A word about SEO
SEO or "Search Engine Optimization" is your ticket to being found—both intentionally and organically—on Google. There's an entire industry based around optimizing websites to "rank" (or appear high in the listings) on Google and other search engines. This article won't deal with that, since there are a million blog posts about that topic. Instead, this article is about adjusting your specific pages' SEO settings.
Here's the basic idea: By including certain information within your website's content and code, Google will—over time—begin to recognize that your website contains helpful, informative, or authoritative information for your audience. Effectively managing your page SEO will push your site higher up in the search results. Good SEO involves knowing your audience (i.e. the words they use to search for you), knowing your offer, and knowing just a bit about how Google ranks websites.
Why learn SEO? Not only will you walk away with a better understanding of how your customers find and engage with you online, but if you're looking to hire an SEO professional to fine-tune your site, you're likely looking at a starting bid of $500/mo. for a small website. That's typically money well-spent with a qualified professional, as SEO services can drastically increase traffic and online business, but many small businesses and organizations simply don't have it in the budget to hire someone at this level. Thankfully, unlike plumbing, mechanical, or electrical work you have little opportunity to "damage" your site or reputation by learning a few, basic DIY skills in this area. (That is, unless you've already had your site professionally set-up and you're tinkering with someone else's work!)
While Outstand Brand does not offer full SEO services and does not guarantee any ranking increase on Google, we're happy to perform SEO-related edits as part of your monthly support allotment as-requested. (For hosting-only customers, or customers who want to try their hand at customizing their site, this guide may be a good jumping-off point!)
All that said, let's actually get in to how to edit a page!
Editing page SEO using RankMath
RankMath is an excellent free WordPress plugin that allows you to quickly modify your site's SEO settings so you can more efficiently rank on Google. RankMath has sitewide settings, and also page-specific settings, which this article will deal with.
To edit a page's SEO, login to your site, click on Pages in the left-hand menu of the Dashboard. On the Pages screen, click Edit Page under the specific page whose SEO you want to edit.
On the Page edit screen, scroll down to the Rank Math SEO box. In this box you'll see a few different tabs. Here's what settings each of these contains:
General Tab
The General tab contains a button to edit the snippet of your site's SEO (the most important part) and an analysis of your page's keywords.
If you click the Edit Snippet button you'll be able to change the page's Title, Permalink, and Description. By default, this pulls from your page title, your page slug (URL path), and excerpt fields, which are in WordPress page's settings. If you'd like something different info than your page settings to display on Google, you can set that here. In this pop-up window there's also a Social tab that lets you edit the details that display on the card when your page is shared on Facebook and Twitter. (This is really the part most people want to edit!)
Moving down to the content analysis part: Before you set up a page keyword, you'll likely some red "errors." These aren't errors with your site. They are errors analyzing the keyword on the page. The idea with this section is to select a single keyword to be used throughout the page or post. Your keyword is the term most likely to be searched/found on Google, and so setting a good keyword involves knowing what people are actually looking for when they land on that page. RankMath provides a helpful guide for setting, analyzing, and modifying your page keywords. (Note: You don't need this tool or the guide to rank on Google, although it can be a good start toward understanding SEO. If your page doesn't use a keyword that people are actually looking for, it doesn't matter how well you "score" on this since part the entire point of SEO is understanding what words people have used to reach that specific page or part of your site.)
Advanced Tab
The Advanced tab is exactly that: Advanced. Most people won't need to touch these at all, but there are some helpful settings here, if you'd like a page intentionally not to be listed on Google, or a page's images to not be listed in Google image search, along with some other handy tools. You can hover over the "?" to see what each option does and consider if it's something you need.
Schema Tab
Changing a page or post's schema changes the way that Google displays that page in search results. Things like events, or products, or job listings may have "bonus content" listed in their Google search results that prompt someone to click on it. An event may have a start date or ticket price, whereas a salary may salary range or job title. It's helpful to understand what kind of content your site includes and if there's any advantage to setting up schema for a particular type of content. (Usually there's not much difference, but if you're in one of the industries this affects, it's really handy to know about schema!)
Social Tab
This gives you access to change how your page/post displays on Facebook and Twitter. We were able to get to these settings earlier in this article by clicking "Edit Snippet" in the general tab, but this is another way to quickly access it. You can change the image, card layout, and title and description, among a few other options for social media.
Editing page SEO using SlimSEO
How to edit your page titles and meta descriptions
To edit your page titles and meta descriptions, go to the "All Posts" or "All Pages" section of the WordPress dashboard. Click on the page or post you want to edit, and scroll down to the "SlimSEO" section. Here, you can edit the page title, meta description, and add focus keywords. Make sure to keep your page titles and meta descriptions short, relevant, and include your focus keywords.
Use the focus keyword analysis feature
SlimSEO includes a focus keyword analysis feature that can help you optimize your content for your chosen keywords. After entering your focus keyword, SlimSEO will analyze your content and provide suggestions for optimizing it.