Marianne Fry Lectures
Steps need to be taken to ensure the site is optimised for search engines and to achieve a reasonably high ranking in searches. This is achieved through the Yoast SEO plugin.
This adds a pane to the edit view of every page or post and provides control or advice over:
- Content optimisation
- Social network sharing
- Search engine requests, such as whether to index a page or not.
Most important is the Focus keyword. Each page can have a focus keywords, examples might be psychotherapy, Gestalt, spirituality etc. With the free version of Yoast SEO we are currently using, we can only have a single keyword for each page. The pane will then give advice about its use. It allows you to prepare a custom snippet – a crafted short extract which will be displayed in search engine results rather than using the first few lines of the text. It also checks that the chosen keyword appears in this snippet, in the page title and near the beginning of the text. It rates the page using a red, yellow or green traffic light rating and this is displayed in the list of site pages. (A blue rating is for pages not to be searched.)
The pane also providers a readability analysis. This is worth paying attention to.
All our new lecture descriptions and historical records of lectures should be reviewed in the light of this SEO guidance.