WordPress and SEO-by Yoast
Table of contents
Learning objectives
1. What is SEO, and why is it important?
Advanced: Holistic SEO
2. What does WordPress do for your SEO?
Example: Pretty permalinks
New: WordPress 5.5 update - XML sitemaps
Key takeaways
Learning objectives
In this lesson, you’ll learn:
● what SEO is and why it is of great importance for your WordPress
site;
● what WordPress does for your site’s SEO out of the box.
What is SEO, and why is it important?
The previous modules were all about creating an excellent site with
WordPress. But what is an excellent website without visitors? You can have
the best site the world has ever seen, but unfortunately, that is not enough
to make people visit it. And that’s where the real challenge begins. Of course,
you can ask your family and friends to check out your site. But we’re
assuming your goal is to have traffic coming in from other sources as well.
But how? Creating a WordPress site is only the first step on your way to
stardom — for the other steps, you need to work on your SEO.
So, before we start, let’s first examine what SEO is and why you should work
on it. SEO stands for ‘search engine optimization.’ It’s the process of
improving websites and content to get more traffic from search engines.
SEO has two parts:
1. an on-page part, which has to do with optimizing everything on your
site to make it better. For example, make sure you have great
content, a good site structure, and more technical stuff, like the
quality of your code.
2. an off-page part, which encompasses everything you do outside of
your site to get people to visit it. This could be social media or
organizing events.
Basically, working on your SEO means increasing the chances that the site
will get visited. If you want to dive deeper into SEO, you should check out the
Yoast SEO academy Premium subscription!
What does WordPress do for your SEO?
WordPress is quite an SEO-friendly content management system. By
installing WordPress, you get a pretty good experience out of the box. A lot
of basics are handled well by WordPress. However, it would be a mistake to
think that you’re ready to rank immediately after installing it. There are still a
lot of things you need to take care of yourself. In this lesson, we’ll first
explore what WordPress does for your SEO. In the next lessons, we’ll show
you how Yoast SEO can help, and what you have to do yourself.
So, let’s go through the things that WordPress does for your site’s SEO out of
the box.
- A strong foundation
First of all, WordPress helps you get going quickly, and it’s a pretty
solid platform to work on. A basic setup can provide a strong
foundation – even without extensive customization, theme
optimization, and plugins. - Pretty permalinks
It supports so-called pretty permalinks so you can use SEO-friendly
URLs. We’ve shown you how to do this earlier in the course
Example: Pretty permalinks
Wait, what do we mean by pretty permalinks again? An example of a pretty
permalink is:
everydayimtravelling.com/top-10-travel-destinations
Whereas the following URL is not very pretty, and therefore not user- and
SEO-friendly:
everydayimtravelling.com/?p=124562
3. Title tag
WordPress also supports the title tag. This makes sure that the title
you entered is also rendered in the code, so the search engines
know exactly where to find the all-important title of your post.
4. Duplicate content
Also, WordPress automatically deals with duplicate content on some
pages. By that, we mean that you sometimes show the same content
on different URLs.
Say you sell products in different colors and sizes. You have a
different URL for each product variation, but the product description
stays the same. This may seem harmless, but as a matter of fact, it
can really hurt your rankings, because duplicate content confuses
Google. WordPress solves this for some pages by adding a so-called
canonical link, showing that one version of the page is the one you
want to show in the search engines. It doesn’t do this for every page,
however, but we’ll get back to that in the next lesson.
5. Redirects
Out of the box, WordPress also redirects posts whenever you change
their titles, which is very convenient. Imagine if you decide you don’t
like the way you’ve framed your post. So you rewrite it and then still
have the old URL, which doesn’t fit your post’s contents anymore! It
would be very confusing for visitors and search engines alike.
6. Health Check
Lastly, a recent addition is the Health Check dashboard that shows
you how your site is doing in a technical sense. We’ve discussed the
WordPress Health Check in the lesson about updates and backups in
the previous module.
New: WordPress 5.5 update - XML sitemaps
As of version 5.5, WordPress comes with its own XML sitemaps. At its core,
an XML sitemap is simply a list of URLs in a text file. The XML sitemap helps
search engine crawlers uncover your content. It helps them find and update
content on your site, which helps them get your content in the indexes for
ranking purposes. The current version of the XML sitemap in WordPress is
very basic and supports only a small set of content types. Yoast SEO also
generates an XML sitemap, which is more powerful and lets you have more
control. If you are using Yoast SEO, make sure to read about the differences
between the Yoast SEO and the WordPress core XML sitemaps.
WordPress needs help
But even with the things WordPress does automatically when it comes to
SEO, it still needs help. Now, it is possible to optimize your site all by
yourself, but we wouldn’t recommend it. It would take ages, and you’d really
have to know your (technical!) stuff. Luckily, there are tons of WordPress SEO
plugins out there that can help you take care of the most important
improvements. One of those is Yoast SEO. And of course, you need to do
some things yourself. In the next two lessons, we’ll explore exactly that.
Key takeaways
● SEO stands for search engine optimization, and it’s the process of
improving websites and content to get more traffic from search
engines. It has an on-page and off-page part.
● WordPress does a couple of things for your site’s SEO out of the box:
○ it offers a strong foundation;
○ it supports pretty permalinks;
○ it supports the title tag;
○ it automatically deals with duplicate content on some
pages;
Yoast Academy 5 / 6
○ it redirects posts whenever you change their titles;
○ it has a Health Check dashboard, which shows what your
site is doing in a technical sense.