- Hey, y'all, I'm Kori Ashton
and this is another WordPress Wednesday.
Today, we're gonna take time to look at best practices
for SEO inside of the Divi theme from elegant themes.
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All right, let's get to the tutorial.
So many of you know that if you watch my channel,
my own website runs on Divi,
and I absolutely love the power of this theme.
I have an entire playlist here
on my YouTube channel dedicated to all things Divi.
But let's talk about SEO specifically.
What can we be doing on our websites to improve?
And how does Divi empower us
to have even better optimization?
I'm gonna show you some access points right now.
First things first, we wanna be sure to jump
into your dashboard, go into your dashboard and be certain
that you go into your settings and go to permalinks.
We wanna be certain
that you have a custom structure right here.
We wanna look at either having a category
in there in the thread, in the string,
or just at least having the post name here.
I prefer having not just the post name,
I prefer including the category.
So I put category first and then post name.
Let me say right now though, if you've not done this
and you already have a live site,
please be very aware of
that making this change right now could completely
and totally mess up all of your links
in your whole website causing you a serious nightmare.
So this needs to be best practices out
of the gate establishing your very first website.
It's very, very important
to learn about permalink structure, and there are all sorts
of opportunities online to do that.
There's a link up here at the top
that has this warning to tell you
when you're touching permalink settings,
you can really, really mess up your search engine rank.
So this is best practice in my opinion when it comes
to structuring your URL paths.
But it's really up to you
on how you'd like to run your site.
I would say minimally have the post name living there.
Next, I wanna talk about your page headers.
Every single page on your WordPress website needs
to have an H1 and H2, so you need to have the ability
to add these things in easily and quickly down the page.
So whenever you're coming in here into your text,
as you know, WordPress allows us to write code
into a wysiwyg, we have that visual mode or that text mode.
Well, Divi allows us to do that as well.
So be certain to have an H1
as somebody is Googling around trying
to find your resources, be certain
that you have an H1 on your page.
And I suggest only having one H1 on your page
and then having any other large text you could have
in easily in an H2, or as you see here,
an H3, other options.
But you certainly wanna address your H1, H2, H3,
your header tags on your website.
Next, I want you to always remember
that images must have alt tags behind them.
And I know if you're familiar with them,
you've probably gone into your media library.
Let's go jump into your dashboard really quickly,
go snoop for a second over into your media library.
Of course, any of these pictures that you choose,
you can always have the alt text right here, right?
But inside of Divi, when you're applying these,
especially inside of a page or post, you want to be certain
that you're carrying that over inside of the builder
if you're using the Divi builder.
So let's jump back to the front of the website.
I'm gonna jump into my toolbox page
and I'll show you by enabling the builder here.
Let's take a look for a minute
and let me show you.
Scrolling down, I'm just gonna choose any image here,
WS Form, if y'all are familiar
with this really great form builder.
I'm gonna open up the gear icon here on this image module.
And what we wanna do here is check to go
into the advanced tab.
So follow along with me here.
We're seeing the content in an image module.
I'm gonna click over to the advanced tab.
Here is where we would play around with any
of our custom CSS, our CSS IDs, anything like that,
but also there's this section here called attributes.
This is where you wanna come in and be certain
that your image alt text is set.
So please take a moment and be certain, of course,
this is also best practices for accessibility.
So it's really, really important that you take time
for every single one of your images to be certain
that that area has been addressed
in each one of your modules
so that not only a browser reader can read this
to an individual, but also Google can easily read it
or any search engine
for that matter can easily read your image.
Just because we know that you've applied it inside
of the media library does not necessarily mean
that it's being called.
So adding it into this advanced tab
on the image module allows that to be taken care of there.
So let's change this one.
This one is going to be Instagram feed.
Let's do that.
(keyboard typing)
And change it here.
(keyboard typing)
And that is always gonna be best practices.
While we're here in this section,
I'm gonna mention another really cool SEO tip.
Text that is linked, anchor text.
So you're gonna see this red font kind of sprinkled
throughout this page in each one of these columns.
Each one of these are linked text areas that are clickable,
people can go out and find the Yoast plugin.
They can go out and find the Instagram feed plugin,
easily and quickly click.
And they can visibly see the difference
that there's something different about this text.
Well, Google also loves that because it knows
that it is a great user experience.
So anytime that you have a paragraph area
or a text area where you're adding in a description
and you have an opportunity to mention something
that could be clickable, be certain to go in
and add in that little extra bit of code.
Of course, if you're in that visual mode,
all you have to do is highlight the text there
and click on the insert link.
You certainly wanna give it that URL
and you can also give it that title
for best practices when it comes to SEO and click okay,
allowing that text to now become an active link.
And the last thing we'll cover
in this particular video is going to be responsive design.
We all know a few years back that Google started griping
at us about getting our website nice and optimized
for a smaller cell phone or tablet view.
Well, if you've ever noticed over here on the left side,
look down at the bottom left-hand corner of your screen.
When you open up this little section here
for the Divi menu to save, when you open up this little area
and extend it out on this left side,
you have the ability to click to see tablet view.
You also have the ability to click
to see the cell phone view.
Did you know that in these views you can make edits
that then only apply to this view?
So let's say I wanted this text
to maybe break a little differently.
Maybe this paragraph just isn't right
or I want this text to be a little bit larger even.
You can make any change you want in this area
and easily and quickly you've impacted then the cell phone
or the mobile view.
So let's go in here.
We're gonna click on the gear icon for this section,
go into our text here.
Notice when I come into this text area, watch this.
See this little icon option appear?
You wanna go ahead and choose mobile.
Be certain that you're in the phone mode.
And then you can do a couple of different things.
You can add in a break if you wanted it
to break in a certain area, we can just add in that break.
All I did was hold down the shift
and hit the return key, and that broke it differently.
If I wanted it here, break it again, break it there.
And now you're gonna see that start to reflect in this area.
Again, that change is only gonna be impactful
on the phone view.
You can go into the design mode
and you can go to the body text.
We're gonna go down to the font size here.
And again, we've got this little extra menu that appears,
I'm gonna go into the phone mode.
I'm in that phone view.
And I'm gonna go ahead and extend it up
and make it be 22 font.
Why not?
Nice and large right there to get your attention.
Well, now I don't like the way it's breaking.
So let's jump back into the content, go back over here.
Be certain that we're still in that phone mode
and let's kind of piece it back together
and see how it feels.
All right.
Maybe I like that.
That kind of works.
Okay, I like that better.
So I'm gonna go ahead and click okay.
Save that.
Then when I go back in a tablet mode,
watch the magic happen.
Look at the font size revert back.
And of course, desktop will revert back as well
to that smaller font size.
And I can click save.
Now when I go view it on mobile,
it's gonna have that nice large font size for me in mobile.
All of that is best optimization for SEO
because you're giving a great user experience
to all of your visitors coming in
and seeing your site able to read things easily and legibly.
Remember, you can do that with any section.
Let's say that this little divide here
at the bottom just isn't really working for you
with all this space on a mobile device.
Well, again, in this mobile view,
you can shrink some of that up if you want.
If that's just too much space, shrink it in
and bring that space up, allowing the user to quickly get
to this next paragraph.
All of that is going to be impactful on a phone view only.
So really cool options here.
That's again, one of the reasons
why I absolutely love the power under the hood
of the Divi theme.
Well, I hope that helps y'all.
I know that this is kind of a quick video,
but if you're interested in learning even more about SEO,
I have a totally free course that you can take
that will help you truly understand kind of the ABCs
of what you need to do to improve fully the optimization
of your website.
So be sure to check out the links below.
I've got a whole playlist here on YouTube as well.
Click like and subscribe
and I'll see y'all next WordPress Wednesday.
Bye, everyone.