This week, 360 Web Designs would like to do a brief tutorial on how to add SEO. Adding SEO is easy, and helps people notice your website!

Using Yoast in WordPress

Yoast is a plugin that we use on all of our websites. When posting a blog or adding a picture, we recommend adding SEO and tags that identify them. Doing SEO for a blog is super easy. Under the text editing, there will be a tab titled “Yoast SEO”. Click on the tab to drop down the menu.

Clicking on “Edit Snippet” will give you access to changing your Search Engine snippet. You can add to the SEO title, slug, and meta description. When you start typing in the “SEO Title” section, you will see an orange or green colored bar below. Green is the ideal color for both your SEO title and meta description. 

Creating Your SEO Title and Meta Description

Notice how my meta description is in green. That’s good! However, the SEO title needs a little more to work with. Just add a location or phone number to the title to sweeten the deal. Adding the location of your business to an SEO tag is great because it improves the visibility of your site in the area. Adding your business phone number is another good thing to add, as it also helps with visibility. Because my SEO title still needed some more information to get to the green bar, I added our phone number.

Adding Your Slug

Usually, the slug will be auto-generated to be the same as your title. However, if you change your title, you need to make sure you also change your slug. A slug is just a URL extension that will represent the blog post on your website. You don’t need to add the hyphens, as they will be automatically generated.

Adding Your Focus Keyphrase

Adding the Focus Key phrase is the most important part of your SEO. Yoast SEO makes it easy to help you choose a key phrase, as it will give you a color based on how well it will perform. If possible, it should be green, but don’t sweat it if it’s orange. Sometimes, based on the content or writing, you may not be able to get your keyphrase to be green, but having an SEO keyphrase is still better than not having one. Now, to choose our key phrase. At first, I thought using SEO as my keyphrase might be a good idea. It’s in the title, and the first sentence of my blog, so it is a good choice and I get the color orange. However, upon further experimentation, I used the phrase “how to”. Because of that, my key phrase turned green! Why? Most likely because it was before the word SEO, and is also searched more frequently than the term SEO. Try different key phrases and experiment. Practice makes perfect!

Adding SEO To Images

Adding SEO to images is also important for image searches. When adding an image to your website, make sure to create a title, alt text, and description. The title will help with image searches, and the alt text and description are like your focus key phrases. I usually add the title of my post and business name separated by a vertical line | (It’s called a pipe or bar), usually above the enter key. I add the same information from alt text and copy and paste into the description as well just to make sure it’s showing up on SEO. From there, you can add the image wherever you need to on the website.

Conclusion

That’s about all of the basics in using Yoast SEO. We, at 360 Web Designs hope blog was helpful. We offer a variety of services such as custom websites, SEO implementation, blog writing, analytics, and more! Visit our website or check out more of our blogs for more free information on other subjects!