The Most Important WordPress Plugin EVER - Top WordPress Plugins for SEO Video Lecture | Be a Blogger: Beginner to Expert - Professional Skills

Do you blog?
Well, if you do, I bet you use WordPress,
why, because it's the best blogging platform
out there, plus it's free.
Who would want to pay for blogging?
Hey, everyone.
I'm Neil Patel and today, I'm going to teach
you how to optimize your WordPress blog.
Now, there's one really simple way to do this.
It's called the Yoast SEO plugin.
I could tell you, Go.
Go make all these on page changes and do this
or that, but you know what, these days, SEO
is really simple especially if you have a
WordPress blog.
Install the Yoast SEO plugin.
All you have to do is go to the plugins section
within your WordPress.
Search for Yoast SEO plugin, install it and
then, you're off to the races.
There's a few things you need to do once you
install the plugin.
The first thing that you need to do is create
a XML sitemap.
That's within the Yoast plugin.
It automatically generates it for you.
Once you create a sitemap, go to Google Webmaster
Tools and then within Webmaster Tools, its
actually called search console now.
I still call it Webmaster Tools because back
in the day, thats what they used to call it.
Once you add your site, go in there and add
a sitemap.
It's really simple.
You add in the URL that Yoast gives you.
Once you add it, it takes Google, let's say
a day or two to index all of your pages.
They'll either determine if they want to index
them or if they don't want to index them and
that's okay.
The more pages you feed them, the more pages
that you'll get indexed.
In addition to that, within the Yoast plugin,
it pretty much does most of it for you.
Just make sure you use a really appealing
title tag and a meta description.
The title tag doesn't have to be the same
as your blog post title.
With the Yoast plugin, you can actually pick
a specific title tag for that post.
It doesn't have to be the same title tag as
the blog post name.
That's what happens with default WordPress.
If you write a blog post, whatever you call
it tend to be the title tag but now with Yoast,
you can pick a new one.
When you do a Google search, you see a blue
link at the top and then a sentence or two
underneath.
The blue link at the top is called a title
tag.
The sentences or two underneath is called
a meta description.
That title tag up top, you can create a specific
one just for people Googling.
You want to put in the keywords that you think
people will be Googling for and of course,
make it appealing as well.
You can use keywords like now, try, free or
even include the date.
By doing things like that, it causes more
click-throughs.
When you're including the date, you'd want
to put the date that is written in.
You would want to put a date like updated
in 2017 or updated in 2020, whatever the year
may be.
By doing that, you'll get more clicks.
As for the meta description, you, of course,
want to include the keywords that you're targeting,
as well as make it appealing sentence so that
way, people will want to click on your listing.
It's that simple.
I can go and break down a ton of other ways
that you can optimize your blog using the
Yoast plugin but those are the main two ways.
The only thing that you need to do on your
end is when you're writing blog posts, make
sure you cross link.
If you have a post on SEO and you have another
one on content marketing and that content
marketing one talks about text and putting
in keywords, you can cross link them together.
By interlinking them within the text within
each blog post, you'll notice that your blog
posts will get crawled better and they'll
rank higher.
You also want to make sure you use the right
words and phrases as you're writing the content.
If you're trying to rank for the keyword SEO,
Google the word SEO.
Look at the top site that ranks for SEO.
Put it in the tool by SEObook.
It's called the SEObook keyword density analyzer.
You put in the URL and I'll show you all the
words and phrases people are using that already
ranked at top.
When you get those words and phrases, you'll
see them by percentage.
You can then integrate some of those keywords
within your blog post and you'll notice over
time, your rankings will increase.
That's it.
Do those tactics and you'll rank higher in
Google.