It always seems impossible, until its done.

If youre reading this, youre probably ready to beef up your Search Engine Optimization to get
better listings on search engines and attract more visitors to your site. This checklist contains some
easy to use practical tips on how to improve the SEO on your WordPress site. Lets get started.

INSTALL A GOOD SEO PLUGIN

The easiest way to get better SEO on your WordPress site is to install an SEO plugin. There are
quite a few out there, but the ones that stand out and are the most popular in this area are Yoast
SEO and All-In-One SEO. Plugins like these will help guide you to optimize your page titles,
individual posts, and much more.

Yoast SEO
Yoast is the complete website optimization package.
Apart from adding titles and descriptions to your
articles, it also allows you to do page analysis, add
open graph meta data, publish an xml sitemap, and
much much more. Its very easy to use. We put this
on all sites that we develop.

All in One SEO Pack

All in One SEO Pack isone of the most downloaded
plugins for WordPress. Use All in One SEO Pack to
automatically optimize your site for Search Engines. Its
great of the box, and even better with the Pro version.

Please note: You should typically only have one SEO plugin installed on a site. Installing more than
one will give you conflicts and potentially break things.

CHECK SEARCH ENGINE VISIBILITY

This is something you should have already done when launching your site. If not, now is a good
time to do so. In your Admin Dashboard under Settings > Reading, there is a setting for Search
Engine Visibility. Make sure Discourage Search Engines from Indexing this Site is unchecked.

Sometimes this is enabled during development phrase for better control over what is being
indexed. Unless you have a private site that you dont want listed on any of the search engines,
youll want to have this unchecked to get listed.

CREATE AN XML SITEMAP

Sitemaps are great in helping search engines index your content. Its basically
a list of all your pages in a certain format that is readable by the crawlers.
If you havent made one yet, you can use a plugin like Google XML Sitemaps.
If youre using the Yoast SEO plugin, a sitemap generator function is already
included there. You just need to enable it in the settings.

CHECK YOUR PAGE TITLE AND DESCRIPTION TAGS

When you give your web pages titles, be sure not to go over 55 characters.
Your description tag should contain 155 or less total characters. Following
these guidelines will ensure the title and/or description of your site doesnt
look wonky on the search results. Google likes nice clean titles and helpful
descriptions. This is a core functionality of most of the SEO plugins, which will
guide you in optimizing your titles and descriptions accordingly.

SIGN UP FOR WEBMASTER TOOLS

The big search engines such as Google and Bing offer free tools which allow you to better
manage your web site listing with them. These tools also give you useful feedback on your sites.
Theyll alert you if their crawler found a missing page, you can also use these tools to submit
sitemaps, exclude pages from their results and much more.
Google Search Console
https://www.google.com/webmasters
Bing Webmaster Tools
http://www.bing.com/toolbox/webmaster

CHECK ROBOTS.TXT FILE

The Robots.txt file is another way to control what on your site gets indexed, and what shouldnt.
Make sure youre allowing search engines. You can read more about it at robotstxt.org.
The structure of a Robots.txt file is pretty simple once you get the hang of it. Once you have a file,
it should be uploaded in the root directory / main folder of your site. If you dont want to mess
around with FTP, you can grab a plugin called Virtual Robots.txt to assist you within the WordPress
Dashboard.

HEADER TAGS
Search engines love header tags. Header tags are preformatted font settings that are usually
found in the editing bar on your page or post edit menu. Using these preformatted options is
better for search engines than typing the text and formatting it manually.
You should try to have at least one H1 tag on each of your pages with titles. You can also use the
H2 tag for content headers. Some WordPress themes will automatically use a header tag with
your page and post titles.

ADD SOCIAL SHARING ICONS

If you havent already, add icons to make your content easily shareable on
Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. The easiest way to add sharing icons is by
using a plugin. There are plenty of sharing related options for WordPress in
the Plugin Directory. Choose one that is both right for your needs and displays
the type of buttons that would go well with your site design.

COMPRESS YOUR IMAGES

This one was also covered at Launch, but its worth mentioning again.
Compressing your JPG and PNG images will help your site load faster, thus
helping your attractiveness to search engines. There are a couple plugins
available to do this, such as WP Smush or TinyPNG.
You could also run your images through an online image compression service,
such as optimizilla.com

ADD ALT TAGS TO YOUR IMAGES

All of your images should have the ALT property filled out
with a description of each image. This helps search engines
not only index your images, but gives them more information
about what your page is about that they can use on their end.
The easiest way to add them is to fill out the image
information screen that you get every time you upload a new
image to your site.
Dont be one of those people that just uploads an image and
inserts into a post without properly categorizing and tagging
it. Not only is it good for your SEO to have alt tags and descriptions, itll also save you headaches
later when youre searching for a particular image in your media library.

CHECK LOAD SPEED

Google has a great tool called PageSpeed Insights which will analyze your site
and not only give you suggestions on what to fix, but will give you helpful
information on how to do it. PageSpeed will also check your load time on both
desktop and mobile devices. Its another great tool that is also free. Run your
site through both of them for optimal results.
You can also use their Mobile Website Speed Testing Tool, which gives you a
nice graphical report about how well your site works across mobile and desktop devices.

CONSIDER A CONTENT DELIVERY NETWORK (CDN)

You can make your site faster and more resilient to downtime by using a
Content Delivery Network to help distribute your site around the world by
duplicating your content behind the scenes and distributing it to other
servers around the world.
While not required, its a good thing to have especially if your site grows
and you need to keep up with the traffic. The major players are CloudFlare
and MaxCDN. ( Amazon and Rackspace are two others for more advanced users)
Lots of hosting companies are integrating with CDNs to make it easier to set up. If you have that
option available, it will usually show up in your Control Panel as an add-on service.

USE BREADCRUMBS
Breadcrumbs are navigational links that make it really clear where the visitor is on your site and
allows them to get back as they click around. Search engines love these because it helps make
their indexing a little easier.
There are lots of plugins to create breadcrumbs if your WordPress theme does not have the
functionality built in. Yoast SEO has it built right in ready for you to simply enable it if you need to.

SUBMIT LOCALLY
If youre a local business, you should submit your site to Google Business.
Google loves providing localized results.
Google My Business
https://www.google.com/business/

These tips along with great content focused on your niche market will take you far on your SEO
journey without having the added expense of a specialist. To request a customized SEO Report
specific to your site, please get in touch!

www.tlcforcoaches.com
We are a team of virtual assistants and web developers that specialize in supporting great
coaches allowing them to focus on doing what they love, while saving them time and money.

How can we help you be more awesome today?

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