.

The Last Word!!

Though, there are many other ways in which you can optimize your content for the search engines, but, these are some top ways in which you can use Yoast for optimizing the content. the above-mentioned strategies make it easier for you to present your content to the search engines and make them understand the gist of the content, so that, they can list it under the relevant search results. These will certainly help you attract more traffic to your website.

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