Before moving on, feel free to create another post. You don’t have to, but you can, if you want to take a break from setting stuff up and just want to get some content online.
If you’re ready to move on, this next chapter is about basic site optimization. This includes, but is not limited to search engine optimization (SEO). A well optimized site is easy for your users to navigate, fast and pleasant to use and equipped with a few elements that make it search engine friendly.
Making a site user-friendly and optimizing it for your visitors is always a priority over optimizing it for search engines.
First things first: In your WordPress admin panel, click on “Settings” and then choose the “Privacy” option. In some cases, the default setting is to hide your blog from search engines.
If that’s the case, click on the radio button next to “I would like my blog to be visible to everyone...” and then save the settings.
Next, let’s optimize the URL structure of your posts and pages. Go to “Settings” and then click on “Permalinks”. In the “Common Settings”, select “Post name”.
Postname titles are often not ideal either, though, because URLs should be kept relatively short. The URL should be short, to the point, on topic and memorable.
To people, the shorter URL looks more professional and to Google, it also looks better because the first one could be interpreted as an attempt at keyword stuffing (an outdated optimization “hack” that people used to use to get better rankings).
WordPress SEO by Yoast
When you activate the WordPress SEO plugin, it does most of the work for you. In the settings, there are many things you can change and modify, but none that you really need to. The default settings are fine.
One thing I recommend changing is the homepage title and meta description.
Titles and meta descriptions are what show up in search engine results as a listing and preview of the page content. The more compelling and interesting your titles and descriptions are, the more clicks you’ll get from search engine results.
The plugin also creates a sitemap for you, which is located at yoursite.com/sitemap_index.xml. You can submit this sitemap to a Google Webmaster account, but I recommend doing this at a later date, once you have some initial content on your site.
One of the most important features of the plugin you’ll find on your post/page editor screen:
For every post, you can manually edit the title (that will be shown in search results) and the description. The title will auto-generate based on the post or page title (which is shown on your site, at the top of the content). Sometimes, it can make sense to have slightly different page and content titles and if that’s the case, here is where you can make the edit.
For every post, I recommend that you add a custom meta description. This should just be a short and compelling description of what the content is about.
The SEO plugin does a whole range of other fancy stuff as well. Feel free to take a look around. You’ll find detailed explanations for most options.
What we’ve covered here are the essentials and they suffice to get you started.
Menus
Once you start setting up the basic content on your site, you’ll have to think about navigation. How and where can your visitors find your content?
Navigation is an important element for any website: offer too many options and you’ll confuse visitors, offer too little and visitors will be frustrated about not being able to find what they’re looking for.
Thankfully, with WordPress, you have full control over what your navigation elements will look like.
Go to the “Appearance” -> “Menus” item in the left sidebar in your WP admin panel.
To begin, create a new menu. You can call it “Test menu” or “Main menu” or whatever you want. Anything you set now can be changed later:
On the left side of the screen, you’ll see one or several options, depending on your theme. In most cases, you’ll have a “Primary Navigation” or “Main Menu” item and a drop-down. Here’s how this works: in the main area of the screen, you create and save menu structures. You can then assign these menus to your theme’s menu areas through the drop down. Some themes come with primary and secondary navigation and additional footer menus.
To create a menu, simply select post and pages from the right, click on the “Add to Menu” button:
You can easily create sub-menus and menu trees with drag and drop as well.
Remember to save your menu before exiting the screen.
Ideally, you want to keep the number of navigation items on your site to a minimum. Don’t overwhelm visitors with options, but give them easy access to your most important content.
Interlinking
Interlinking your pages is useful for your human visitors as well as for search engines. Whenever you reference one post from another one, create a link between the two. Whenever you are writing about a topic related to a past post, mention it and link to it. From time to time, go through some of your older posts and see if there are any opportunities to link from your older to your newer posts.
Having a good interlinking structure on your site makes navigation a lot easier and it encourages engagement. Visitors are more likely to consume your content, the easier that content is to consume. In addition, there are also SEO advantages to strongly interlinking your content.
Standard Pages
There are some pages any website should feature. These pages are:
About page about yourself or your company and the purpose of your website.
Contact page with a contact form (look for contact form plugins), where visitors can send you a message.
Privacy Policy A page stating your privacy policy, i.e. what happens with people’s private data when they visit your site and say, leave a comment. You can use this privacy policy generator to create one for your site. Please take note that I am not a lawyer and I can’t guarantee that
Disclaimer A page stating whether you make money from your blog or not and if you ever get paid for your opinions. Use this easy generator to make one of your own. Again, I am not a lawyer etc..
Shologoo
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