Optimize Your WordPress Blog

Every business today should have a blog. Publishing new blog content regularly is one of the easiest ways to quickly build your authority and thought leadership within your industry.

The many advantages, like reaching the press, improving SEO, building your know-like-trust factor and more, all make it well worth the time to publish new blog content on your website on a consistent basis.

It’s also important to optimize your WordPress blog for relevant keywords and keyword phrases that you target audience types in search of solutions your business delivers. If you do not optimize your blog, you will create less traffic to your website, making it harder to get found by ideal customers who are in the market for your services now.

Today, with plug ins like Yoast for WordPress, it’s easier now more than ever to optimize your blog in just minutes — saving you thousands of dollars from not needing to outsource this simple task.

Yoast is easy to use once you get the hang of it and has an ample amount of options to help you get your blog found in online searches. Follow this step by step process on how to optimize your WordPress blog using Yoast and you will soon feel like a pro!

1. Get a WordPress blog: Go to WordPress.org and click “Download WordPress.”

You will be taken to this screen: Click download again and wait for it to complete.

2. Go to your website

3. Click on the plugins tab and click add new

4. Search for Yoast SEO. This is the plugin that will help you to optimize your WordPress blog.

5. Click Install Now shown below

 6. Click Activate

7. It will come up on your sidebar as “SEO” once the plugin is added correctly.

8. The configuration wizard is good for starting out with Yoast. It will take you through the basics of optimizing your blog step by step. It is located in the “General” tab shown below.

9. After you have edited your blog, if you are unhappy with your work, you can click the “restore default settings” button also in the “General” tab and it will return your settings to their original state.

10. On the “Your info” tab indicated below, you can change your website name, select if you’re a company or a person, and write your name in if you are not a company.

11. Under the Webmaster tools tab, you can verify your website with multiple search engines. Start by clicking the link to “Google Search Console.”

You will be taken to a screen that looks like this. Follow the recommended method to verify your website.

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12. In the Titles & Metas tab, you can choose the symbol you would like to appear on the tab of your website.

13. The Homepage tab is where you will optimize the front page of your website. You can optimize the title and description which will later appear on the search engine.

14. The Post types tab is where you will customize the templates for your posts, pages, and media. You can customize the title templates and the description templates.

15. The Taxonomies tab is where you customize templates for your categories, tags, and format.

16. The social tab is where all of your social media account links go. If you click on each tab, you can customize what people will see as the frontpage of these profiles.

17. Frontpage settings will allow you to customize what people see when they share your social media profiles.

18. Click on the tools tab next.

The most useful link on the tools page is the bulk editor which allows you to edit all of the titles on your website.

19. If you choose a post and press edit, it will allow you to optimize each post inside of your website individually.

20. Under “SEO Title,” always put your most important keywords.

21. The red dots shown here will give you an idea of what is missing from your website in terms of optimization.

It’s that simple. Just use the notifications in the red and orange buttons as a checklist to fix one by one. You’ll see how quickly you can optimize your blog post for your keyword phrases that will help your blog get found by so many more potential customers who are searching online.

QUESTION: Share your best blog optimization tip below or post your question on this topic: