How to Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress

Do you want to properly add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress?

Meta keywords and descriptions allow you to improve your website’s SEO ranking. This means more traffic, leads, and sales for your business.

In this article, we will show you how to easily add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress.

Adding meta keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress

Why Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress?

Keywords and descriptions allow you to tell search engines more about the content of your posts and pages.

Keywords are important words or phrases that people are likely to search to find your content. A meta description is a brief description of what your page or post is about.

It’s your meta title, description, and keywords that shows up in Google search results:

Google Search Listing

Meta keywords and meta description are HTML meta tags. They form part of your website’s header code. They don’t appear on your page or post for visitors to see. However, search engines and browsers can use them.

WordPress SEO plugins make it super easy for you to add them from your WordPress admin area for each post and page on your website.

How Important are Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions for SEO?

Like most WordPress users, you are probably wondering will adding meta keywords and meta descriptions will improve my WordPress SEO rankings.

While search engines don’t exactly share how much weight they assign to keywords or description, SEO experts always recommend adding proper meta description and keywords for on-page SEO optimization.

Meta descriptions are widely used by search engines. In Google’s search results, they appear below your content’s title, with the search term shown in bold.

An example meta description, for the All in One SEO plugin homepage

An effective meta description will encourage users to click through and read your content. And what we do know is that a good click through rate means Google will likely rank your content higher.

Now when it comes to meta keywords, most modern search engines either assign very little importance or don’t use them at all. The main exception is the Russian search engine Yandex.

Instead search engines prefer that you add your focused keywords in your title, description, and through out your content. This is why SEO plugins like AIOSEO comes with a TruSEO score that helps you optimize your content for focused keywords and keyphrases.

Our Recommendations for Meta Keywords and Meta Descriptions

We recommend adding a meta description for all the posts and pages on your site, including your homepage, category pages, and tag pages.

Note: Google customizes the description based on the search query, so it will only use your meta description some of the time. However, it’s still worth creating a meta description. It will appear for around 30% of users, and it can help your SEO.

When it comes to meta keywords, it’s up to you whether or not to use them. They will not harm your site, but they may not have much benefit either.

Having said that, let’s take a look at how to easily add keywords and meta descriptions in WordPress.

How to Add Meta Description and Keywords in WordPress (Video Tutorial)

If you prefer the written tutorial, then please continue reading.

Installing and Activating All in One SEO for WordPress

For this tutorial, we will be using All in One SEO (AIOSEO) which is the best WordPress SEO plugin on the market. It allows you to easily optimize your entire WordPress site for better SEO and comes with comprehensive set of tools to grow your business.

First, you’ll need to install and activate the All in One SEO plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, All in One SEO will take you through a simple setup wizard. Just follow the step by step instructions to get everything set up for your site.

After completing the setup, simply click the ‘Finish Setup and Go to the Dashboard’ button.

Click the Finish Setup button to go to your dashboard

Enable Meta Keywords Support in All in One SEO

All in One SEO comes with built-in support for meta description and keywords. However, the meta keywords feature is turned off by default. This is because many search engines give little or no importance to keywords in their rankings.

To enable it, go to All in One SEO » Search Appearance » Advanced in your WordPress dashboard. Then, switch the meta keywords toggle from No to Yes.

Turning on the meta keywords option in All in One SEO

After enabling meta keywords in WordPress, you will see some additional options. You can generate a post’s keywords from its categories and/or tags. Also, you can dynamically generate keywords on your blog posts and archive pages.

It’s up to you whether you want to use these automated options or not. Regardless, you will always be able manually define keywords for each post and page.

The meta keyword options that are available in All in One SEO

Don’t forget to click the ‘Save Changes’ button at the bottom of the page after making changes.

Adding Meta Descriptions and Meta Keywords to Your WordPress Posts and Pages

First, you need to edit a post or page where you want to add your meta keywords and meta description.

AIOSEO works on both WordPress block editor (Gutenberg) and WordPress classic editor.

Once on the content editor screen, scroll down to the ‘AIOSEO Settings’ box below the content area.

Adding a Meta Description to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO

You will see your site’s title and an automatically generated description as the snippet. Below that, you’ll see the Meta Description field.

The automatically generated snippet in All in One SEO

Go ahead and enter a description into your Meta Description field. All in One SEO will let you know how many characters you’ve used. This is important because Google will only show 160 characters in the search results.

You’ll see that your snippet preview automatically updates as you type your meta description.

Entering your meta description in All in One SEO

Once you’ve finished, simply save or publish your post to save the changes to your meta description.

Using All in One SEO’s Dynamic Tags in Your Meta Descriptions

Optionally, you can add tags to your meta description. The ones that All in One SEO offers by default are Page Content and Separator, but you can add other dynamic tags as well.

For example, we’ve added the author’s name to our meta description here.

A meta description with the tags Author First Name and Author Last Name at the start

To add a tag, simply type the # character into the meta description box. You’ll then see a dropdown menu of available tags.

Adding tags to your meta description in All in One SEO

Adding Meta Keywords to Your Post or Page Using AIOSEO

To add your meta keywords, you need to click the Advanced tab for your AIOSEO settings.

Simply type in your keywords, and press Enter after each one. It’s important to only use keywords that are relevant to your content. Adding irrelevant keywords will not give you any SEO benefits.

Adding meta keywords for your post or page using All in One SEO

Tip: Meta keywords are completely separate from your Focus Keyword. You can set a Focus Keyword under the General tab. This is for All in One SEO to give you recommendations about improving your content. The Focus Keyword doesn’t automatically become a meta keyword for your post or page.

Adding Meta Keywords and Meta Description for Your Homepage

You can also add meta keywords and a meta description for your website’s homepage in WordPress. Here is how to do that using All in One SEO.

First, go to Search Appearance » Global Settings in your WordPress admin. Then, scroll down to the Home Page section.

The Home Page section in your Search Appearance settings for All in One SEO

On this screen, you can easily enter a meta description and keywords, just like you would for a post or page.

All in One SEO will use your tagline as your meta description by default. You can leave that in there or you can customize it.

Entering a meta description and keywords for your homepage

You can also click on the other options to add those tags into your meta description. Alternatively, you can add different tags by typing the # character in your meta description, as described above.

Tip: It’s better to use these tags rather than manually typing your site title, tagline, or separator character. This is because your meta description will automatically be updated if you later make changes to any of those.

Make sure you click the Save Changes button at the bottom of the page after adding your meta description and keywords.

Meta Keywords and Description for WordPress Category Archives

You can also add keywords and description to your category and tag archive pages.

First, you need to visit the Posts » Categories page. Take your mouse over to the category you want to edit and then click on the ‘Edit’ link.

Editing a category in WordPress

Scroll down on the category’s page to the AIOSEO Settings box. Here, you just need to enter a meta description for your category. Again, you can use All in One SEO’s tags within this if you want to.

Adding a meta description for your category in All in One SEO

To add keywords, simply click on the Advanced tab like you would for any post or page.

Make sure you save the changes to your category before moving on.

Your meta description and keywords will now be used for the category page, which is the archive of posts in that category.

You can repeat the process to add meta keywords and descriptions to your blog’s tags and other custom taxonomy archive pages.

All in One SEO integrates seamlessly with other popular WordPress plugins. This allows you to add keywords and meta description for your WooCommerce product pages, SeedProd landing pages, MemberPress course pages, and more.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add keywords and meta description to your WordPress posts and pages. You may also want to see our step by step guide on how to create an email newsletter to grow your website traffic, and our comparison of the best WordPress contact form plugins.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post How to Add Keywords and Meta Descriptions in WordPress appeared first on WPBeginner.

How is SEO Changing this Decade?

Every year, Google changes its search algorithms more than a hundred times. Some changes are minor tweaks; some are colossal shifts that majorly affect the way that your business ranks on the search engine. It...

Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step)

Improving your WordPress SEO is crucial for getting more traffic to your website. Sadly most WordPress SEO guides are too technical for new users to get started.

If you are serious about increasing your website traffic, then you need to pay attention to the WordPress SEO best practices.

In this guide, we will share the top WordPress SEO tips to help you improve your WordPress SEO and get more organic traffic.

WordPress SEO for beginners

You might have heard experts saying that WordPress is SEO friendly. This is actually why a lot of people choose WordPress to start a blog or a website.

While WordPress makes sure that the code it generates follows the SEO best practices, there is a lot more you need to do if you want to maximize your SEO efforts.

We have a number of actionable steps that you need to take to properly optimize your WordPress SEO.

To make it easy, we have created a table of contents to help you easily navigate through our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

Table of Contents

Introduction

The Basics of WordPress SEO

The Best WordPress SEO Plugin

WordPress SEO Best Practices

Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

Finally, see more SEO tools and resources to take your WordPress SEO even farther.

Introduction

We know the idea of optimizing for WordPress SEO can be intimidating for beginners, especially if you’re not a tech geek.

But don’t worry — it doesn’t have to be complicated. Start here to learn the basics, and then you can start applying them to your own website.

What is SEO?

What is SEO

SEO is an acronym that stands for Search Engine Optimization. It’s a strategy used by website owners to get more traffic by ranking higher in search engines.

Search engine optimization isn’t about tricking Google or gaming the system. It’s simply about creating a website that has optimized code and formatting which makes it easy for search engines to find your website.

When people search the web for the topics you write about, your search-engine-optimized content will appear higher in the search results, and you’ll get more people clicking through to your website.

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Why SEO is important

Search engines are often the biggest source of traffic for most websites.

Google and other search engines use advanced algorithms to understand and rank pages appropriately in search results. However, those algorithms aren’t perfect — they still need your help to understand what your content is about.

If your content isn’t optimized, then search engines won’t know how to rank it. When people search for the topics you write about, your website won’t appear in the search results, and you’ll miss out on all that traffic.

It is really important for all business owners to make their website search engine friendly, so that they can maximize their search traffic.

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Basics of WordPress SEO

SEO can get technical, but it doesn’t have to be. Just learning a few basic SEO tips to optimize your site can give you a noticeable boost in your website traffic.

You don’t have to be a tech genius to use the techniques below. If you’re already using WordPress, then you’ve got what it takes!

Let’s get started optimizing your website.

Check Your Site’s Visibility Settings

WordPress comes with a built-in option to hide your website from search engines. The purpose of this option is to give you time to work on your website before it’s ready to go public.

However, sometimes this option can get checked accidentally and it makes your website unavailable to search engines.

If your website is not appearing in search results, then the first thing you need to do is to make sure that this option is unchecked.

Simply log in to the admin area of your WordPress site and visit Settings » Reading page.

Search engine visibility settings in WordPress

You need to scroll down to the ‘Search Engine Visibility’ section and make sure that the box next to ‘Discourage search engines from indexing this site’ is unchecked.

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your changes.

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SEO friendly URLs contain words that clearly explain the content of the page, and they’re easy to read by both humans and search engines.

Some examples of SEO friendly URLs are:

https://www.wpbeginner.com/how-to-install-wordpress/
https://www.wpbeginner.com/common-wordpress-errors-and-how-to-fix-them/

Notice that these URLs are readable and a user can guess what they will see on the page just by looking at the URL text.

So what does a non-SEO friendly URL look like?

https://www.wpbeginner.com/?p=10467
http://example.com/archives/123

Notice that these URLs use numbers unrelated to the content, and a user cannot guess what they will find on the page by looking at the URL.

Using SEO friendly permalink structure improves your chances of getting better positions in search results.

Here is how you can check and update your WordPress site’s permalink structure.

You need to visit the Settings » Permalinks page. Select the post name option and then click on the ‘Save Changes’ button to store your settings.

SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress

For more detailed instructions take a look at our guide on what is a SEO friendly URL structure in WordPress.

Note: If your website has been running for more than 6 months, then please don’t change your permalink structure unless you’re using the numbers option. If you’re using Day and Name or Month and Name, continue using that.

By changing your permalink structure on an established site, you will lose all of your social media share count and run the risk of losing your existing SEO ranking.

If you must change your permalink structure, then hire a professional, so they can setup proper redirects. You’ll still lose your social share counts on the pages.

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WWW vs non-WWW

If you are just starting out with your website, then you need to choose whether you want to use www (http://www.example.com) or non-www (http://example.com) in your site’s URL.

Search engines consider these to be two different websites, so this means you need to choose one and stick to it.

You can set your preference by visiting the Settings » General page. Add your preferred URL in both the ‘WordPress Address’ and ‘Site Address’ fields.

Non-www or www in WordPress URLs

Despite what someone else might say, from a SEO standpoint there’s no advantage to using one or another.

For more detailed information on this topic, take a look at our guide on www vs non-www – which is better for WordPress SEO.

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The Best WordPress SEO plugin

One of the best parts about WordPress is that there’s a plugin for everything, and SEO is no exception. There are thousands of WordPress SEO plugins which makes it harder for beginners to choose the best WordPress SEO plugin.

Instead of installing separate plugins for individual SEO tasks, we will help you choose the best WordPress SEO plugin that does it all, and it’s 100% free.

Choosing the Best WordPress SEO Plugin

Choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin

When it comes to choosing the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will most likely narrow your choices down to the two most popular solutions: Yoast SEO or All in One SEO Pack.

They are both effective solutions, and we’ve done a pros and cons comparison of Yoast SEO vs All in One SEO Pack.

At WPBeginner, we use Yoast SEO, so in this tutorial we’ll be using Yoast SEO for screenshots and examples.

Regardless, we have a step by step guide on properly setting up each of these plugins:

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Add XML Sitemaps in WordPress

Add XML sitemap in WordPress

An XML Sitemap is a specially formatted file that lists every single page on your website. This makes it easy for search engines to find all of your content.

While adding an XML sitemap does not boost your site’s search rankings, it does help search engines find the pages quickly and start ranking them.

If you’re using the Yoast SEO plugin, then it will automatically create an XML sitemap for you. To find your sitemap, just go to this URL (don’t forget to replace example.com with your own domain name):

http://example.com/sitemap_index.xml

We will show you how to submit your XML sitemap to Google in the next step.

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Add Your Site to Google Search Console

Google Search Console

Google Search Console, also known as Webmaster Tools, is a set of tools offered by Google to give website owners a look at how their content is seen by the search engine.

It provides reports and data to help you understand how your pages appear in search results. You also get to see the actual search terms people are using to find your website, how each page appears in the search results, and how often your pages are clicked.

All this information helps you understand what’s working on your site and what’s not. You can then plan your content strategy accordingly.

Google Search Console also alerts you when there is something wrong with your website, like when search crawlers are unable to access it, find duplicate content, or restricted resources.

We have a step by step guide on how to add your WordPress site to Google Search Console.

If you’re using Yoast SEO, then follow step 6 in our Yoast SEO setup guide.

If you’re not using Yoast SEO, then you can watch our video that shows an alternative way:

Once you have added your website to Google Search Console, click on the Sitemap from the left menu and then paste the last part of the sitemap URL.

Adding sitemap in Google Search Console

Click on the submit button to save your changes.

Google Search Console will now check your sitemap and use it to improve your website’s crawling.

Once you have successfully added your sitemap, it will appear as pending. It does take Google some time to crawl your website. After a few hours, you would be able to see some stats about your sitemap. It will show you the number of links it found in your sitemap, how many of them got indexed, a ratio of images and web pages, etc.

We recommend that you check your Search Console at least on a monthly basis for gathering insights and see your website’s SEO progress.

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Optimizing Your Blog Posts for SEO

Often beginners make the mistake of thinking that installing and activating a WordPress SEO plugin is all that’s needed. SEO is an ongoing process that you must keep up with if you want to see maximum results.

All top SEO plugins allow you to add a title, description, and focus keyword to every blog post and page. It also shows you a preview of what users will see when they Google your website.

We recommend that you optimize your title and description to get maximum clicks.

When writing your blog post, simply scroll down to the SEO section and take full advantage of it.

Yoast SEO blog post settings

If you’re wondering how to choose a focus keyword or focus keyphrase, what is a good title, or what is a good meta description, then we have covered it in details in our beginners guide to optimize your blog posts for SEO.

We highly recommend that you read it because on-page SEO is crucial for your success.

Doing Keyword Research for Your Website

Many beginners use their best guesses to figure out what topics people are looking for and what they should add to their blogs and website.

It is like shooting an arrow in the dark. You don’t need to do that when you can use real data to find out what people are looking for.

Keyword research is a research technique used by content creators and SEO experts. It helps you discover words users enter into search engines to find content, products, and services in your industry.

You can then use those words and phrases into your website to get more search traffic.

There are a ton of keyword research tools (both free and paid) that you can use. We recommend using SEMRush, it helps you discover keywords and even find out the keywords where your competitors are ranking.

For more details, see our beginner’s guide on how to do keyword research for your WordPress website.

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WordPress SEO Best Practices

If you follow the basics of WordPress SEO and use the best WordPress SEO plugin, you will already be ahead of most websites.

However if you want even better results, then you need to follow the WordPress SEO best practices below.

These aren’t too technical and most won’t even require you to touch any code. But they will make a big difference if you follow them.

Properly Using Categories and Tags in WordPress

Category vs Tag

WordPress allows you to sort your blog posts into categories and tags. This makes it easy for you to manage your content by topics, and for your users to find the content they’re looking for.

Categories and tags also help search engines understand your website structure and content.

Often beginners get confused on how to best use categories and tags. After explaining this to thousands of readers, here’s how we approach categories and tags.

Categories are meant for broad grouping of your posts. If your blog was a book, then categories will be the table of content.

For example, on a personal blog, you can have categories like music, food, travel, etc. Categories are hierarchical, so you can add child categories to them.

On the other hand, tags are more specific keywords that describe the contents of an individual post. For example, a blog post filed under the food category can have tags like salad, breakfast, pancakes, etc. Think of these as indexes section in a textbook.

For more on this topic, see our guide on categories vs tags and SEO best practices for sorting your content.

By using categories and tags properly, you make it easy for your users to browse your website. Since it’s easy for users, it also makes it easier for search engines to browse your website.

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Make Internal Linking a Habit

Adding internal links in WordPress

Search engines assign each page on your website a score (page authority). The recipe of this score is kept secret so that people cannot game the results. However, the most common signals of authority are links.

This is why it’s important that you link to your own content from your other blog posts and pages.

You should make it a habit to interlink your own posts whenever possible. If you have multiple authors, then create a pre-publish blog post checklist that requires them to interlink at least 3 other blog posts.

This will help you boost your pageviews, increases the time users spend on your site, and ultimately will improve the SEO score of your individual blog posts and pages.

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Optimize WordPress Comments

Optimize WordPress comments

Comments can be a strong indication of user engagement on your website. Engaged users mean more links back to your site, more traffic, and improved SEO.

However, you need to make sure that your comments are real and not spam. Spammers submit comments with bad links which could affect and even ruin your search rankings.

This is why we recommend everyone to start using Akismet. It is one of the two plugins that come pre-installed with every WordPress site, and it helps you combat comment spam.

If Akismet alone is unable to handle comment spam, then see these tips and tools to combat comment spam in WordPress.

If your blog posts attract a lot of genuine, spam-free comments, then you should pat yourself on the shoulder for building such an engaging website!

However, too many comments on a post can make it load slower which also affects your search engine rankings. (Keep reading below to find out more about how speed affects SEO.)

To prepare your website so that it can handle the burden comments put on your server and speed, you can split comments into multiple pages. See our tutorial on how to paginate comments in WordPress.

(If you’d like to get more comments on your site, check out these 11 ways to get more comments on your WordPress blog posts.)

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NoFollow External Links in WordPress

As mentioned above, links help search engines decide which pages are important. When you link to a website, you are passing some of your site’s SEO score to that link. This SEO score is called “link juice.”

For good search rankings, you need to make sure that you are getting more link juice from other websites than you are giving away.

Adding the “nofollow” attribute to external links (links to websites that you don’t own) instructs search engines not to follow those links. This helps you save link juice.

A normal external link looks like this in HTML:

<a href="http://example.com">Example Website</a>

An external link with the nofollow attribute looks like this:

<a href="http://example.com" rel="nofollow">Example Website</a>

By default, WordPress does not come with an option to make links nofollow. However, you can still easily do that by manually modifying links.

Simply select the block containing your link and then click on the 3 vertical dots icon present at the top bar.

Edit as HTML

This will open a menu where you need to click on the ‘Edit as HTML’ option.

You will now see the HTML code of your link. Go ahead to add the rel=”nofollow” attribute to the link element.

Manually adding nofollow attribute to a link

If you see the rel=”noopener noreferrer” attribute in the HTML code, then add a space after noreferrer and add nofollow after that.

For more details and alternate methods, see our guide on how to add nofollow links in WordPress.

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Full Posts vs Summaries or Excerpts

Full posts vs summary or excerpts

WordPress displays and links to your posts from a number of pages like home page, category archive, tags archive, date archive, author pages, etc.

By default, it shows the full article content on all these pages. This affects your site’s SEO, as search engines may find it to be duplicate content. Full articles also make your archive pages load slower.

Showing full articles everywhere also affects your page views. For example, users who subscribe to your RSS feed will be able to read the full article in their feed reader without ever visiting your website.

The easiest way to solve this is by showing summaries or excerpts instead of full articles.

You can do this by going to Settings » Reading and select summary.

For detailed instructions, see our guide on how to customize WordPress excerpts without coding.

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Speed and Security for WordPress SEO

Even if you follow all the WordPress SEO tips and best practices above, if your site is slow or gets taken down by a hacker, your search engine rankings will take a big hit.

Here’s how to prevent your site from losing search engine traffic due to slow performance or lax security.

Optimize Your Site’s Speed and Performance

Optimize your WordPress site's speed and performance

Research shows that in the internet age, the average human attention span is shorter than that of a goldfish.

Web usability experts believe that users decide whether they want to stay or leave within a few seconds of visiting a website.

That means that as a website owner, you only have a few seconds to present your content and engage users. You don’t want to waste this precious time making your visitor wait for your website to load. Search engines like Google now rank faster websites higher than slow loading websites.

If you need to improve your site’s speed, check out this expert advice on 18 useful tricks to speed up WordPress and boost performance.

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Optimizing Images in WordPress for SEO

Images are more engaging than text but they also take more time to load. If you are not careful with image sizes and quality, then they can slow down your website.

You need to make sure that you use images that are optimized to load faster. See our guide on how to speed up WordPress by optimizing images for the web.

Another trick you can use to optimize your images for search engines is to use a descriptive title and alt tags. These tags help search engines understand what your image is about. They also help users with visual impairment as their screen readers can read the alt text to them.

WordPress allows you to easily add title and alt tags when you upload an image.

Adding alt text and title to images in WordPress

If you are a photographer or add a lot of images to your WordPress site, then you need to use a gallery plugin.

We recommend using the Envira Gallery. In our speed tests, we found it to be the fastest WordPress gallery plugin. It’s also fully responsive and SEO friendly out of the box.

For more tips, see our complete beginner’s guide to image SEO.

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Security and Safety of Your WordPress Site

WordPress security

Each week, Google blacklists around 20,000 websites for malware and around 50,000 for phishing. When a site is blacklisted, it doesn’t show up in any search results at all.

This means that the security of your WordPress site is crucial for good rankings. You don’t want all your hard work on SEO to go to waste if your site is compromised by a hacker.

The good news is that it’s not that difficult to keep your WordPress site safe — see the step by step instructions in our ultimate WordPress security guide.

At WPBeginner, we use Sucuri to protect our website against attacks. To see why we recommend this service, check out our case study of how Sucuri helped us block 450,000 WordPress attacks in 3 months.

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Start Using SSL/HTTPS

A site secured by SSL and HTTPS

SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) is a technology that encrypts the connection between a user’s browser and the server they are connecting to. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.

Websites secured with SSL are indicated by a padlock sign in the browser’s address bar. This makes your website more trustworthy, and it is required if you are running an online store with WordPress and processing sensitive payment information.

All top WordPress hosting companies offer free SSL certificates with Let’s Encrypt. See our guide on how to get a free SSL certificate for your website for more details.

If you want a premium wildcard SSL certificate or just a regular certificate with security warranty, then we recommend using Domain.com.

Their SSL certificates come with a minimum of $10,000 security warranty and up to $1.75 million security warranty. You also get a TrustLogo site seal to display on your site for added credibility.

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More SEO Tools and Resources

Once you get the hang of WordPress SEO best practices, you’ll want to take your skills even further to get ahead of your competition.

We have compiled a list of best WordPress SEO plugins and tools that you should use to boost your SEO. If you’re ready to try some more advanced techniques, you can also check out our archive of WordPress SEO articles.

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We hope this article helped you learn how to properly optimize your WordPress site for SEO. Go ahead and implement a few of these WordPress SEO tips, and you should see an increase in your traffic within a few months as the search engines process your changes.

If you liked this article, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel for WordPress video tutorials. You can also find us on Twitter and Facebook.

The post Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide for Beginners (Step by Step) appeared first on WPBeginner.

How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console

One of the most important step in optimizing your WordPress site for SEO is adding it to Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools).

Google Search Console offers specific webmaster tools to help website owners monitor and maintain their search presence and rankings.

In this guide, we will show you how to easily add and verify your WordPress site in Google Search Console also known as Webmaster Tools.

How to easily add your WordPress site to Google Search Console

What is Google Search Console?

Google Search Console is a free tool offered by Google to help website owners monitor their website’s presence in Google search results.

It helps you track search rankings along with keeping you updated about site errors, security issues, and indexing issues that may affect your website’s search performance.

If you are serious about growing your website, then you need to add it to Google webmaster tools from day one.

That being, let’s take a look at how to easily add your site to Google Search Console.

Adding Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console

First, you need to visit the Google Search Console website and click on the ‘Start Now’ button.

Start Google Search Console

Next, you’ll need to sign in with your Google / Gmail account.

Once logged in, you’ll be asked to enter your website URL.

There are two methods for site verification: domain name or URL prefix. We recommend the URL prefix method because it is more flexible.

Add website URL

Keep in mind that Google considers an HTTP and HTTPS as two different protocols. It also considers https://www.example.com and https://example.com as two different websites.

You need to enter the correct website URL used by WordPress.

If you are unsure, then there is an easy way to find out the exact URL you need to enter. Simply login to your WordPress admin area and go to Settings » General page.

There you will see your website’s URL in the site address field.

Copy your site address from WordPress settings page

After entering your correct website address in Google webmaster tools setup wizard, click on the ‘Continue’ button to go to the next step.

Now, you’ll be asked to verify ownership of your website. There are several ways to do that, but we will show the HTML tag method because it is the easiest one.

Copy the HTML tag

Click on the HTML tag to expand it and then copy the code inside it.

Now, you need to add this Google site verification meta tag in WordPress, so Google can verify that you are the owner of the website.

Most WordPress tutorials will guide you to just edit the header.php file in your WordPress theme and add the code just above the <body> tag.

However, we don’t recommend this method because if you update or change your theme, then the HTML tag will disappear.

Google periodically checks for the HTML tag and will disable your access to the site data in the search console if it cannot find the verification tag.

Here is how to make sure that Google can always verify your ownership of the website.

First, you need to install and activate the Insert Headers and Footers plugin. For more details, see our step by step guide on how to install a WordPress plugin.

Upon activation, go to Settings » Insert Headers and Footers page and paste the Google HTML tag code you copied earlier inside the ‘Scripts in Header’ box.

Add HTML verification tag to site header

Don’t forget to click on the ‘Save’ button to store your changes.

You can now go back to Google Search Console settings and click on the ‘Verify’ button.

Verify ownership

Google Search Console will now look for the HTML tag in your website code and will show you a success message.

Your website successfully added to Search Console

Note: If you don’t see a success message, then you need to clear your WordPress cache. This will ensure that Google can fetch the latest version of your website.

That’s all. You have successfully added your site to the Google Search Console (Webmaster tools). You can now click on the ‘Go to Property’ link to visit your Google Search Console dashboard.

Google Search Console dashboard

From here you can see your website’s performance reports and index coverage.

Before you do that, let’s tell Google a little bit more about your website. This will help Google crawl your website a bit more efficiently.

Add XML Sitemap to Google Search Console

An XML sitemap is a file that lists all your website content in XML format, so search engines like Google can easily discover and index your content.

The easiest way to add an XML sitemap to your WordPress website is by installing and activating the Yoast SEO plugin.

Upon activation, go to SEO » General and switch to the ‘Features’ tab. From here, you need to scroll down to the ‘XML Sitemap’ option and make sure that it is turned on.

XML Sitemap option in Yoast SEO

Next, you need to get the XML sitemap link. Simply click on the question mark icon next to the XML sitemap option, and you will see a link to your XML sitemap.

View your XML sitemap

Clicking on the link will take you to your XML sitemap. From there, you can just copy the URL from your browser’s address bar.

Copy your XML Sitemap URL

Alternatively, you can directly access your XML sitemap by adding sitemap_index.xml at the end of your website address. For example:

https://www.example.com/sitemap_index.xml

Now that you have XML sitemap ready, let’s help Google find it quickly.

Simply switch to the Google Search Console dashboard and click on the Sitemaps menu from the left column.

Add your sitemap URL to Google Search Console

After that, you need to add the last part of your sitemap URL under the ‘Add new sitemap’ section and click the Submit button.

Google will now add your sitemap URL to your Google Search Console.

That’s all, you have successfully added your website to Google Search Console.

The next step is to learn how to use the treasure trove of information in Google search console to grow your business. We have a complete Google Search Console guide for beginners which shows you how to make the most out of Google Search Console data.

Google Search Console and WordPress FAQs

Having helped thousands of readers add and verify their website in Google search console, we have seen just about every question you can think of. Here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions.

1. How can I upload a Google HTML verification file to my WordPress blog?

Google Search Console allows few different ways to verify website ownership. In this article, we covered the easiest method which is to use the Google site verification meta tag. However some website owners prefer to upload the HTML file to verify site ownership.

To upload the Google search console HTML verification file to WordPress, you will need to login to your WordPress hosting cPanel or connect to your hosting account using FTP.

Next, you need to upload the HTML verification file inside the /public_html/ folder of your website. This is the root directory where you’ll see other WordPress folders like /wp-admin/, /wp-content/, etc.

2. Should I use a Google Site verification plugin for WordPress?

There are many WordPress plugins that are designed specifically to help you with Google site verification. However you don’t need to use them because you’ll likely need to verify ownership on other webmaster tools and platforms like Bing, Yandex, Pinterest, etc.

It’s much better to use the Insert Headers and Footers plugin because it lets you add site verification for all platforms (in a single plugin).

3. How can I become a power user of Google Search Console?

Google search console has a lot of useful information that you can use to grow your business. We have created the ultimate Google Search Console guide that you can use to become a power user.

4. I’m running into problems, is there a Google Search console phone number that I can contact?

No, there’s no Google search console phone number that you can contact. If you’re running into problems with Google search console, then you can use their online support center. For specific questions about WordPress, you can always join our free WordPress help group to ask your questions.

We hope this article helped you learn how to easily add your WordPress site to Google Search Console. You may also want to see our guide on how to get more traffic to your website, and our comparison of the best email marketing services for small business.

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The post How to Add Your WordPress Site to Google Search Console appeared first on WPBeginner.

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