[WordPress SEO] #yoast #sitemapxml

wordpress-seo.md

WordPress SEO

Meta descriptions

1. (Yoast) SEO
2. Search Appearance
3. Content Types
4. [Content Type]
5. Meta description
6. Insert snippet variable
7. [Type E for..] Excerpt

Sitemap.xml

This is used by site crawlers, including Google, Tenon and Sort Site.

Yoast SEO automatically generates sitemaps from published pages/posts.

It's a bit tricky to find your way around Yoast SEO, so:

1. SEO > General > Features > set XML Sitemaps to On
2. SEO > Search Appearance > Content Types
3. For each type set Show Posts in search results to True. It's critical that at least Pages are included in search results, otherwise search engines will not index your home page
4. Check that the sitemap is correct: https://domain.com/page-sitemap.xml

Submit new sitemaps to Google

1. https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap.xml
2. https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap2.xml
3. https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=http://example.com/sitemap3.xml

Add sitemaps to robots.txt

Sitemap: http://example.com/my_sitemap.xml
Sitemap: http://example.com/my_sitemap2.xml
Sitemap: http://example.com/my_sitemap3.xml

But Yoast say that this is redundant. Which is just as well as I can't actually see robots.txt in Transmit, despite it being viewable in the root of my site.

Add sitemaps to Google Search Console

1. https://search.google.com/search-console/
2. Copy the TXT value
3. Log into web host and add a record to the site's DNS Zone:
4. @, TXT, [value]
5. Check DNS propagation progress at https://dnsmap.io/#TXT/example.com
6. Go back to the console and press Verify