Before you publish a blog post or page there are some SEO settings that you should set up before clicking that publish button. By customizing the settings we’ll go over in this help article your pages will have a better chance in search results.
Pages and posts are the most important for configuring SEO settings but these steps also apply to categories and tags. Not all settings below are available for categories and tags, either. You will only find the SEO settings but no video sitemap on category and tag edit screens.
- Accessing Advanced SEO Panels
- SEO Settings
- Content Analysis
- Structured Data Types
- Turning On/Off SEO Panels
- Video Walkthrough of Configured Page, Post, Category, and Tag SEO Settings
Accessing Advanced SEO Panels
When you’re editing a post or page then you will have access to the three advanced SEO panels we’ll go over in this help article. Keep in mind that they aren’t available when you’re in the Site Builder. You have to save either a draft or publish your changes in Site Builder before going to the Edit Page link in the admin bar across the top of the screen.
Accessing Advanced SEO Panels from a page, post, category, or tag.
There’s an admin link on the top bar of your website when you’re logged in. If you’re on a page, post, category, or tag then there’s an option to edit the item you’re on. When you click on the link then you will see the SEO panel where you can edit all the SEO settings.
Accessing Advanced SEO Panels from the WPHubSite admin dashboard.
If you’re in the admin dashboard (already logged into your website) then you can browse to all posts or pages and edit from there. This also works for the categories and tags listed under the Posts menu item.
Step 1: Hover over or click on the Pages section in the WPHubSite admin dashboard. You can also hover over or click on the Posts section to access blog posts.
Step 2: Click on the All Pages link. It will be All Posts if you’re going to edit a blog post or for categories or tags choose the link you’d like.
Step 3: When you hover the cursor over any page or post and an Edit link will show up, click it.
Step 4: No matter if your page or post is edited with Site Builder or the Standard Editor the advanced SEO settings will show up at the bottom of the main window. Scroll down until you see SEO. That’s where you need to be for the next section.
If you don’t see SEO, Content Analysis, or Structured Data types then you likely need to turn them on.
SEO Settings
There are several tabs where you can configure information for this specific page’s SEO settings. The Titles settings tab is where the most important and commonly edited information is located
In most cases you aren’t likely to need to switch from the default tab. Therefore, the other tabs will be covered but to the depth of the first tab.
Titles settings (Title & Meta Description)
It’s likely that you’ll never need to go into any of the other tabs. The titles settings tab has everything you must configure for proper on-page SEO. Even some of these settings are automated so you won’t need to mess with them.
Step 1: For pages, you’ll likely want to update the title to something more substantial and descriptive for the sake of those who find your site on a search engine and have no idea what it’s about. You can type something descriptive in, place a variable seperator (step 2) and the variable site title.
For posts, you don’t even need to touch this setting. Your post title will be used in this spot with the defaults you set in the general sitewide SEO settings.
Step 2: If you do want to manually set a page title then use the variables for everything but the title. So, your title might look something like this: Descriptive Page Title %%sep%% %%sitetitle%%.
Step 3: Pay close attention to the characters for your title. A title should be no longer than 60 characters including spaces.
Step 4: In almost every circumstance you’ll want to write a custom meta description for every post and page. Automating the meta description won’t create anything good for your website’s SEO. The only exception might be if you write a good (and proper length) post excerpt for every page and post. In that case yo could use that also for the meta description. You can learn more about where to write a post excerpt in this help article (step 10).
Step 5: If you do create a good post excerpt for every post and page then you can either use this button or to be more efficient, update the single post types setting in the general sitewide SEO setting.
Step 6: As with titles, your meta description should be contained within 160 characters including spaces. This one is a bit more lenient because Google often will choose its own description anyway. Stay as close as you can to 160.
Item 7: You can see about how this page will look on Google with this preview. It’s an estimate because Google is unpredictable and can choose whatever it wants to show as the description. Sometimes Google will pull in text from the page that better fits the search term.
Important: SEO settings are not saved as you make them. Any changes you make for any setting and your post and pages themselves must be published in order to save them and make them live.
That’s it for the most important SEO settings for your pages, posts, categories and tags! Everything else is optional and likely doesn’t need to be updated. Many settings will be pulled from elsewhere in your page settings to provide useful data that doesn’t make you work as hard.
If you want just the basics for on-page SEO then this is the only tab you need here. You can skip to the Content Analysis section.
Advanced
for a bit more advanced control of a specific page or post, this tab will give you that power. If this is a normal, original, page or post that you want indexed to the best of Google’s ability then don’t mess with any of these settings except perhaps the custom breadcrumbs if you’re using the SEO plugins breadcrumbs in your design.
Step 1: Click on the Advanced tab.
Step 2: Many of these settings will disable the indexing of this entire page or perhaps just disable advanced features that Google might use to display this page in search results. If you’re creating a page that has a lead page download on it then you’ll likely want to use these settings. In that case, you’d select everything.
Each item describes what it does, the first option being one of the most important. If you select noindex then Google and other search engines won’t display this page in search results.
Note: If you select to noindex a page, it will also not show up in your XML or HTML sitemaps.
Step 3: The only time you’d use this option is if the page or post is not original and belongs to someone else. If the content is copied from another page then the canonical should be set to the URL where the content originally came from. You won’t get penalized if you do this, otherwise you may be vulnerable to getting a search penalization which is not good.
Step 4: This advanced setting is only useful if you’re using the breadcrumbs from the SEO plugin. That is an advanced topic for use in Site Builder Themer only but if you’re page title is long then this setting is helpful to shorten up the breadcrumbs name. We often don’t even use this setting so you can likely safely ignore it.
Social
The default settings from your pages and posts are likely fine for social sharing as long as your title and meta description looks good. Also, it’s important that you upload a custom featured image for each blog post which will also be used as the image for social and cropped for the right size.
If all those things are in place then these settings are unnecessary to change. For pages, a featured image likely isn’t important (unless you prefer to create one). Keep in mind that you also set up a sitewide default for Facebook Open Graph and Twitter Cards. Those also apply to pages so no need to overwork yourself creating unique images for every page too.
In case you would like to customize the share information for Facebook and Twitter these settings are what you need.
Step 1: Click on the Social tab in the SEO panel.
Step 2: Type in a custom Facebook post title and description to overwrite using the page title and meta description. You can upload a custom image also if you’d like to overwrite the featured image being used.
Step 3: Type in a custom Twitter post title and description that will overwrite the page title and meta description. You can also upload a custom Twitter image that will overwrite whatever is set as the featured image.
Redirection
If you’d like to set up a temporary redirection from a page or post then you can set them in the SEO settings on the page or post in addition to the general sitewide redirections. There’s no difference in where you do it, though.
To enable a redirection, select the box to enable it, put in the URL you’d like the page to redirect to, then be sure to publish.
That’s it!
Video Sitemap
If you embedded a video into a post or page then you can set up the video for your website video sitemap also. You must enable your website’s video sitemap before anything can show up in it, though. There are instructions on how to set up and enable site maps in the general sitewide SEO setting help article.
Step 1: Click on the Video Sitemap tab.
Step 2: Click this bar to expand the video section so you can update all the settings. Each piece of information is described and you don’t need to fill everything out. It’s not likely you’ll want to put anything in the video rating or video count boxes.
Step 3: This will add another section for another video. You don’t have to use this, it’s only available if you have more than one video on your post or page. Under no circumstance should you overuse the ability to add more videos. Search engines will know and could penalize you for it.
That’s all you have to do to set up videos in your video sitemap. Be sure you publish your post to save all SEO settings after you make changes.
Content Analysis
There’s nothing to change in the content analysis section but it is somewhat helpful when you’re creating your content. It will give you helpful tips on whether you could use more keywords in your document, headings, or make other changes to help your documents search engines optimization.
There are several groups of information you should refer to as you’re trying to perfect the SEO on your WPHubSite WordPress website pages and posts. It all starts with accessing the content analysis panel and setting up what to analyze.
Step 1: Scroll down your page or post just a bit past the SEO panel. There you will find the content analysis panel which you may have to click on to expand. If you don’t see it at all, check if it’s turned on.
Step 2: Type in the keyword you’d like to analyze your document for. This isn’t a setting that will affect your actual page but it does guide the entire content analysis process. You will get the best results if you use a long-tail keyword (read that article, it will help you a ton with your SEO) that describes what your page or post is about. Two or more words is ideal but you may have the best luck with three words.
Tip: If you can’t find a really good (and useful keyword) then completely skip the analysis. It’s not necessary and should only be used if it can help your readers. In fact, not all tabs of the analysis require a keyword to be set. You can go through the configuration, images, and links tabs without a keyword and they’ll still be helpful.
Step 3: If you’re having a hard time with thinking of a good target keyword then this option may be for you. It will scour Google for good suggestions. You can type a one or two word keyword in here and several options will come up as buttons. You can click on any button that you like and it will auto populate in the target keyword box. Pretty slick!
Step 4: Click the Refresh analysis button once you have all your target keywords inserted. Once you click this button it will refresh all the information provided to you in the sections below.
Each tab below has valuable information provided to you. It’s a good idea to go through each one and see if there’s anything you can easily fix. The recommendations are just that, recommendations. Don’t get caught up in making everything perfect because it will never happen and then your content will suffer. Look out for things you can update without affecting your content too much.
Optimizations
Step 1: Click on the Optimizations tab.
Item 2: Each page should have at least 300 words. This is a general rule of thumb, though, and not all posts or pages will follow this rule. For instance, you may have a post with just a video. In that case, ignore this guidance.
Item 3 & 4: This will analyze whether your keyword is located in any of your H2 or H3 headings. If you can make this happen without having an awkward heading then do it. Otherwise ignore this guidance because it’s not essential, just helpful.
Item 5 & 6: Your keyword should absolutely be located in your title and meta description. If you have a good keyword for your analysis, this shouldn’t be a problem. If it makes your content awkward then skip this whole tab of the analysis.
Configuration
This analysis tab will show if you have any issues that will adversely affect how this page or post being indexed. It refers almost solely to the advanced tab in the SEO panel and the setting you configured in there.
Step 1: Click on the Configuration tab.
Step 2: Review everything in this list and make sure you have all green checks. One red X could mean your site won’t be indexed by Google properly and you might get an error in the Google Search Console. If you have any red X’s then go back to the advanced settings on the SEO tab of this page or post and check your settings.
Images
Your images should have alt tags if they are not merely a decoration and they contribute to your content. This should be the case in any image. If you forget alt tags in any images then you’ll find out here.
Step 1: Click on the Images tab.
Step 2: Check if you have a red X and images listed. If you have alt tags missing you’ll see a list of the images they aren’t located on. Go back to those images and update the alt tag for them. The block settings of images has a section in it for you to put in an alt tag.
Links
Step 1: Click on the Links tab.
Item 2: If you have any nofollow links on your page then they will show up here. The analysis will show nofollow links from your main navigation and footer navigation so take this information with a grain of salt. as you can see the Home link is nofollow which was set in a previous help article. You won’t likely have this in yours.
Item 3: If you have an outbound link on your website and it’s set to nofollow then it will show up on this list. WPHubSite doesn’t actually have a setting to turn on nofollow for links so you would have to go in and do it manually, therefore, it’s not likely you’ll have one ever show up in here. It’s also not an issue if you have a few nofollow links. Issues might arise if you have too many nofollow links.
Structured Data Types
If you set up automatic Schemas in the sitewide SEO settings then they will show up in this section. You’ll only see them show up in the list if you have an automatic schema set up for a particular post or page. For example, below there’s an automatic schema set up for posts that configures them as a blog post.
Step 1: Scroll down your page or post until you see the Structured Data Types heading below your content. It may not be expanded but you can do that by clicking the bar. If you don’t see it at all then it could be turned off, you can turn it back on.
Item 2: This is the tab you’ll find any automatic schemas set up on. You can see an Articles schema type has been set up for this particular post.
Item 3: If you click this Edit link then you will be brought to the setup screen for this automatic schema. If you make any changes from this screen they will affect all posts or pages the automatic schema is set to affect.
Item 4: You can override the schema settings for the post or page you’re on in this tab. The settings here work the same was as the automatic schema setup process.
That’s it! Once sure everything set properly on your post or page then it’s ready to publish (if you’re ready). None of the settings in any of the panels will be saved until you either save a draft or publish your page or post.
Turning On/Off SEO Panels
There are three panels that you can turn on and off for SEO settings on each post and page in the WordPress standard editor. They’re not available in the Site Builder but they are available by going into the edit page of Site Builder pages.
When they’re on then you’ll have all the settings needed to configure SEO for your page or post. Unfortunately, sometimes they may get turned off in which case you will have to manually turn them on. here’s how to do that.
Step 1: On your page or post edit screen, click on the three vertical dots in the top right corner of the window.
Step 2: Click on the Options item of the menu.
Step 3: Select the boxes next to the panels you wish to have enabled. All three are that are shown in the box are recommended to have enabled. As soon as you select the item they will show up.
Tip: This is a good place to turn off panels that you never use or don’t want to use. It can clean up the editing interface for you.
Step 4: Click the X link to close the options menu.
Now you will have all three of the panels that you will need to make the changes above.