WordPress SEO

Another standard plugin we use across our sites is the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.

It allows you full control over your title tags and meta descriptions of your landing pages so that you can optimize them for the keywords you are targeting.

SEO Titles: This is the single most important factor to SEO. Be default, the title tag of any post or page will be the title of the page or the post. But you can tweak it if you want the title tag that appears to Google to be different than the title that shows at the top of the page to the end user viewing your site. For instance, you may want the title of a page to be “Market Stats” to the people on your website and “Laguna Beach Real Estate Market Statistics” to the search engines. The “SEO Title” setting allows you to do this.

Meta Descriptions: Don’t think of this as a place to put keywords for SEO reasons. Instead, think of this as “ad copy” to increase the likelihood of someone clicking through to your site from Google.

XML Sitemap: This plugin also includes a XML sitemap generator, so that you can submit your sitemap to Google Webmaster Central. A XML sitemap will not help your site rank higher, but it will help Google correctly crawl your site’s content. Your sitemap will be located at yourdomainname.com/sitemap.xml once you enable sitemap functionality from your SEO settings.

External Resource: How to install and setup the WordPress SEO plugin by Yoast.