I wanted to give you a little Blogging 101 lesson because a lot of people are asking about plugins for SEO. If you are wondering how to use SEO plugin in wordpress – this will help you.
There are a few to choose from, but I have personally found that YOAST seems to be the easiest to use. It gives me a “green light” when it is ready to go. I love that because I am a visual person.
I use it on Your Modern Family & on here. I really like it because it lets you see how well you are doing. SEO is important to rank you higher in search engines, etc…
So, how do you use the SEO plugin in wordpress?
You can see in this screenshot that right now my SEO plugin is not activated because it is gray. (The SEO indicator is on the right hand side, under PUBLICIZE: See the little button next to SEO? It will be green when this post is completed.)
Now when I take my focus keyword (the title: how to use an SEO plugin ) and I put it into my plugin, it will be activated.
What that means is that I add it to 6 different places:
- The Title
- URL
- Image
- Focus Keyword
- SEO title
- meta description
When adding it to your URL, you can just use a little part of it, like even a word or two, instead of the whole thing.
I always have it in every picture. Here is my screenshot so that you can see what I mean after I upload an image:
This is an easy way to boost your SEO and your search traffic.
You also have to make sure that you have enough words to turn the SEO plugin green. I aim for 250 words for each post. (you can see the word count in this screenshot)
And when my post is done, here is the new SEO score:
Here is a screenshot to show you what I mean:
NOW BE SURE TO DO THE SOCIAL PART!!
You may have seen on Business2Blogger where they showed everyone how to make a Facebook image so that when you link is shared on Facebook, it is the perfect picture.
I do this all in the SEO plugin, as well: 
After they taught us this, my posts have all been looking so much better! I try to go back and update old images as often as I can.
After you do this, GO TO FACEBOOK DEBUGGER and enter your post.
To use the debugger:
1- Add your URL to the page and hit DEBUG
2- hit the button that says SCRAPE NEW CONENT and scroll down to see if it works (there will be many errors- ignore that part for now).
3- Hit the button AGAIN and AGAIN and AGAIN until it grabs your new image. If you hit it too many times, it will just tell you that you have exceeded the number of clicks, but that doesn’t normally happen.
That’s it!
For more advice, check out our book!
Do you know of any great SEO Plug-ins for the Blogger platform?
I don’t – I”m sorry, Marie. I was only on blogger for about a month before switching.
Thank you Becky, for walking me through this! I have been intimidated thinking about adding in a SEO plug in. Many have recommended Yoast, but it scared me. You have simplified it for me. I’m going to install this week!
Hi Becky, (my name is Becky too!0
Anyways, I really appreciate this information, as I am new to blogging. But I have to be honest. How do you know this information is correct? How do you know that boldfaceing vocabulary will REALLY give it a higher ranking? I read your other post about not putting an image right away, which was informative. However, how do you know this? I’m totally new to all of this, and want to learn. I don’t mean to challenge you! Just curious. 🙂 Where do YOU learn these things? Thanks soooo much!
haha! Nope- I get it. I have been to several blogging conferences, (Paula has, as well) and we both do a lot of research online, etc… We follow technical bloggers & google people online (twitter, etc..) I guess I just read, read & read more on it, to stay current. Hope that helped!
Thanks for the great post. I’ve been blogging for about 4 months and learning a lot, but have been struggling with the SEO piece. I just installed Yoast and wrote my first post with it this morning. It is a very helpful tool.
Hi. I don’t have the option for SEO plugins. The only thing I have below where you showed it is a box to check for ‘This post is super awesome’. Perhaps you can only use the plugins if you have bought your URL and layout???
Thank you for all of this helpful information. You really simplified it for me. I just started my blog this week, and did not even know what SEO meant. I used all of your advice for my first post 🙂
Do you always make your keyword string bold? or was that just here to highlight it?
Thanks for this easy-to-follow post! My blog is the first one I’ve ever self-hosted and actually put effort into gaining an audience for, and I also use the YOAST SEO plugin. After researching a lot of the terms, I read that having the exact phrase in both the Title and Alt Text for an image actually penalizes your SEO standing, as it’s considered “keyword stuffing”. I’m curious as to what your thoughts are on this.
I’ve used Yoast for a while, but I never thought about using the social tab. Thanks for the info!
I was hesitant of using the social part on YOAST, but I am curious – do I have to use the Facebook debugger?
Thank you! This helped a lot!
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