Hello, this is Rob here from Rob coming calm. Now we're going to do something really important. If you want to do content marketing correctly, you're going to have to get the basics of SEO right. And in this video, I'm going to install and set up Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. SEO is really very simple, you need to create great, valuable and engaging content that people are going to want to share and talk about. However, there are a few basics that you need to do with your WordPress install and your various blog posts in order to maximize the clout of your extremely brilliant content on Google and various other places like Facebook and Twitter and other search engines as well.

So the best way to do this is to install Yoast SEO. So how do we do that? Well of course we go to plugins add New, and let's search for Yoast SEO or you could search for Yoast SEO WordPress. And there it is. It's the first one that comes up. As you can see, it's over a million active installs and very good rating on it last updated fairly recently.

And it is the de facto SEO plugin that people use. So we're going to install it now and activate plugin. And already you'll see that there is a new item on the left hand menu here called SEO, and that's from the plugin. There's a tour that you can do if you want and advise you not to do that because you can do that at any time in the back end. Now already, it's said that there's a warning because we already have a sitemap installed. So we can deactivate the site map plugin, which has happened with one click there and configure you Yoast SEO plugin, which has already happened, but let's go back to the first item under the SEO tab on the left hand side here and you know the tour that you get when you first install Yoast, you can take that anytime, and it'll give you a quick run around the plugin, which is a great idea.

But I'm going to go through and show you how I would install it first. So we go to your info, it's taken the website name from the WordPress settings general name, we also have an alternate name we can put in as well. That's a good idea. And here of course you can choose whether you're a company of all person and give the company a name and a logo, I would advise you to do that. And if the website is a personal blog, or even a personal brand, like my website Rob Covent calm is, then I would choose person and I would save change This is a very important page, I would advise you to fill in at least the Google search console and Bing when not master tools. So if you click on that link there, we can attempt to verify the site.

So we've already set it up for Google Analytics. So this should work. So we can use the Google services such as Search Console, and I would do the same for Bing Webmaster Tools. And in the Security tab, I wouldn't worry about this so much unless you have other users using your WordPress install, which is unlikely. The second link below the SEO tab titles and metas is something that is quite important and I'll show you how I'd set that up. I would enable force rewrite titles and choose a title separator that's not too important, but save changes there.

And then on homepage, this is very effective. And this is basically your title and meta description on your homepage. So for us, that will be the same as in settings general. And we should, right message description template Save Changes. Now post types, this is where it gets very important posts and page types. Now on your posts, I would have just your title.

So if you write a new blog post, that means the title of the page will be the same as the blog post heading. And that's really how you want it. So if somebody tweets that page, then they tweet out the heading of the blog post followed by the link. There's nothing more annoying when you try to tweet a Blog Post article. And you get a long site title in there, which will always be too long for tweets and you might not want that in there. So I think it's best just to keep the posts with the post title in them.

If you're wondering One title means the title is the HTML title we're talking about. And in Chrome, you get that by clicking here. And there is your title. This is this page is title. It's the most important words on the HTML page that the Google robot will ever read, because it's the title of that particular page. So it's very important.

Now in the meta description template for the posts and the pages, I would just put in an excerpt. However, you can change that on a case by case basis. Now, what is the meta description that is a sentence Usually, it doesn't have any SEO benefits, but it does appear in the Google results page underneath the blue heading. And you can change these all on a case by case basis on the individual pages and posts as well and I'll show you how to do that. In another video, however, for the pages, I do put site name. So the site name is what we put in homepage, or under Settings general.

So it's that ecommerce branding and distribution. So the About Us page, for example will be about us and then go into the site name. So you get all that seo keyword goodness in the long page title, which you want, because people won't ever tweet that. And it's a nice keyword rich title. However, the blog posts which will be keyword rich anyway, we don't want to put the site name on them. So that's it.

I would leave this because I never use media files as pages. You don't want your images to be different pages, I find that very distracting and confusing to other search engines. So I would leave the rest of it as it is. Setting up no index, because you want all of these pages, your blog posts and your static pages to be indexed by Google. However, that's not the case in taxonomies. So taxonomies, as you can see, are the categories, the tags, and the format.

So these are different pages. So for example, when you start blogging, you will create different categories for your blog posts. And then if you click on any of these categories, you'll see all the blog posts in these categories. So this is duplicate content. So you never want this to be indexed. And don't worry if you don't take these because Google isn't stupid.

They realize when it's duplicate content, and they weren't necessarily penalize you for it, but it's a good thing to do. Now, in these categories, you can leave this as it is, it's a very long title there. The good thing is that you've got the page in there, that means that every category page will be different because when you have more than 20 3040 posts in a category, you want to have the page number in there. So each category page has a different unique title to it. But however, you could just change that to this have the category title followed by the site name and followed by the page number. So that will be for example, say we have a category called e commerce.

So we'll have e commerce followed by the site name, which would be viable shop ecommerce, blah, blah, blah, followed by page one, page two, page three. And in the meta description, we'll put articles tagged with term title. So that will be articles tagged with e commerce, for example, and it's more or less the same in tags. So every blog post, you can add a few tags to help people find the blog posts. They very little SEO importance. So we'll just do the same thing have the tag whatever it is, again, it could be ecommerce or Amazon or something like that, followed by the site name followed by the page number.

However, these taxonomy pages are very, very unimportant. I'm going to save the changes now, when compared to these pages. These are your unique blog posts and static pages like about us. And these are the ones you want the search engines to drive traffic towards the taxonomies, the category pages, the tag pages, they're just extra ways of ordering your blog posts within your site, and not at all interesting to the search engines in terms of returning traffic towards them. But they are important. It is important to create categories and tags because they do explain to the search engines, what your website is all about.

And also our archives and data archives are very similar in that they are different ways to order content on your site. But they will be showing virtually the same content that exists on the posts and pages. Because for example, if you have different authors, then you can order the content via author archives. And the same with Data Archives. So again, you definitely want to add no index to these author archives. In fact, I'm actually going to disable the author archives, because I know I will only ever have one author, so there's very little point in having them.

And then we have these special pages with their own unique titles, as well. So when you search for pages in your site, somebody puts a search term or search phrase in the search box, then this will be the title of that page. So we'll save changes there. And lastly, I would no index the sub pages of the archives. Because again, all of this is duplicate content, and not interesting for the search engines to return traffic towards. So save changes there.

And that is it. It's very important stage that you fill out the homepage correctly. And you get some keywords in there. And the post types that you do those. Apart from that it's just a question of no indexing the other pages and make sure that they have unique page titles in them. But again, all of this isn't hugely important for SEO, but it's good to get right.

However, if you get it wrong, Google is not stupid. And they will tend to return the traffic to the post types as long as they have keyword rich specific titles to them. And that is just the best seo advice anyway, so let's go on to social. So this is a very important And part two fill out mostly because of the Facebook Open Graph metadata, which I find very important. But also there's Twitter section as well. Google Plus isn't that important these days, but we should do it, at least for Facebook, because if you paste a link in Facebook, then this makes sure that the link looks nice with a great image, and a good title and description.

And other sites are using the Facebook Open Graph metadata standard as well. So it's very important to get it right. So the Facebook page URL, we put that in there, and we have a Twitter handle that we'll put in there. Again, I would create a Google Plus page as well. And if you have any of these accounts, I put them in here as well. But Facebook, this is the important part.

I would advise you to fill in all of this check, add Open Graph metadata, add an image URL for your homepage. So I would upload a large image here, maybe 750 by 420 pixels 72 ppi. So an image of about 50 or 60 k nice attractive image. So that is if anyone shares your homepage on facebook, facebook will return that image. Likewise with the title and description. Now we can copy that from the message description that we put in under titles and meta.

So I would add an image there and add an image there and save changes. Now Twitter, I would check add Twitter card metadata and choose summary. And if you think you're going to be using a large image every time then do summary with large image Okay, so if you wish you can verify your site with Pinterest and add the verification code there. And likewise, if you want to create a Google Plus page, which I would advise you to do, then I would add Google Plus specific post metadata and add the Google Plus page there. But that is it. Now the XML sitemap is created.

And we need to add this to Google Webmaster Tools. So let's just make sure we've got that right by going to Webmaster Tools, crawl Sitemaps and add test sitemap. And we will add the sitemap there sitemap underscore index dot XML. And we'll submit that there and I would leave these all as is and same with advanced tools and search console. And then choose the site that you connected to Google Webmaster Tools and Google Analytics and save profile. And that's a good thing to do.

And there you have it, you have set up Yoast SEO correctly. But that is not all. Because even more importantly than any of those global settings is that every time you write a blog post, you have this Yoast SEO plow, which is super important. I'll tell you about it in another video. But basically, you always want to write a meta description. You may want to improve the SEO title, and you can focus in on keywords although the information in there is pretty obvious.

However, the most important thing is the description in the title there in terms of your SEO, on an individual page or post and I'll come to that in another video. My name is Rob Robert cabin.com I hope you enjoyed that how to install and set up Yoast SEO for WordPress plugin. I'll see you in another video.