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Do’s and Dont’s for SEO

What to DO

1. Quality and original content

Quality of your content is most important part in SEO. Never and Never copy content from other blogs, website and most immortally from Wikipedia. Google will never index you if you copy. Engage audience with your writing. In addition, do not forget to tell your friend to write comments and share the website page on social media

2. Use relevant keywords in your titles, body text and Meta descriptions

To improve your SEO ranking it is most important to put relevant keywords in title tag, body text. And put key words in description of that page. If you don’t know coding they you can use many plug ins available for that. “Meta tag” is one plug in which works best.

3. Do keyword Analysis

Every time you write content for your website or blog, do keyword research before that. Use tool like Keyword planner to search relevant keyword and use those keywords in your main content. Make sure that you are not stuffing keywords in your content.

4. Use Breadcrumb

Use breadcrumb navigation to allow users keep track of their location within your website and help search engine understand your website structure

5. Back links from other sites

To increase Google ranking of your website you need to get more and more back links to your website from other sides. More the back links of your website more you are important in Google’s eyes.

6. Monitor your backlinks

Always keep watch on backlinks of your website. For SEO success, it’s important to maintain a clean backlinks profile. Use Monitor Backlinks SEO tool for tracking your back links

7. Build internal links

Internal links are one of the easiest ways to build links to your best pieces of content. Internal links are also a Google ranking factor, and they can help search engines easily find and index your content.

8. Create infographics

Infographics are popular and they help you build quality backlinks and drive relevant traffic to your site. Learn how to build backlinks with infographics.

9. Create a sitemap

Sitemaps will not give you an SEO boost, but it will give search engines an easier way to find and index all your site’s pages. A sitemap is easy to create, and it will increase the index and crawl rate for your site.

10. Make it easy for others to link to your website

While you should never publicly ask for a link to your website, you can encourage webmasters to link to you by creating a small “link to this article” widget.

11. Be patient, SEO takes time

You will never get results overnight. SEO is a process that can take months or sometimes years. It’s an ongoing process, and you are never done optimizing your site. As long as you are using the SEO best practices, results will come, and your rankings will increase.

12. Make your site user-friendly

Your website has to be intuitive and very easy to navigate.

13. Write long content

Your content should be long and helpful for your readers. The longer your articles are the more keywords it will have and the more chances to rank for new search phrases. Do your best to write more comprehensive guides than your competitors do.

14. Learn from your best competitors

Always study your competition and try to learn from their success. Replicate what is working for them, and try to build the same quality backlinks.

15. Remove and disavow bad links

To make sure you will not suffer from a Google penalty, you have to frequently analyze your site’s backlinks and remove the suspicious ones. With the links you cannot remove, create a disavow report and submit it to Google’s Disavow Tool.

16. Post fresh content often

New articles will show your readers and search engines that you are still updating the website and it has not been abandoned.

17. Make your website mobile friendly

Nowadays more than 50% of the users are accessing the internet using mobile phones. On this basis, Google has released a mobile friendly algorithm that gives an advantage to sites that have a responsive design or a mobile version.

18. Build your website with SEO in mind

If you are just starting your website, you should consider SEO from the beginning. Make the whole search engine friendly and help Google and other search engines easily crawl it.

19. Improve website speed

While not a major factor, your website speed will give you a small advantage for SEO.

What not to do

1. Avoid irrelevant links

Links from unrelated websites will get your website penalized. It makes no sense to have links from irrelevant sites, from completely different niches. For example, if you an ecommerce site that sells baby clothes links from sporting sites will not be useful.

2. Don’t do keyword stuffing

You should never use too many keywords in your content. Write for your audience, and not for the search engines bots.

3. Avoid sitewide backlinks

Sitewide backlinks will quickly sound an alert to Google that you are doing something suspicious.

4. Don’t use hidden text or links

Hidden text and links are from the 90’s. Using this technique today, will get you penalized very quickly.

5. Don’t build backlinks only to your homepage

When you build backlinks, you have to make the whole process look very natural. Building links only to your homepage can raise a flag to Google.

6. Don’t copy other website’s content

Your website has to have unique content. Duplicate content is not something that you should use.

7. Don’t do link exchanges

Reciprocal links are outdated, and you should stay away from this technique.

8. Don’t publish low-quality content

While it’s important to have a lot of content on your site, if the quality if low, you’ll be penalized by Panda. Especially if your content is very thin and short.

9. Don’t accept spammy blog comments

Approximately 90% of the comments are spam. You have to moderate all comments prior to approval. Never accept comments without real names. If “cheap design” says that, your content was great and leaves a link, hit the spam button as fast as you can.

10. Ads above the fold

Ads above the fold will affect the user experience and Google penalizes sites that have too many ads above the fold. If a user lands on your site for the first time, they should not see ads.

11. Try not to use Flash. The search engines cannot read flash.

12. Don’t copy images directly from net. Make them relevant to your content and use an alt tag with relevant keywords for search engines to read as they cannot read graphics.

13. Do not only use images to link out. You should always use text links to link out to important content on your web site.

14. Don’t use images to display important names, content, or links

15. Avoid Pop ups

16. Don’t change the template of your website in every category.

17. Never use “_ “ under scope in page link instead of that you can use “-“ hyphen

OPTIMAZE IT August 5, 2019 0 Comments

Blog PostUncategorized

How to setup Yoast WordPress SEO Plug in

This is the guide to configure the SEO By Yoast plugin. In the 3.0 version, there are some changes in the UI, but configuration is still the same. Our team at OPTIMAZE IT have updated this with editing meta description & title for single post which is changed in version 3.0.

Whenever we talk about best SEO Plugins for WordPress and All In One SEO, WordPress SEO by Yoast emerges as a prominent name. Many of you who are using the All In One SEO plugin should know about the much-advanced version of the plugin, which is available in WordPress with the name “WordPress SEO by Yoast“.

This plugin has integrated many known features of other plug-in by Joost de Valk, for example, Meta robots plugin, RSS Footer plugin, and many others. Since this plugin offers many features, setting up Yoast WordPress SEO plugin is not that easy. For this reason, I am sharing this tutorial, which will help you to transition from All in One SEO to Yoast SEO plugin, and configure this plugin for optimal performance.

A Guide for configuring WordPress Yoast SEO plugin:

WordPress SEO by Yoast is the powerhouse for WordPress search engine optimization. However, setting up this plugin might be tricky for some, and a new websiteger or anyone without basic SEO skills, might find it difficult to configure. An incorrect configuration can stop search engine bots from indexing your website, or you might let bots crawl a part that might not be important. Before we go ahead with our setup guide, let us look into some of the SEO features offered by this plugin:

Verify sites in Google, Bing, and Alexa
Title meta settings
Hide RSD, WLW, Short links from head
Meta-control for Taxonomies, author page
Supports Facebook Open Graph
Generate sitemap
Advance permalink control
Breadcrumbs support
RSS feed footer plugin settings
Import settings from other SEO plugins.
Edit hatches files
Hide date from Search engine snippets
Add Google authorship for single author

These are some of the settings offered by this plugin.

Now let us get started with the tutorial to set up this free SEO plugin.

Complete Setup & Configuration guide for Yoast WordPress SEO Plugin:

If you are using any existing SEO plugins like All In One SEO, Old All In One SEO, Headspace 2 or any other such plugins, or if you are using any plugins by Yoast such as RSS footer, Robots meta or Yoast Breadcrumbs, you should start by importing your settings into this plugin.

Once you have installed and activated WordPress SEO by Yoast, go to SEO> Import & export under the left panel, and select the plugin from which you would like to import your settings. I suggest making a backup of your database, and then using the option that to “Delete the old data after import? (recommended)”.

WordPress SEO Dashboard:

The first step to getting started with this plugin is to submit your site to Alexa, Google, Bing, and Yandex. After installing the plugin, click on SEO> General > Webmaster tools to access this page.

You can refer to how to submit a site to Google and Alexa here to learn more about the process. Once you have done this, let’s move to advanced part of this plugin:

Titles and Meta Settings:

This is one of the most important parts of this plugin, and I will explain most of it with screenshots and brief explanations below them.

Once you click on titles and metas, click on the help section first to see what operator is being used and what that operator does. This will help you to quickly setup the title and metas SEO aspects of the plugin.

Homepage settings:

click on the home tab and configure the settings for your homepage title and meta description.

Title template: the home title that you want to show in Google search.
Meta Description: your homepage meta description for search engines.

Post type SEO Settings:

This is where you will configure the SEO for all of your post types. By default, you will have Post, Pages & media type. If you are using more custom type in WordPress, you will see the section here. Here you can define the SEO for the post, page and media sections of your WordPress website. As I mentioned above, be sure to check out the help section to understand what templates you can use. Also, by default WordPress SEO by Yoast hides the date from search engine snippets, which is useful for websites writing evergreen content. If you are running a news website and want to show the date for your posts in search engines, you can check the “Date in snippet preview” box.

This is how I have configured it for my website:

Taxonomies & Archive SEO Settings:

I prefer keeping tags and categories as no index and do follow. However, this may change depending on your website’s SEO plan. If you wish to use my settings, simply check the “No index”, “follow” and “hide” boxes. Once again, you can configure the title template according to your needs. Since we are not indexing tags and categories, you can add more user and brand-centric title templates. Ex: “%%term_title%% Archives %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%”

Here you can set indexing for your author and date-based archive. Also, you can disable or enable the date and author archive. I suggest that you check the “Noindex” and “follow” boxes, and leave everything else as it is.

Other:

This is the last one under Title Metas settings. Here is what I am using which seems to be working well & driving almost 1 million page views from search engine every month. You can ignore “use meta keyword tag”, as Google already made it official that they do not care about keyword meta tags.

This completes the “settings” piece for the meta and titles settings of WordPress SEO by Yoast.

The final options will keep your WordPress website head section clean by hiding information such as posted short links, WLW manifest links and others.

Social settings:

In SEO By Yoast 3.0, they have added the Google Knowledge Graph feature. This will show your social media profile in the search engine whenever someone searches for your brand name. The configuration is easy. Simply add all your social media profiles in the format shown in the image below.

Here you can configure the Facebook open graph meta tags, the default image for Facebook, and the Twitter Meta card. You can learn in depth about Facebook open graph meta tags here. I recommend that you add a default image, which will help Facebook to show an image when your posts have no image and are liked or shared on Facebook.

XML sitemap:

Enable the Sitemap feature and this plugin will take care of your website’s sitemap. After creating the Sitemap file, submit the Sitemap to Google, Bing & any other search engine that accepts Sitemap file.

Permalink Configuration:

Don’t confuse this with the WordPress default Permalink setting. Here you can configure advanced permalink settings. I usually use 2-3 settings from here to avoid parameters being indexed in Google searches. With this plugin in particular, it is easier to get rid of the replytocom parameter, which is quite a headache.

Note: Note: This setting is under Advanced > Permalink tab. Here is a screenshot of my settings:

Internal link:

Breadcrumbs are useful for getting search engines to understand your site structure, and they help users to navigating your site. However, I have never tried and tested breadcrumbs on any of my sites. You can read the official guide here for a better understanding of breadcrumbs.

Once you are done making all the changes in your SEO by Yoast plugin, go ahead and use the Google rich snippet testing tool to check for authorship, and see how Google will show your website post in Google search.

RSS:

This part integrates the feature of the RSS footer plugin. When using it you can add a link back to the original article in RSS feeds. You can also use it to add advertisements to your RSS feeds. I simply add the following line after the post content section: “The post %%POSTLINK%% appeared first on %%WEBSITELINK%%.”Note: This setting is under the Advanced tab.

Edit files:

This is another useful feature of the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. You can edit the WordPress .htaccess and robots.txt file from the dashboard. A word of caution: whenever you are editing your .htaccess file from your dashboard, always keep FTP access as well, as misconfigured .htaccess files may stop your site from functioning.

I hope this tutorial will help you to setup WordPress SEO by Yoast correctly.

Note: The features below are in the pro version of SEO By Yoast. These are optional, and you may or may not need them.

Issue with Adding meta description & title in latest SEO Yoast plugin:

In the latest version of SEO by Yoast, they have made a major design change which is confusing for old users, when it comes to adding meta title & description. You just need to click on META description and enter your meta, actually it is modified in a new ways that you need to click on the DEFAULT meta and when you click the default META which is picked up from post starting or beginning will be emptied than you can put your own meta. Actually the concept of block has been removed by NEW Yoast update, you just need to click on the given TITLE to edit that title and click on META to edit the meta

Redirects:

This is another handy feature of this plugin, as it allows you to direct any URL to a URL of your choice. When you are getting too many 404 errors (you can check that in the Google Webmaster tool), you can simply re-direct them to save your link juice. If you want to learn much more about 404 error pages and SEO, you should read this detailed guide.

Webmaster tools: