WordPress right out of the box is pretty SEO friendly. However, you’ll want to do some basic things to customize your title tags and meta tags, as the ones that are automatically assigned may not be sufficient from an SEO standpoint. There are a lot of great plug ins for this, and I can’t speak to all of them, but the one I find the most straight-forward and user-friendly is the Yoast SEO Plug In. This plug in allows you to do a couple of things, one of the most important being allowing you to manually edit your title tag and meta tags. Let’s look at this for a moment.
First, you’ll want to go to Plugins>Add New. In the search bar, type in Yoast SEO. Download and activate the plugin. A new menu will appear under your settings menu for SEO. We’re not going to go there now, but, just be aware of it.
Now, let’s do some SEO. Go to any of your pages and you’ll see a nice big section below your post text that allows you to edit your title tag and meta description. Let’s use a concrete example. I’ve done SEO on the following site: www.slstransportation.com/blog, which offers limousine service in various cities. One of the pages focuses on the keyword “Austin Limousine.” The title I want the user to see is SLS Worldwide – Austin, but I don’t want search engines to see that as the title. Why? Because who is going to search for SLS Worldwide – Austin if they’re looking for a limousine in Austin? I want the (meta) title tag to focus on the keyword I am looking for. Therefore, in the Yoast SEO title tag box, I make sure to put “Austin Limousine.”
Next you go to the description field and type in a short description. Make sure that your keywords are in the description, exactly the way they show up in the title tag.
That’s it. Easy! Next time we’ll look at using Yoast to edit your permalink structure, so that the url of your page contains your keywords. If you have your keyword set in you title tag, description tag, url, and a couple times in your text, you’ve covered the basics of on page optimization for that page.
