Okay, so now this lecture is about on site SEO, what I'd call global SEO. And this is Seo that you do with an SEO plugin. Or in the case of this site, we have Genesis Framework loaded. And Genesis has SEO settings here that do the same job as an SEO plugin. But I'm also going to show you on my site, Rob carbonite.com, where I use an SEO plugin called Yoast SEO, which is the best SEO plugin. I'll just show you how to get that.

If you go into plugins, add new search for WordPress, SEO, and it's WordPress SEO by Yoast. That's the one I've got loaded here. And once you have it loaded, you have This SEO tab here on the left hand side, you can control a lot of things here on the Genesis SEO settings, what we're doing now, as I says, global SEO settings. So we're going to have a format for page titles, and post titles, the homepage title, meta description, etc. And then the next lecture will be about on page SEO. And I'll get much more specific about one particular blog post.

And the first thing we're going to talk about is titles. Because the most important point of a web page in terms of SEO is the title. And this goes to the homepage. Here the title is in the HTML, the title is here, right in the in the body of the title tags there, obviously, and the title of this page is creative designs, dash London based creative design agency. And you can't see it on Chrome unfortunately, on the other browsers, it's at the top of the window. dobar but if you click on window, you can see the title here.

So that's what we're doing. First of all, with the SEO settings, we also do meta descriptions as well. And let's start with the Genesis SEO settings. Here. It's asking you to add the site description tagline to the title on the homepage. What they're talking about here is if you go into settings General, here is a tagline.

That's the site title. And that's the tagline. Always with the site title, you put some keywords in. This is a hypothetical design company. So we're calling it creative designs. We could call it creative Web Designs or something like that, putting keywords in there.

And similarly, our tagline is quite important. We want London in there because we're hoping to get people who search for London we've got creative in there. Again, we got design, we've got agency so that wouldn't be important or narrowly but it is now because in the SEO settings we have ad site description, tagline title, so that's why you've got both here, creative designs London based creative design agency. So that The homepage. If I show you in Yoast SEO, we're on titles and metas here, and you've got a home here. So you can choose your home page title, and the home page meta description as well.

Again, we got a homepage message description as well. The meta description again is in the HTML. This isn't important for SEO. It's not a ranking factor that Google uses. Whereas titles and headings are very much ranking factors that Google uses. The meta description appears on the Google results pages.

If we Google creative design agency here, the black text is the meta description. So on the Genesis SEO settings, you can put your homepage meta description there, and you can put it here on the Yoast SEO page. So that's the homepage. Now we're going to talk about all the other pages of the site. And obviously we're going to do this on a case by case basis because every page is different, but there are some or global settings that we can affect here. And that's right at the top here.

Here, we can add the site name to inner pages. And what that means is, it'll be easy to show you. And this is our portfolio page, the heading is portfolio. And the title is just portfolio. That right there is not very good. It's just one word portfolio.

It doesn't have any other key words for it, we don't know what it's about. It's just portfolio. So it would help to get some keywords in there. So what you could do is add the site name to the inner pages and put it on the right and have a document title separator of M dash. So if I update the settings there, I'll show you what that does. If we refresh portfolio, now we have at least a couple more keywords or I should say one is one of them isn't spelled correctly, and that will be on every page now.

So the blog is now blog creative designs for the title, however, don't want to do that. And the reason is, I find that a bit annoying because that puts the title on all the blog pages. And I really prefer to have the blog page is just to be the title of the blog page itself. And other people like to stuff this with keywords and have a title with keywords that appears on every one of their blog posts. And if you want to tweet it, that means that title goes in there as well, even though it's not relevant to the blog post. So I just like to keep the page title to be the same as the content on the page, I have the page heading.

So what I'm going to do is go back to those other pages that we want, like the portfolio page and the blog page and everything. And I'm going to update the titles on those individually and put more keywords in them manually. I'm not going to do it this way. But you have the option to do it this way if you wish. Similarly, with Yoast, you can put title and site name on your posts, you've got a choice with Yes, you've got a bit more control over it because you can put title site name on the pages which I like and just title on the post, which I like again, so moving down On the settings for Genesis, we have to have the site description in the title of the homepage, we don't want the title of the site on the other pages. And here on the homepage settings, we can add custom meta description and title to it.

So if we wanted to change the title of the homepage, we could, and I will put a meta description in there as well. Meta Keywords. Again, there's something else in the HTML. But the thing about Meta Keywords is you just forget about them. In fact, it says here, keywords are generally ignored by search engines, they used to be important back in the 90s. But nowadays, they are just not important at all.

So just forget about the keywords. Whenever you see keywords, just leave it blank. And here it's asking if you should do no index nofollow and no archives to the homepage. Definitely not. Now index means we don't want Google indexing it and we do want Google indexing it so we leave all those unchecked and in the document head settings. This is I believe, unnecessary little bits of text in the head that won't help Anyway, so I'll leave these three unchecked.

Now this bit is very important. This is applying no index to the archive pages. Now all these pages are I'll show you that category archives, for example, this is a blog page here power of color. And that's in a category called graphic design. So if I click on graphic design, we've got exactly the same information there. That's because it's a way of categorizing blog posts, which is all well and good.

But the search engines don't really need to know about these because they've got the information of the blog post anyway, because they've indexed the blog page, and they don't need to index any of the other archive pages. So what these settings do is apply no index to these archives setting so you don't have duplicate content on the search engines. Similarly, this can be done here in Yoast SEO and taxonomies. Here you see they're all checks, no index for the category archives, the tag archives and others as well authorized Data Archives, any any archives, basically, we don't want them indexed back to the Genesis SEO settings. This one we leave checked. But I remember reading something saying that this didn't actually matter at all, whether you have it checked or not, but that is the end of the Genesis SEO settings and save settings.

Let's just go back to the Yoast SEO and I'll show you quickly what else you have here. There is much more control on this plugin, it's very good plugin, I would recommend that if you're not using Genesis, you can add Open Graph metadata. We'll be doing that later. That's to put some more code in your head to make sure your posts look nice with an image on Facebook and I've already put that in there. That's why I don't have that check there anyway, you can do your XML sitemaps through Yoast as well. And that means that you don't have to load an extra plugin for the sitemap.

But on my Genesis sites, you'll remember I've already done my XML sitemap lots of other useful things you You have here you can edit files, I find this quite useful. You can edit files from inside this plugin like the robots. txt remember, that's the one where you get the sitemap address and you disallow certain folders and you can edit the ht access file. That's quite handy because it can be quite fiddly editing these files with an FTP program. But that is more or less it for your global SEO settings. If I go into pages and remember that portfolio page, we thought it was quite sad because the title is just portfolio which we don't want.

We want more in there. So if we go to pages, and portfolio here on every page, underneath the text editor is your individual SEO settings. And what you can do is here add a custom title. And this is very important, so we'll just say portfolio for creative designs. And design agency or something like that, then you've got designs twice there might want to think about that it's a bit of a no no to put keywords in twice, you may be able to get away with it once or twice on a site, you should add a custom meta description as well. I'll come to that later on do blog posts, because you want to write something catchy.

Remember that you see on black bit on the results pages. So anyway, if you update that, and then update portfolio, of course, the heading doesn't change. That's the same because that's here. But the title of page has changed. And that's much better for Google because there's more keywords in there. Google understands much better what the page is all about.

It's more likely to service in the results pages, but the blog posts I prefer remain just with the title. So this is just power of color and we got no rubbish about it being from creative designs calm. So this is the most important part of SEO in terms of Have what Google sees on the page, Google thinks that the title is the most important and most descriptive element of a page. So you want to develop a way of getting keywords in there, both globally, and individually, which we'll move on to later. I'll see you in the next lecture.