In the past, setting up and understanding SEO used to be very difficult for novice web designers and developers, but now, this is no longer the case. Georgia State University has installed a new WordPress Widget called Yoast to make SEO much easier. To see the Yoast Widget on your page, check the dashboard. Go to Pages > Add New or Post > Add New. If you have a page that is already built, navigate to Pages > All Pages or Posts > All Posts and locate the page or post for which you want to view the Yoast information.

Scroll down the page past the text box for your WordPress page or post, and go to the widget named Yoast SEO Premium. 

To begin, type in your Focus Keyphrase (this is the search term that you want your page to rank for most. So when people search for that phrase, they should find you). Once entered, the Yoast widget checks your page or post to determine if your website's page or post is SEO-friendly and how well your keyphrase is used within your site's content. Your goal as a web developer and designer is to have this list mostly in the green ("Good results"). Yoast will give you help and ideas on how to do this. The greener your site, the higher it will appear in search engine results for your keyphrase.

You will also need to make sure that the hierarchy of your headlines is set up properly. Meaning, use only one H1 for the title of the page, and then H2s for headlines below that, and H3s for any headlines nested under H2s. Think of your headlines as the main bullets in a PowerPoint presentation and order them accordingly.

Also, don't forget that any images used on your pages need to have "alt text" filled in for them. This is just a short description of what the image contains. Say that you use an image featuring two students studying. You would give it the alt text "Two students studying." It's that simple.

If you are interested in learning more about SEO and how to make your site more SEO-friendly, please visit this WordPress SEO Tutorial.

Keywords: seo for wordpress, wordpress seo settings, yoast seo tutorial, configuring yoast seo, search engine optimization wordpress, optimize wordpress pages, seo best practices wordpress