WordPress is an effective platform for website creation as it allows users to easily create a website even without prior experience in web development. However, despite the usefulness of WordPress in building various kinds of websites, users might still face some common challenges.
Therefore, to better utilize and manage a WordPress site, it’s crucial to master WordPress basics. Learn the basics and best practices of managing your WordPress site by checking out the previous webinar here.
Upon mastering WordPress basics, you can further enhance your WordPress site by creating a more professional look and having better SEO using useful plugins. While you will be learning it from this webinar.
During the webinar, Hezrin Shahnaz, Director of HSZ Creative Works shed some light on how to use Elementor Website Builder to build a nice and professional looking website with the easiest way. While Taco Verdonschot, Community Manager of Yoast provided valuable tips on using Yoast SEO to better optimize WordPress Sites.
Plugins are one of the most effective tools that give the power to WordPress sites to retain visitors and rank high in the search engine results.
Check out the key takeaways of the webinar.
Session 1: Elementor for Everyone
1. Plugins that enhance Elementor
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Elementor PRO
This is not a free plugin. Elementor PRO provides more features for users to design their WordPress site. But if all you are looking for is a simple website, you will get to save your cost as other free features in Elementor are sufficient to build a simple and nice website.
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Elementor Header & Footer
This plugin helps standardize the header and footer of all the pages of your website. You do not have to adjust and amend the format of the website page by page. All you need to do is edit one page of the website, and Elementor Header & Footer will automatically standardize all the pages into the same format.
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Essential Addons & Premium Addons for Elementor
This plugin is rather similar to Elementor PRO, but it comes with additional features. If you are unable to find the features you want from Elementor PRO, you may want to seek more features from Essential Addons or Premium Addons.
2. Development Flow
Before you build and design your website, you need to start with the structure and functionality of your website to ensure that the site is navigable.
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Website Structure
Before you build and design your website, it’s recommended that you understand its architecture and foundation. You need to know what you need on your website clearly — the goal you hope to achieve. Also, having a structure first will help in SEO later in your journey.
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Website Functionality
There are different websites on the Internet — a website for information, blog, eCommerce, and more. Therefore, you need to know the purpose and use of your website before you start building.
Session 2: SEO Basics with Yoast SEO
3. Search Engine: Google
In this session, the speaker focused on having better SEO on Google since it is the most popular search engine in Malaysia. It is important to know what Google wants to rank higher in Google search results. We understand that to boost SEO on Google, the website needs to be well-organized, informative, accessible, and useful for visitors.
4. SEO for Everyone
Yoast aims to make sure everyone has a better SEO without spending on expensive consultant fees. To make SEO accessible to everyone, the features that Yoast thinks are indispensable for improving the SEO of a website will always be free of charge. Therefore, everyone can start to achieve better SEO with Yoast plugins.
5. Holistic SEO
We need to improve all the significant aspects of a website comprehensively to boost its ranking in the search engine. For example, we need to focus on technical SEO, quality of writing, structuring, user-experience, and many other aspects. Our website will not achieve high rankings if we focus on a particular part of SEO as it will not satisfy Google’s criteria. Thus, make sure everything on your website is SEO-friendly.
6. Rich Results
Sometimes search engines will show more than just a title and description before the audience clicks in. When we search for a location, company or person, there will be a box (also known as a knowledge graph) beside the search results. The knowledge graph contains all data provided by different resources as Google accumulates and connects the information from different websites on the internet.
7. Structured Data
One of the things that make Yoast unique is it makes structured data as easy as possible. Connecting all the data and structuring it is very important as it gives relationships among pieces of data on your website and allows Google to understand the information of your site easily. Yoast helps connect every piece of information on your website without you managing numbers of settings to structure your data.
8. Readable Text
Writing for the web is not the same as writing a book. On the Internet, people are less likely to read a long elaborated sentence, but a short and concise sentence. Yoast SEO also provides readability analysis, which helps analyse the content of your website and make sure all the text is well-structured.
9. Site Structure
Site structure makes it easy for the search engine to find and go through the pages of your website and understand the content. Yoast is a tool that helps to set up site structure, create internal linking among the data in your website. Therefore, the user and Google can understand your page effectively and know how all the information on your page is connected.
10. Yoast SEO Integration
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Elementor
Integration between Elementor and Yoast SEO will help to analyse all the content on your website and make sure that your website is optimized.
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Zapier
When there is any new update or post on your website, Zapier is useful in helping your website be exposed to more people. On Zapier, you are able to create multiple social media apps which will automatically promote your new post to the world via various social media.
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SEMrush
SEMrush is a tool that helps in finding key phrases, telling you the topic that is related to your content. It helps to better optimize your website and allows you to know the trend on a specific topic.
The Elementor Website Builder features allow us to provide a great format and design for our website. At the same time, Yoast SEO helps to improve various aspects of your website regarding SEO. Yoast SEO ensures that your WordPress site can achieve a higher rank in the search engine, thereby putting your website in the eyes of millions of searchers to get their attention to visit your website.
Having Plugins for your WordPress site offers lots of advantages. The two plugins introduced in this webinar can save cost and time in building a website. With these powerful tools, you can design and effectively develop your website.
In the webinar, the speakers also demonstrated using the plugins on the WordPress site to guide everyone on using it on their own.
