InMotion Central makes it easy to quickly audit your site for SEO best practices using the BoldGrid SEO plugin. This can help you with search engine optimization (SEO) for your WordPress site and hopefully, increase the chances of your pages and posts showing up on search engine results pages (SERPs). This guide will show you how to enable and use BoldGrid SEO from InMotion Central.
An Introduction to SEO
SEO is the method of enhancing your website’s visibility to increase the quantity and quality of organic website traffic from the results displayed to a user making a search query. Search engines (e.g., Google, Bing, and DuckDuckGo) systematically review websites and analyze the content within to determine the best search results to match what the user is seeking. If you want your beautifully crafted website to display as an option, then your SEO game needs to be on point.
To learn more about SEO basics check out our article: Search Engine Optimization Getting Started Guide.
How to Enable and Use BoldGrid SEO
- Login to InMotion Central.
- Roll your mouse over the project you want to work with and click The Bridge option.
- If you have multiple environments, click Environment and select the one you want to use.
- Click Optimize then Search Engine in the sub-menu.
- You will see an overview of the BoldGrid SEO plugin, click the Enable Plugin button. The plugin will be installed and activated then perform a scan of your site to see if your pages and posts have SEO Titles and Descriptions setup. After the scan completes, you will see a list of all your pages and posts with an X next to the ones that are missing SEO Titles and Descriptions.
- Click the page or post that you want to update and another tab will open the editor of your WordPress Dashboard.
- Scroll to the bottom and enter the Target Keyword or Phrase for the page or post. This should be the main focus of the content.
- Click the Title & Description tab and fill in your SEO Title (this will be the link on search result pages) and SEO Description (this will be the text that displays below the link). Ideally you want all circles to turn green which means you are meaning the requirements.
- Click the Search Visibility tab and choose if you want to “Tell search engines to read and index this page” which will hopefully cause them crawl your site and show this page or post on search result pages. Then, select if you want to “Tell search engines to follow links in this page” to encourage them to follow the links on your page when crawling your site. These are set to Yes by default.
- Be sure to click Update or Save Draft after enter your SEO settings.
- You can then return to the Projects->Search Engine page of InMotion Central (it should be open in another tab still) and click the Refresh Summary to rescan your site for updated SEO Titles and descriptions. The X’s should now be check marks.
Congratulations! Now you know how to enable and use the BoldGrid SEO plugin and can begin optimizing your pages and posts for search engines. Take your SEO skills to the next level and learn more from our other SEO articles.