Progress So Far
So far I've been here a little over 3 months. My progress is pretty slow but steady. There is SO MUCH to learn and do. It's fortunate that so many of you are willing to help. I look forward to paying it forward.
Thus far, I have gotten the following done:
- Selected a niche
- Purchased a domain & hosted it on WA
- Created a web site
- Written 5 posts, and started on another (mine tend to be long & research-intense)
- Made photos and added to my posts
- Created a Google + account and set up Google Authorship (the day before they announced that authorship is being discontinued)
- Mostly completed Course 2
I've also installed & activated a different plug-in for SEO, as shown on Jeremy West's blog located here:
Thanks Jeremy. At first I was having typical newbie problems with the Yoast SEO plugin, and Jeremy was kind enough to reply to a couple of questions that got me off dead center. I learned the following about how to use it:
- After installing and when activating, it seems to need All-in-One SEO to be deactivated in order to work.
- One of the tabs for the Yoast SEO plug-in says it imports settings from the All-in-One SEO plugin. I clicked that and it said it did it.
And then I also had to learn that to use it, you must:
- Scroll down on your editing session of your page or post till you see the Yoast SEO plug-in. It has tabs across the top. Go to the general tab.
- In the General tab put in your key word where it says "Focus Keyword".
- Where it says "Meta Description" put in up to 156 characters that you want the Google search to display as a snippet of text that shows up on a search result just after your title, url, and author. It's supposedly like a little teaser to get the viewer interested in clicking on your web site.
- At this point, you might think, like I did, that you could click the "Page Analysis" tab on the Yoast SEO plugin and use it, but you'd be wrong. First you must hit "Update" on an existing post that you're editing, or hit "Save Draft" on a new post that hasn't been published yet. Only then can you use the "Page Analysis" tab.
I'm not sure yet whether the Wordpress SEO by Yoast plug-in is better than the All-In-One SEO plug-in, but it gives you some easy suggestions for things to update for better SEO and search results.
Whether it's because of the Yoast plugin or not, I have one post that shows up on page 2 of a Google keyword search, and another on page 9 search results. Gradually moving up!
I'm finding it hard to get enough time to do the research for writing my posts, then write them, do the training, incorporate the new lessons into my website, get ideas for new posts, etc. etc. etc. Plus go to work, spend time with my wife, and do all the other stuff that make up life. I've got several ideas for new posts to write but haven't found the time to write them yet.
Moving slow, but steady!
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Hi John, I have yoast to, but I really don't know about how and where to see that ranking stuff, can you explain that to me?
Hi Loes, all I know about ranking that I mentioned in my blog post is this: I go to Google and search for the keywords that I built my posts around. Then I look and see where my website shows up. For one keyword, my website showed up on the second page of the google search. On another one, it showed up on page nine. I think there is a lesson coming up about Google analytics and Google webmaster tools, but I haven't gotten that far in the training yet. I also saw someone's website that had a counter for how much traffic had been to his website, which I think was a Wordpress plugin. When I get farther along, I may look for that and install it.
Cheers!
But John, to bring in my exact keyword search, doesnot say anything to me, my visitors has to bring in this exact frase, and when they only use one word of my frase, and I come up on the first site, that would be something to be exited about. Loes