Initial WordPress Website SEO Set Up - Lesson #10 - Amazon Affiliate Marketing Training

Key Takeaways

all right what's up everyone welcome to lesson 10 of the Surfside PPC WordPress Money course today we're going to go over the initial search engine optimization setup for your website so we've kind of gone through installing plugins all sorts of little things to kind of get started on your website but we haven't really done much to optimize for search engines SEO or search engine optimization is the practice of basically you know setting up your website so that search engines can easily read your niche they can easily read your content your content is optimized you know for specific keywords and specific things that people are typing in and basically we're gonna go through everything you need to start setting that up how to start setting up you know Google Analytics Google webmasters and also Bing Webmaster Tools along with the Yoast SEO plug-in so that's kind of we're gonna go through today let's get started with Google Analytics so if you have a Google account on a gmail account what you want to do is sign into it and go to google.com slash analytics you're gonna come to a page that looks like this one somewhat similar at least so if you click sign in here at the top right corner you'll see a bunch of different Google products here so you can kind of get involved in a lot of these different products here but we're going to do analytics for now so the initial page you're gonna see here is basically start analyzing your site's traffic in three steps sign up for Google Analytics add tracking code learn about your audience so we're gonna click sign up here you could either do website or mobile app obviously we're a website you have to name your account and you have to name your website so sometimes you have multiple websites and the same account like for example let's just say you have a smaller blog along with a larger store that are set up as two separate websites which you wouldn't really do but let's just say you did that you can put different websites under the same account so it's kind of easier to manage everything website URL we're gonna do is just add our URL in here out our URL in there industry category whatever website you're setting up from the niche you selected reporting timezone I just like to select the time zone I'm in so I'm an Eastern data sharing so you can click or on you could check or uncheck all of these basically it's what data you share with Google account specialist is helpful if you're gonna reach out for help technical support as well benchmarking in Google Google products basically you're just sharing data on your website with them I always just share because they're just basically they're just a huge dane about data mining service that's trying to improve their product it's not you know trying to find your personal data or anything like that so once you do that all you do is click get tracking ID you're gonna have to accept their terms of agreement okay alright so what you're gonna get is this page here and what you have is a tracking ID so this is your universal tracking ID it's it's the ID for your Google Analytics account you'll also see it if you go in here you'll see it at the bottom right here for your property you a 107 31 you know same thing right here over here is your global site tag so you can there's two different kind of ways to implement Google Analytics there's plugins you can download where you just add your tracking ID right here and it'll keep track of everything with Google Analytics on your website or you can add your global site tag to your website so what we're gonna do is take our global site tag here copy it go back to our website and we're gonna go to appearance and editor so this is kind of a way to edit some of the code of your website some of the backend some of the pages that people can see and it's good to know about the editor section so I like that they give this basically a warning sign here that says editing this code is highly discouraged proceed with caution we're gonna proceed but just to know that if you do mess with a lot of code here CSS code or up here we're gonna go down to our kingdom theme so we can actually add our Google Analytics code there so what we're gonna do is come over to this header dot PHP file so when you switch the kingdom theme up here and go to header dot PHP you're gonna see all the code kind of here and I actually added a global site tag here earlier but I'm gonna redo it so we're gonna do an under the head file here so right under this head tag the first thing you want to do is copy and paste your global site tag so don't you just want to make sure it's underneath this head tag right here and in between whatever is down below here so it's probably look very similar to what we have right now just want to copy and paste this site tag here if you're wondering it says copy and paste this code is the first item into the head of every webpage you want to track so basically every time a website one of your web pages gets loaded it's gonna have this loaded as well which allows it to monitor everything that's happening on your website so we're gonna go down to the bottom and make sure we click update file if you don't click update and you just kind of change pages you'll never actually add it to your website so we're gonna do finally up here you'll see file edited successfully what we're gonna do here finally just click please configure your Google Analytics settings so let's see that all right so with monster insights what they're gonna do is give you a little bit more in your back-end about Google Analytics you don't have to constantly log into Google Analytics so we're into is authenticate with your Google account when you click that button you're gonna get a couple little screens that come up as long as you're logged in with the same browser you should be fine so click to get Google code so now you're gonna take this code here copy it close out of here and paste so now all you have to do is select the analytics profile we just created so it should match 107 31 okay done you're all set while we wait for this to load so monster insights so now it's gonna have what profile were under you can disable the dashboard if you want automatic updates so yes you can update you know things as they come minor only I like to just do yes you know automatic updates just update automatically allow usage tracking I'm not going to right now I just don't even worry about it so just click Save Changes so you're not gonna need too much with monster insights yet but what it does is it allows you to kind of look at your Google Analytics date a lot easier for your website all right so if you just installed it may take 24 hours to populate but just know like you can kind of come in here in the monster insights thing on the left you click dashboard you can update your settings as you wish you can build custom reports there's two tools here and then they have some add-ons as well it's just a way to kind of look at your data optimize your data and find you know different things that are happening on your website so now we have Google Analytics web our Google Analytics all set up so basically what you want to do here is you can come back out go into your website if you're not familiar with Google Analytics at all it's it's one of those things that you kind of just have to play around in and start learning as you go what it does is there's different tabs over here so real time this is what's happening on your website audience this has data about everyone that's been to your website so overview active users you know demographics interests geographic behavior are they on mobile what type of technology are they using or what kind of website browser they use in acquisition is how did the person get to your website so you know overview all traffic where they come from AdWords are you paying for Google AdWords traffic Google search console which is also Google Webmaster Tools we're going to set that up in the next step social and then campaigns is any campaigns you're running will go through that as we go behavior so you can kind of see different you know what pages are people visiting the most house is your website going what are people typing in when they search on your website you can create custom events like someone visits three of the same web pages or three different web pages at the same time something like that conversions so you eventually want to get to the point where you're setting up conversions you have goals if you have ecommerce you can set up your ecommerce data right in there so a lot of different things here with Google Analytics it's all completely free it's one of those things you kind of have to learn as you go but it's good to note and good to have so we have it all installed on our website so next we're gonna you know you just you have a Google account here the next thing we're going to go to is google.com slash webmasters so webmasters is also called search console you'll see search console down here Google webmasters so we're gonna do is click sign in okay so we're gonna sign in here and now it's going to give you a welcome to search console and we're going to do the same thing we just kind of did so HTTP WWF armed house goals com all right so there's different ways to verify ownership of formal schools comm if you just installed Google Analytics you should be able to use that as an alternate method so let's just do Google Analytics account verify all right so congratulations you've successfully successfully verified your ownership so we're gonna click continue here all right so now we have this set up the next the other thing you want to do is you want to add another property here so we're gonna go to search console they're gonna usually send you a message right away that says improve the search presence it's gonna say add all your website versions select your preferred version select target country we're gonna add all website versions first all right so so the only difference here is instead of adding WWE to do farm house goals com so the reason why you want to add both is sometimes people will come on your website it actually monitors that data differently so here we're gonna go into alternate methods again click Google Analytics verify okay so both of our websites are gonna give us a message usually so let's say I take a minute for that one looks like they're just gonna send it for the one so let's just say in the WWF our mouse goals alright so here improve the search presence so that's going to be in our messages alright so we added all website versions that's good set your preferred version so you can kind of tell Google is your preferred domain display URLs as www or just display URLs as for Mouse goals I like to just display as far Mouse goals comm and save so now what that means is that a lot of your data will start to come in to this up here is farmhouse goals comm rather than the WWN because we just set that as our preferred version it doesn't really matter which one you prefer it's just up to you so we'll come back into this message here so select target country so our language says Google has not yet processed the property that's fine so our target country we're gonna do target users and the United States safe doesn't mean your website won't show outside of the United States but if your website's kind of geared towards just people in the United States that's what you want so share access with coworkers so if you have other people that you work with you can actually add their email and they can have different levels of permission and you can just add them to your website so they can monitor and manage everything submit a sitemap file we're going to do that in a second but down here at 6 learn how to work with search console so if you want a little bit of a kind of tutorial for how to use search console I'll go through it a little bit but um you know here's a good tutorial here alright let's go back to our dashboard real quick okay so what we can do down here real quick is if you see acquisitions search console just want to go in here and we can click setup search console data sharing so since we just set up this search console what we want to do is click setup data sharing and it'll kind of let you you know set up however you want for then we go to the bottom here so here we go search console adjust search console and we're gonna click Edit where it says none and we're gonna let this one so the one without the www click Save so let's see if that updates now so if you see over here there's a lot of different things with your property you can link thing so AdWords Adsense if you go to all products so search console now it says actively linked receiving data that's good so you can link your adsense account AdWords ad exchange bigquery there's all these different things you can also link but search console is one of those ones you want to link right away because now we can go into not audience acquisition and go into search console and go into landing pages and there should be even though there's no data yet alright good so that's this once you get this page it means you're you're starting to kind of talk to each other so now we have our search console set up let's go back in here and just make sure I have everything set up so you're gonna have over here it's good to know all messages for it's always good to go through those so it's gonna say improve the search presence so now I got basically my email for this one without the www so you can set preferred version again I think I already have that set up okay good let Google optimize for my site that's good I want to make sure my target country is set up for this URL as well so language will basically come out as English and any other you know you can use href language tags as well alright so now we're targeting in the United States if you want to share access you can submit a sitemap I'm gonna do that in a second how we're gonna leave this open actually so it's just close out of this closing out of US on my stuff here so sometimes with all these messages that you're gonna get so you're gonna see we have four here now sometimes what I do do is just they're gonna give you one with target country change to now associated with Google Analytics sometimes I'll just click on all of them just to kind of get rid of the message so do that um the big thing with messages that's good is sometimes it'll tell you like if you're receiving a lot of 404 errors sometimes it'll tell you if your website's been hacked so you want to like kind of periodically check on messages I usually check into search console almost every other day it's something I like to look at a lot for keywords I'm I'm targeting so always good good data in there so now we have our Google Analytics set up we have Google Webmaster setup so our next thing is gonna be Bing Webmaster Tools so when you open up Bing you can add your website to it so kind of just make a Microsoft account pretty simple and then you just come in up here Bing calm slash webmaster what we're gonna do is add our site URL so I'm gonna do I'll do it the same way we did last time actually let's just do this click Add ok so again you can add a sitemap here so I'm gonna pause actually here and go over the sitemap so I can just add it right now and then add it into search console so what we're gonna do and now is go back to Yoast SEO so you can pause your little as you're setting up Bing webmasters tools here we're gonna go into Yoast SEO you should have a little notification here first let's go into Yoast SEO and click on search console I want to make sure I have it set up through my website okay so basically now you just need to give Yoast SEO access to your search console so we're gonna click again get Google authorization code sign in so Yoast wants a view and manage search console data we're gonna allow so basically you just need this code here we're gonna enter it down here at the bottom and authenticate so we're gonna do the profile without the WW and click Save profile okay so now you'll see in the settings here we're connected to our profile and Google webmasters so now we're good with the search console link here let's go to dashboard all right so basically you should come here and if there's any problems or notifications they'll have them here we're gonna go into general so the first thing you want to do is open the configuration wizard it's gonna let you do yo step by step okay so we're gonna configure Yoast SEO so my site is live and ready to be indexed we want to select option a so we're gonna say it represents an online shop it's also like a blog but you know we're just gonna do an online shop because that's really what kind of a little bit more of what we are so we're gonna be a company because it's farmhouse goals I don't have my company logo yet so we don't have to worry about that now we can always go back in and do that if you have your logo already just upload it here I don't have my social profiles set up yet I'm gonna do that in the next step so we don't have any social profiles yet we're gonna click Next if you have any you just copy and paste the URLs in there all right so this is post type visibility so post should be visible pages should be visible I like doing media as visible and products should be visible let's go back let's just keep media hidden and that should be fine yeah let's keep media hidden actually so if your site has multiple authors you can click yes here mine will not so I'm just gonna do now so we're already set up with Google search console here so I could just click Next if you didn't do it in the last step you could do it now you don't have to re-authenticate so for title separator you can select how the titles are separated on your website so a good example is you know some websites will do farmhouse goals you know best farmhouse decor something like that otherwise if you don't want that as your separator you can choose any bids other ones for example this one so just a matter of preference I use the - I just use the one that they give you automatically here so stay up to date I'm just gonna click Next here so you can upgrade to premium if you want with Yoast but we're not going to do that and we're just gonna click Next again alright so now we're all done let's put click close all right so what we're gonna do next is after you go through the configuration wizard is you're gonna be here at the Yoast SEO dashboard if you go to features here you see this advanced settings pages enable disabled I like to enable them so it's Save Changes once you enable them you're gonna get more access to the things in Yost's you'll see before just said dashboard search console and premium now you have titles and metas social XML sitemaps advanced and tools it's all free this isn't like a premium version or anything Yoast is the one premium version I kind of recommend so it's it's one of the things to look at Yoast has a lot of premium tools even some for WooCommerce I recommend looking at them they have some pretty cool ones in there so here's the title separator you'll see you can optimize some different pages so homepage and front page so it's gonna say you can determine the title and description for the front page by editing it the front page itself so just clicking on that just so you can kind of see how this goes so it's gonna say homepage up here if you scroll down a little bit you'll see Yoast SEO this is kind of what it looks like from your homepage right now so instead of doing homepage farmhouse goals you know I could do farmhouse goals best farmhouse decor furniture and more so something like that so that's kind of how to look it's gonna be your homepage so slug you don't have to worry about it just give me a - some meta description all optimize this eventually about just a quick kind of example so you could do discover the best farmhouse home decor for your living room bathroom all right so something simple I'm up here you can keep this just to say home that's fine you could also do like welcome to farmhouse coals it's up to you so texts I'm just gonna do homepage text goes here I don't know welcome to all update all this but just a quick start so update so I'm gonna open this page real quick and then go back into Yoast titles and metas all right so you'll see I did home homepage text goes here welcome to farmhouse decor so you can see I'm putting my mouse over the top right now it's as far Mouse goals best farmhouse decor furniture and more that's her title tag so over here where you see home page so just by editing the front page our editor did all this and made it a little bit a little bit more SEO optimized for now but I'll I'll keep updating that that's one of those things where you want to go back to your top 18 keywords and focus on those that's really where I use them as in the home page and basically letting people go to different sections of my website a lot easier so let's continue on this with titles and metas you could see post types you can adjust how your title template is so the separator we chose this represents a - your site name is whatever your website name was set up and pretty you know the previous step when we did the - went through the configuration wizard so mine would be farmhouse goals a - here the title template so it's whatever the title your post is page could be page number pages same thing whatever the title is separator so you can leave this all as is but it's just good to know you can adjust these as you wish so sometimes at the products I think I end up just doing title but I'll go back through some of those things as I do them Save Changes alright so this is something you can kind of go through and adjust but what I want to do is come down here and go to XML sitemaps one of my favorite parts of Yoast is that they create sitemaps for you so it's enabled here you have max entries per sitemap so you can adjust that up or down depending on how big your sitemap is so you can include what you want in sitemap I include my media a sitemap is a good way good thing for Google to to give them because it shows them everything new that's on your website and they can quickly and easily index things in their search engine so let's go to general here so you click here find your XML sitemap here so we'll click it's gonna open up a page so this is your sitemap URL up here index dot PHP sitemap index dot XML you upload them differently to search console so let's go to we're in Google search console now we're gonna click submit a sitemap if you can't find it there the other way you can do it is go into your search console so I'm going to do the one without the www here you click sitemaps and just click on that link I think they bring you to the same page it looks like yep both bring you to the same page you can't really see him switch but under crawl here you'll see sitemaps so we're gonna do add test sitemap so for Google what you're gonna do is take the URL starting after the last - so the index dot PHP see that looks good so what I'd like to do is copy that click test alright so all you want to see here is no errors found so that's good close test now we're gonna do it again and click Submit you don't have to test it you're it's fine if you don't it'll work no matter what with use but now we have our sitemap here so for farmhouse kohls.com in the google search console we have our sitemap and of course we're gonna go back to our Bing Webmaster Tools where we kind of paused earlier and click add a sitemap for this one we're gonna add the complete URL okay now when do you receive the most traffic to your website we're just gonna do all day so enter all your personal information here i dissenter my own way i dissent our farmhouse kohls.com even though i have my own website let's see home and garden home home home alright I'm not really sure where maybe I'm just not seeing it then we'll just do retail so you don't you only have to fill out the ones with the Stars up here United States so you can get communication from them how would you like to receive messages so you could do weekly alert preference if you want so that's fine so if you have any issues they'll email you click Save okay so once you're done with that it's gonna say verify ownership for farm house goals comm so same thing we did with Google Analytics we're gonna take this meta tag copy it go to appearance editor so I want to go into the Kingdom theme select so again we're back in the header.php file you'll see up top you see our global site tag from earlier we're gonna place this one right below our global site tag so that's let's Google or let's Bing verify our web site through Bing Webmaster Tools let's click update see there's different ways to do this as well you can download this XML file and upload it to your web server alright so our file is edited successfully so if we go down here and click verify hopefully they're able to all right they're giving me an error let's say sometimes it takes a second for your web site to update you know reload it reload everything a little bit eventually this will verify sometimes I've had issues in the past where it takes a second so we're gonna go back this should be all good to go now with Bing Webmaster Tools if you keep having issues the other thing you can do is go into your Yoast SEO and I believe yeah here with Webmaster Tools and you can just add your different IDs here for Bing Webmaster Tools and google webmaster tools just to make sure it's all verified but we should have everything good to go now so I'll make sure my Bing is is all good and our Google Analytics should be set up in our Google Webmaster should be all good to go as well along with our Yoast SEO setup so this is a good beginning point for a website we did our front page and we made sure that we optimize that for with our keywords you want to refer to your top 20 keywords for that but we're gonna go through SEO a lot throughout the videos so I appreciate you guys joining me today and stay tuned for the next video