SEO? That’s Search Engine Optimization, but everyone calls it SEO, congratulations, you now know a buzz word.
I’m always telling people that WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) and I install it on many of my customer’s sites. WordPress is basic and customizable, without the customization, you might get lost. Plugins are what we use to cusomize the website, they can make the site do a lot of really flashy things, but many of the plugins do stuff behind the scenes that you don’t see, but need to happen.
Today I’m going to tell you about my favorite SEO plugin, WordPress SEO by Yoast. It’s easy and simple, there is a free version, and a paid version, depending on what you need. It works amazingly, and they are always adding new functionality to it. Thanks to this plugin I get to tell google and other search engines how I want them to describe me. In the first image, you can see how there is a preview of my post as it would appear in google. It shows the title, the URL, and a small description.
There are tabs that let me check how well the SEO is in my page, with advice, some special functions, and how to modify how my links will look in social media.
In the next image you can see how I can customize the descriptions for each social media platform, making it relevant to the reader. I can even give them separate titles, and images so it is customized for the reader.
There are a lot of other things this does, you can customize the SEO on every page on your website, set defaults but it also will integrate your webmaster tools. You can set it to talk to your facebook page and google plus page, not to mention it makes creating twitter cards a breeze. It can work with Permalinks, your RSS, there are just too many options. Plus you can buy add on extensions.
If I lost you with some of these terms, don’t worry, the most important part you need to know I explained with pictures. If you want to follow a more in depth tutorial check out this one, and take it step by step. SEO is how you get google and other search engines to notice you more, and it helps people find your site when they are looking for the right content.
What do you use for SEO? Have you forgotten about SEO? Need help adding this to your site? Let me know.
