To have a solid technical SEO foundation on your website, touching all bases like URL structure, meta tags, robots.txt, sitemap, content, tools, data collection, and more.
Part of this recipe covers how to perform these tasks using WordPress but similar steps can be taken on any other CMS. Many times the SOPs offer these alternatives as well.
Having the right tools and structure in place will make it much easier for you to rank in search engines. A technically poor website will be harder to rank than an optimized one.
Usually only once per website/domain. But you can revisit some sections of the recipe every 6 months to make sure everything is still optimal.
The person responsible for SEO.
Step 1 - Set up an SEO-friendly Wordpress configuration
Outcome: Yoast is installed and configured, and your website is using the ideal permalink and homepage structure.
Special instructions: If your Wordpress blog already has indexed blog posts, skip the “Set Up Permalinks” section and instead replace that section with SOP050- Migrating an existing WordPress website towards SEO-friendly URLs .
Notes: While this SOP covers how to install Yoast on WordPress, Yoast is also available for platforms like Magento, Drupal, and others.
Step 2 - Set up Google Search Console
Step 3 - Set up your Robots.txt file
Outcome: You’ve created and added the perfect robots.txt file to your site, and you’ve validated it in Google Search Console.
Step 4 - Set up your XML Sitemap
Outcome: You’ve got a properly structured sitemap on your website and you’ve submitted it to Google Search Console.
Special instructions: If you are using WordPress and Yoast, you will only need to follow that specific section of the SOP.
Step 5 - Create an automated backup of your Google Search Console data
Outcome: You’ve backed up your search console data for the last 2 months and now have Google Sheets backing up your data every month on auto-pilot.