B2 SEO Wordpress Plugin Instruction Manual by B2 Foundry

B2 SEO

PLUGIN FOR WORDPRESS INSTRUCTION MANUAL optimize your site so people can find you easily

PLUGIN AVAILABLE THROUGH WORDPRESS.ORG AND AT WWW.B2FOUNDRY.COM

SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZE YOUR WORDPRESS SITE WITH B2 SEO At B2 Foundry, we work with organizations and businesses with limited budgets and resources. Not all of our clients have the budget to pay for search engine optimization. We believe that there is no point in making a web site that is not at least basically optimized so we created our B2 SEO plugin, instruction manual and a beginners guide to basic search engine optimization so that anyone with a WordPress site can add in basic optimization no matter what their budget is. We also have a B2 XML Automatic Sitemap Generator plugin that can help you further optimize your site with very little effort. This is a huge topic, with an abundance of written material on the web and in books. Companies specialize in providing this service. Our focus is to give you a brief overview of the plugin, some vocabulary, and a limited education on actions you can take where you can have an impact on how you present your organization or business on the web before a user even clicks on your site.

Start Here 1. Download and install B2 SEO on your site from http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/b2-seo/ or search for B2 SEO in the plugin search feature inside WordPress 2. If you do not understand what meta tags, titles and keywords are download our guide The Basics of Search Engine Optimization - A Beginners Guide so that you can create the content you need to use this plugin successfully. Itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s available at www.b2foundry.com/ and there will be a link to it from the right sidebar of the B2 SEO plugin. This B2 SEO instruction manual only explains where to enter information and how to configure your plugin. It does not tell you how to write the tags you need to write. 3. Learn where to enter information to optimize individual posts and pages. 4. Go step by step through the settings in the B2 SEO plugin tool admin area. 5. Download, install and configure our B2 XML Sitemap Generator if you want to add more SEO to your site. That plugin takes less than 1 minute to configure and is worth the results. We promise. http://WordPress.org/extend/plugins/b2-xml-sitemap-generator/

OPTIMIZING INDIVIDUAL POSTS AND PAGES When you install the B2 SEO plugin on your site, there are two areas where you can enter SEO information. • You can enter SEO information into a post or a page when you add or edit them individually in the space marked B2 SEO that is beneath the visual/html content area editor. Information entered in a B2 SEO page or post is specific to that content. If you are using OpenGraph on your site for sharing, what you have entered in these fields is what is seen when the page or post is shared for example on Facebook. • You can also enter information globally for posts/pages within the admin area of the B2 SEP plugin. All SEO settings entered in this section apply to the entire site. You should initially review and set up all the admin options when you install the plugin. • Following is a example of the B2 SEO section that is displayed on the bottom of the post and page. These same fields also exist in the B2 SEO admin area. Information you enter in an individual post or page, takes precedence over the global information.

CONFIGURE GLOBAL SETTINGS

Information You Enter into this Plugin is Seen by Others What you enter into the plugin is relevant because it not only aids in people finding you, it also helps you control how your information is displayed to the world via search results and sharing. SEO information you add into the post and pages ends up in the search results when a user enters words that are relevant to your organization. This is what they see. Example of a blog post in search results Introducing: The Body Shop - Beauty And The Blog - XYZ.com blog.xyz.com/2011/03/introducing-body-shop.html Mar 9, 2011 â&#x20AC;&#x201C; The Body Shop has arrived in stores and on xyz.com! ... hey!! i loved the blogpost!! Please check my blog out and follow if you like, I am ... Example of a page in search results XYZ: Beauty, Skin Care, Makeup, Hair, & Fragrance www.xyz.com/ - Cached xyz.com is a leading beauty retailer offering the best cosmetics, skin care, makeup, fragrance & perfume, hair, beauty products and makeup tips The above in SEO terms Metatag Title Permalink Date included snippet or metatag description If you do not have familiarity with writing descriptions and choosing keywords, refer to our Basics of Search Engine Optimization guide available at b2foundry.com/products. If you do not want to write anything yourself, donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t worry. There are ways to configure the plugin within the global settings to write them for you.

Global Settings Find the B2 SEO plugin as a selection option towards the bottom of the left navigation bar. This tool has 14 pages with settings that apply to the entire site. Following are screen prints with very brief explanations of what each one does.

DASHBOARD

Disable Date in Snippet Preview for Posts Crawlers and robots capture the date when they first discover the post and include it in the snippet or meta description so the users know how old the post is. If you click on this check box that date will not appear in the browser.

Hide SEO Metabox in the Following Post Types There is a B2 SEO box at the bottom of each post and page box as displayed in step 3. It is also included in the attachment, product and shop-order input screens for our shopping cart plugin and the individual portfolio entries on our portfolio plugin. Click on any of the boxes to keep the B2 SEO input box from appearing in the individual areas. You might like to do this if you plan on entering SEO information in the plugin that applies site wide only and do not want to confuse other contributors to your website.

TITLE TAG SETTINGS - GLOBAL META TAG SETTINGS Rewrites titles forcefully If you want to give your post and pages unique titles you should check this box. If you do not check it funky results can happen like duplicate titles. When using a theme that is not using the default wp_title function to display title, make sure you check to rewrite titles forcefully

Individual Pages and Landing Page This page displays similar input fields that you see in the B2 SEO Meta tag box in the post, page, attachment, product and shop-order screen. If you want every post and page to have unique information, you should do that on those pages as well as filling in the input areas. If you have never written titles and tags before, please read our guide The Basics of Search Engine Optimization - A Beginners Guide to learn about the information you should input.

Title Templates At the bottom of the title tag settings screen is a box labeled “Title Templates”. This contains two columns of information the first column contains code and the second contains the code description. If you do not want to write any titles or descriptions you can copy the code to the appropriate tag setting box and the system will automatically generate the titles or descriptions. For example: If you set the a meta description for a post as “ This is a test description”, that will display in every post. If you want the beginning of each post to display as an excerpt of that post you can copy and paste %%excerpt%% into the meta description box and the first lines of the post will display.

PERMALINKS Permalink is Short for Permanent Link The URL (web address) is the second piece of information that appears in the browser in search results. The URL can be just the website name like XYZ.com. In the case of a post, it can include the category name: XZY.com/products/. It is important when the searcher clicks on the permalink that they get directed to the expected and functional page or post. You want to make sure that you have permalinks turned on because the url appears more relevant for search engines as well as for people. Appearance Without permalinks enabled = http://xyz.com/cat34343.aspx?l=afdsafsd versus With permalinks enabled = XZY.com/products/rockstarshirt Remove Category Base /category/ from the Category URL- Removes the category from the URL for all post so your posts reads XYZ.com/portfolio instead of XYZ.com/category/portfolio/ Trailing Slash - The purpose of the trailing slash is to ensure that the robots know the precise address. If the URL does not have a trailing slash the request will be redirected via 301 redirect. This can bog down your site’s performance as well as send the searcher to a different result than expected. As for WordPress pages (posts, pages, categories, tags, search results and other archives) WordPress inserts a trailing slash itself but not for other custom pages. Redirect Attachments - URL’s to parent post URLs - WordPress treats images and pdf’s as their own pages. If you insert an image into a post, it will still be considered to be a separate page and can get disconnected from the post. By clicking on this setting you are “gluing” the pages so they stay together. Redirect Untidy Links to Pretty Permalinks - A pretty link is a human readable link. Checking this option will ensure a link still links to the correct post and not to a 404 page

INDEXING

The search engines have a database of information they assemble with information their robots gather when they crawl through websites. This process is called indexing. If you do not want specific information to be stored in the search engine database you should block them from indexing areas by checking the appropriate box.

FOLLOW/NO FOLLOW Follow/No follow rules tell the web crawlers what pages and links to ignore. No Follow Login/Registration Pages means you’re asking crawlers, robots to not follow login or registration pages. Even if you don’t have any registration system and only you, as an admin, go to wpadmin for login etc. you might not want your login page to show up in search results. No Follow Comment Links - Block comment links from random followers that you can’t vouch for from being picked up. No Follow Links in the Meta Widget - shows different links like Login/Logout, Site Admin, RSS Link, Comment RSS link, WordPress site etc. You might not want search engines to index such links, as they are irrelevant.

ROBOT SETTINGS

Robot Settings control how your website appears and loads in the search results in a browser Noodp - Tells Google/Bing/Yahoo! to use website meta tag description instead of theirs or DMOZ. Benefit is that you control the information that will appear in the search results when your site appears in the browser. Noydir - Tells Yahoo! to use website meta tag description instead of theirs. The benefit is that you control the information that will appear in the search results when your site appears in the browser. Yahoo made a deal with Bing and is now powered by Bing. Protocols might change in a few months. Nosnippet - Tells Google not to use the snippet* that appears under the title of the search results. Benefit is that your page will load faster. The drawback is there is no sound bite to draw the end user into clicking on your URL. Noarchive -Tells Google not to store a cached copy of your page. Benefit is that the site will always show the latest version to the end user. The drawback is that the page will take longer to load. If you have up to the minute breaking news you might like this feature. Sites that are cached show that at the end of your URL. If you entered meta tag descriptions for your pages and your posts you might like to consider checking the noodp and noydir options. *A snippet is the description that appears in the third line of the Search Results. It can be a default description from the first lines of the website page, a metatag description, a description by DMOZ.

301 REDIRECT Redirect to the Home Page 301 is a permanent redirect. Use this when you want to permanently redirect any page to a different page. For example, if your site doesn’t have any authors archive or you had an author’s archive that you later discarded, you might want to set the author archive to redirect it somewhere else. Some users might have bookmarked the author archive url at one point before you discarded the archive. When they return to the url they bookmarked, you don’t want them to see the archive that no longer exists, so check 301 redirect author’s archive to homepage. Now even if a user tries to access author’s archive e.g http://example.com/author/admin/ it will be redirected to home page. Similarly if you don’t have any date archive, a url like http://example.com/2012/01 should be redirected to the home page. These options are post specific. They apply to situations where the blog post do not display the author name and/or the posting date.

HEAD TAG CLEANER Clean Up Your Code This feature is of more interest for a developer than a non-technical user. It doesn’t do anything for SEO. The purpose is to clean up the clutter in the <head> tag. Hide RSD (Really Simple Discovery) Links - This is used by client apps to discover blogs etc. Since WordPress is nothing but a blogging software, RSD is needed. When a website not a blog uses the WordPress framework, you might not want blogging clients to discover your site, so check hide. Hide WLW Manifest Links - It’s an XML file required by Windows Live Writer. If you are a blogger and you use Windows Live Writer for blogging, you’ll need that manifest file. Check box if you don’t need it. Hide WordPress Generator - Hides the meta tags that tells the site is powered by WordPress. Hide Index Relation Links - Tells the index link in this case the home URL Hide Start Relation Links -Tells the start link which is the blogroll page Hide Previous / Next Post Links - Tells the previous post link and the next post links. You don’t need index/start/prev/next links if you submit your sitemap. If you aren’t using a sitemap generator, don’t check it. Hide Shortlink for posts - If your site is hosted on WordPress, WordPress automatically creates a short link. This is for their analytics. Once you’ll share on facebook or other platforms, they won’t show a snapshot of the page as that link won’t take them to the site and instead to a WordPress Analytics engine. Check it if you don’t want that. Hide RSS links - Check if you don’t want search engines to see where to grab your RSS feed.

BREADCRUMBS

Most people are familiar with the fairy tale, Hansel and Gretel, in which the children leave a trail of breadcrumbs behind them to find their way back home. When used in the context of websites, a breadcrumb is a form of a navigation trail that tells users where they are. The breadcrumb trail is typically at the top of a page and usually has the following format: Home/category/section/item/detail. • Check the box to enable/disable Breadcrumbs showing - If you check this box, breadcrumbs will be inserted into your site after the header area. • Separator - Customize the separator. The default is set at >>. Other separators are >, /. Change the default from ( Home >> Contact) to (Home > Contact) or (Home / Contact). • Alias - Use a different name instead of Home. e.g. Front Page, Home Page, etc. For example. The default is Home. Change that from Home >Contact to read: (Home Page > Contact ) or (Front Page > Contact ) etc. • Prefix for Path - If you want to use any prefix like Visited Home > Visited Contact where Visited is the prefix. Default Blank • Prefix for Archive - An archive can be of a category, date or author. You can add those words as a prefix. For example. If the default is set at (Home> Archives) you can change that to: (Home > Archives for Shows), (Home > Archives for November 2011), or ( Home > Archives for John Doe) etc. • Prefix for Search - Similarly if you want to add a prefix to a search result breadcrumb, you can specify it here. Default: Search for. E.g. Search for Resources • Alias for 404 - When a page not found occurs, control what should be displayed in the breadcrumbs path. Default is Page Not found. E.g. Home > Page not found • Remove Blogroll - Check if you don’t want to show the blogroll in the breadcrumbs path. For example in the default view (Home page) is a blogroll, you probably don’t want to show the breadcrumb on the home page so you should check that box. If however, the homepage is a special page and not the blogroll, you’ll want to show blogroll so don’t check the box. • Taxonomy in WordPress means entities associated with a post type. e.g. Category, Tags etc. For each Post type we can specify which entity should be displayed in breadcrumbs. For example if we only want to show Categories in the breadcrumbs, we’ll select the Category from the dropdown. By default all such entities will be displayed. Please note that WordPress has different Post Types such as: Post, Page, Attachment, Revisions, Nav Menus, Custom Post. • Bold Last - Check this if you want to bold the last item in the breadcrumbs. e.g. Home > Contact vs Home > Contact

WEBMASTER TOOL Enter Verification Codes Google, Yahoo! and Bing have webmaster tools that provide information like traffic stats, index coverage, crawl activity, keyword research, who is linking to your site. They will help you improve the traffic to your site. To make use of these tools you need to go to each of these tools sites, register and enter the validation code they provide you into the input areas. It is essential to complete the entire process. The tools will not recognize you until you complete the process as outlined.

RSS SETTINGS RSS (Real Simple Syndication) enable you to share your post with your audience. You can manage and customize your feeds. The crawlers discover and index your feeds. If you look into page source, you’ll notice feed urls in the <head> tag. One is the RSS feed for posts the other is the RSS feed for the comments. Check the box if you don’t want search engines to index the comments feed. In many cases, you wouldn’t want search engines to show post comments in search results. Similarly if you don’t want to index any RSS feed URLs including comments, posts, pages etc. ,check the second box. Ping the search engine when a new post is created to send notification. If you are using our B2 XML sitemap plugin, don’t check the box. The XML sitemap plugin does this more efficiently. Contents before Post in the Feed - Since any RSS reader such as Google reader consumes an RSS feed, we might want to add additional text in the beginning of the post, such as Read Full Article on xyz.com. etc. You can also use shorthand syntax like %%POSTLINK%% etc. Contents after Post in the Feed. Same as above except it adds the information after the post.

CUSTOM CODE INSERTER Head Tag Code Insertion Area If you want to add Google Analytics Code you can copy and paste that in the Head Tag or in the Body Tag. Similarly, if you have a custom font that uses javascript and you donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t have one of our themes with the custom font selector, you can copy and paste that code into the head section. This area allows you to insert any type of code from a third party that you might want to use without touching the theme files. This is good for those who want the code there even if they change the theme files or do not have any coding experience. You may want to add links in all your posts as they show up. You can use the Add contents before or after the post. The best way to understand this capability; test it yourself, and see results by looking into any post before and after you add code to this section.

FILE EDITOR

Every site is served from a webserver. A webserver is a piece of program that handles a request sent by a user and serves the contents accordingly. For example. xyz.com/contact means the user asked the webserver to load the contact page in the xyz. com directory. This rule is defined in a .htaccess file. WordPress has a utility to set permalinks (Settings > Permalinks). They set that htaccess file so it normally doesn’t have to be touched. However, in certain situations one might want to change rules to define their own custom permalinks pattern. If this is the case (you need to have a full grip on webservers and .htaccess file to do this), you can edit the file here. Similarly, when you register with Google Webmaster Tools, they may give you some code that they want you to put onto your server with a file name robots.txt. This could be difficult if you don’t possess the knowledge. Alternatively, you can simply copy that code and paste it in here and it’ll automatically create a robot.txt file if it doesn’t exist or update an existing one.

BACKUP/RESTORE Backup Your B2 SEO Settings Clicking on the Backup Settings. A backup file named b2seo.zip will be created and saved on your hard drive in the default download directory. To restore the setting click on the browse button to locate and select the file then click on restore.

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