Yusuf Chowdhury joins Kori on WordPress Wednesday to walk you through the basics of how to install Yoast into your WordPress Website.
Full Video Transcript
Hi, everyone. Welcome to another WordPress Wednesday. My name’s Kori Ashton here at WebTegrity.
I’m excited today to have a guest with us. Yusuf Chowdhury. If y’all are in San Antonio y’all know him. He is our fearless leader for our WordPress Meetup group here in town. He’s the lead organizer for that.
If y’all don’t know him, you need to connect with us. We’ll put the link in the description box below because he’s always running awesome free classes around the San Antonio area out at UTSA. Where else? I mean, you’re everywhere. Yusuf’s YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCHsIhrmGlaXPgdcecpmxx8A
-UTSA. Geekdom. On the street. [laughter]
-Exactly.
-(inaudible)
-He’s awesome. Plus, he also has an incredible YouTube channel as well. We’ll put that link in the description box below.
Before we get started (he is going to walk you through the Yoast plug-in today). Before we get started though we do want to mention our awesome sponsors.
We’ve got WPengine, WPelevation, and WP101. All three of these companies are phenomenal for the WordPress community. If you’re using WordPress for your business (that’s the platform that you have your website on), or, if you’re a freelancer, working for a company that uses WordPress, and that’s how you make your living, you need to connect with all three of these incredible resources.
WPengine offers hosting. WPelevation has great tracks for the freelancer learning how to improve their business model. And WP101 does incredible WordPress tutorials just like we do, but they take it to the next level. We love all three of these companies. We’re proud to say they’re sponsors of our classes here at WebTegrity. So, without further ado. Here he goes. He’s going to walk you through using the Yoast plugin. I’m going to get off screen and he’s going to take it over. You ready?
-Yes
-You got this?
-Yes. I feel different. I feel like Kori 3.0 version. [laughter]
-Bye, y’all.
-Thanks, Kori. All right, folks. Now, you’re under my control. I ask you to fall asleep right now. Go. Fall asleep. [giggling]
Now, before I start talking about Yoast what we’re going to do is we’re going to have four episodes. This is going to be Yoast 101. Then we’re going to have 102 in the next video. 103. And 104 because I want you to understand the basics first.
The first question that comes to your mind possibly is What is SEO? Somebody right there is saying maybe it means sunning enormous octopus. Well, it’s not. It’s not about sunning enormous octopus. SEO stands for search engine optimization. But, still, what the heck does it mean?
Let me put it this way: every website—this is, like, a must in my book—every website should have some type of onsite SEO optimization done because this is what your customers— your target market—search for when they go to Google or Bing or Yahoo. It’s amazing that I see a lot of websites don’t even implement these strategies.
When you try to run an SEO campaign, there’s onsite SEO and offsite. Of course, offsite SEO would be a completely different topic because this is where tons of work is done to push traffic to offsite. But the onsite SEO— this is something that Google highly recommends that every website should have because eventually when your website gets indexed properly, then the Google spider— the software—will understand what every particular page stands for and what kind of key phrases and content can be indexed for folks that are searching for your website. That’s the first thing. That’s what the onsite SEO is.
Secondly, before you optimize every single page, you have to understand that when you try to optimize your pages, you have to do some sort of technique called keyword research. To do that, you can go to Google Ads or Google Adwords. Sometimes you call it Google Keyword Planner. It’s free. If you have a Gmail account, you definitely have access to this.
I won’t be able to show you today how to run the keyword research (we’ll do that in the second video) but you definitely need this to run some sort of research marketing on the key phrases and the keywords that your target market look for. That’s the second thing.
Three, you have to install this awesome plug-in called Yoast. I love this plug-in because if you don’t know how to code or you have no knowledge about the HTML script or anything like that it would be very difficult for you to optimize every single page because you have to pass those texts and key phrases to the developer and have them do it for you manually on every page. But this plug-in actually saves you time and helps you.
It’s like … look at it like a personal SU assistance. I highly recommend that you install that. To do this, let’s go to your … this is a website created by Kori so we can break it and fix it. Once you log in to your WordPress dashboard, go to Plugins. Under the search right here, do a search for SEO yoast.
It’s not coming up. A ha! Why? [ he forgot to first press Add New ] Okay. Try again. Let’s see what happened here. Add New. There you go. Look at that. One million active installs. That’s a lot. I’m going to go ahead and click on install now. There you go. Successfully installed.
After you do that, make sure it has the latest update and go ahead and click Activate Plugin. It should show up right here. There you go. When you move your mouse to the SEO plugin, you’ll see that there are several options. We will cover that in video number three or four (I’ll have to double check that).
Once you add the SEO plugin right now, that does not mean your website is optimized. That’s another mistake that I see people do. They install yoast plugin and they keep asking me, -Hey, Yusuf. Nothing’s happening. What’s going on? -Well, you still have to do some work. What happened right now, if you go to Posts or Pages, you’ll notice right now there’s this SEO option here—it’s all grayed out—because you haven’t optimized it. If you do, it will change in color. Anywhere from red, orange, yellow, or green. Green is the best. Yellow means kind of okay. Orange in the middle. And red means very bad.
You will see the same thing if you click on pages. See that? We have one green right here. So, that’s it! This is how you install the yoast plugin. What we’re going to do in our next video, we’ll show you how to do a quick keyword research, then go to every blog post or pages and how to optimize it. Those are going to be on our featured videos.
Other than that, please, if you have any questions, do ask in this MeetUp. Or just come and view the video. Okay. Thank you. We’ll see you next time. [chuckling]
[Yusuf Chowdhury for WebTegrity WordPress Wednesday]
