Getting Your SEO Right

You have finished writing your article or blog post. And now you want to be sure whether you have got the SEO right. How do you check the essentials for correctness? Why do you have to Search Engine Optimize in the first place?

Why Search Engine Optimize?

It's simple. People search for stuff online all the time by typing in relevant words into the search field of Google, Bing, Yahoo and other Search engines. This means that anyone searching for stuff related to what you have written about, should reach your website. So basically, you want your article to be ranked high by Google. In other words, your article should appear in SERPs.

What Are SERPs?

Search engine results pages are web pages served to users when they search for something online using a search engine, such as Google. The user enters their search query (often using specific terms and phrases known as keywords), upon which the search engine presents them with a SERP.

Very Very Basic SEO

This brings us to the question, how do we get SEO right? Well, here we will discuss only the most basic and essential points that you must check before you publish your article/blog/post.

If you have the time, please go through this article, especially if you use the Rank Math plugin for your SEO. It's a life-changer:

https://rankmath.com/kb/score-100-in-tests/


In the next paragraph, we look at Focus Keywords.



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CforChange Premium
What is a meta description and how do I add/change it?
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ChrystopherJ Premium Plus
If you have followed Kyle's training and using the All in One SEO plugin (AIO SEO), then you will have this setup to Automatic. It will take the first 160 Characters from the Excerpt field, if populated, otherwise, it will take the first 160 Characters from your Content. Don't worry if you see No Value on the Page/Post section, as this just means no manual entry.
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Parameter Premium
,

Hello Cfor,

See below Kyle's training Chrystopher spoke about in case you missed it . I also spoke about it in the piece of training below. I hope you will find them explanatory enough.

Ay
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nathaniell Premium
@Chrystopher is correct. This is generated automatically using AIO SEO. However, making custom meta descriptions can do a lot for your click through rate in search engine results as well. Jay explains it here:
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Teboho9 Premium
Hi Aparna,

Thanks for all of this tutorial.

I need to understand on the issue of Date in a URL. On WordPress, you can choose whether the month and year of publication of your article appears. I chose to have that on my initial / main website. But for my new / "extracurricular" website, I left that option out (so far). So the format of the URLs for the two websites looks thus:

https://mainwebsite.com/2020/11/hi-aparna/

https://newwebsite.com/hi-aparna/

By "Avoid using a date or year", do you mean that the URLs / permalinks of my main website are not good for SEO?

Regards
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Aparna155 Premium
Hi,

The reason why it is suggested that the year of publishing be avoided in the Permalink or URL is that when the year changes you may want to change the permalink, and that is not advisable. It's a Permanent Link for the reason that it should not change. That's how search engines expect it to be.

Suppose I write a review of Wealthy Affiliate in 2020 and name it "The best Wealthy Affiliate review, 2020". The permalink, which gets generated automatically, will be https:// mydomain/the-best-wealthy-affiliate-review-2020.

Now in 2021, this review will seem old, or not current, and therefore I may like to change the Title to "The best Wealthy Affiliate Review, 2021". But if I make a change to the Permalink as well, the article may get deindexed or may lose ratings, as Google treats it as a new article. It further gets complicated as Google now believes that the earlier article was the canonical. And there is a risk of your same article being branded an exact "Duplicate copy".

Therefore in any article which I write, I should always remove the year from the Permalink, even though I may let it remain in the Title, for reasons that I want my article to stay current in the current year (which in fact it might be).

I hope I have been able to answer your question?

Regards,
Aparna
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Teboho9 Premium
hallo,

I understand your explanation; thanks!
But I guess the example of my website that I have given, is different in that the year and month are automatically inserted into every URL by WordPress, because of the Setting I have selected. So they appear even if I have not written the year in the title. (Another Setting we can choose, is to have Year, Month and Date inserted.)
I am just wondering if that URL format is not favoured by the search engines.

Hoping I am clear,
Teboho ☺️
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Aparna155 Premium
Settings in WordPress can be changed Teboho.

The point is that for a particular niche or subject, I may want my articles (and permalinks) to be relevant to the present year.
In other niches, that may not be the case.

So you have to decide whether your niche (and article titles and permalinks) are benefitted by a date or not.

Regards,
Aps
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Teboho9 Premium
thanks and kindest regards to you too!
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Parameter Premium
Thank you for this Aparna, I really love your emphasis on permalink, especially on the fact that it is not meant to change during the life time of the article.

I have made this mistake in time past, before knowing that I was doing myself more harm than good

Good job

Ayodeji
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Teboho9 Premium
hi to you and Aparna,

In early days, I have also changed titles and therefore permalinks of a few articles. But I did that within 2-3 days, when the articles didn't rank. Unfortunately a few of them have ended up not being indexed and are labelled as "Duplicate Content" in GSC.
Should I change the titles and permalinks back to the original?
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Aparna155 Premium
Thank u Ayodeji. Coming from you, this means a lot.
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Aparna155 Premium
Titles don't matter as much, I believe. But permalinks should remain the same. No harm in changing them back and seeing what happens. It would be education for all.
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Jyen77 Premium
Thank you for the trainning Aparna.
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Aparna155 Premium
Thanx Jyen
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Mruxton Premium Plus
Aparna ,another Great Training.

Cheers
Murray
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Aparna155 Premium
Thank u Murray
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LeonEdwards2 Premium
Thank you for this training Aparna.
I visualised this as a pdf/ebook.
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Aparna155 Premium
Thanx Leon :)
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