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SQ SEO 2018 – old – Step 1 – Activate All the Settings – See How

Welcome to Squirrly SEO.

Before you can benefit in full from using the plugin, it’s good to know that Squirrly SEO is about a lot more than just a couple of settings in your WordPress.

SEO Live Assistant, Keyword Research Assistant, Performance Analytics, SEO Audits, Google Rank Checkers, Briefcase – and over 200 other tools and features are the things that make this software invaluable.

It brings to WordPress things that have never been seen before inside a WordPress Plugin.

You can use this plugin with any other WordPress SEO Plugin. !! Warning !!: If you do, make sure that you let the other plugin handle SEO Settings, don’t activate them in Squirrly SEO and don’t expect them to be handled by Squirrly if you don’t decide otherwise yourself.

Activate all the Settings

a) Check for SEO Errors.

You will see that Squirrly offers you an orange button which you can click. It reads: “Check for SEO Errors”. This will help you see if it is currently safe to turn on the SEO Settings from Squirrly

Why is this important? Themes and plugins in WordPress don’t always follow to 100% the indications of WordPress, therefore interfering with other software, like Squirrly.

Doing this step a) is important for your safety.

b) Go to WordPress -> Squirrly -> SEO Settings.

You will see that you have multiple tabs there. Go through all of them and start activating all the settings from Squirrly, if you want it to offer you its full power.

Make sure the switch is turned on!

Then, look at the right side of this box inside your WordPress.

Activate Canonical

Activate Required METAs

Activate XML Sitemap

Activate Feed (so you can easily give readers and apps access to your RSS Feed)

Activate Favicons and Apple Icons

Activate JSON-LD for Semantic SEO

Activate Options for NoFollow and NoIndex

By activating these first, you will that new options appear in your Settings.

Then move on and activate all the settings in the First Page Optimization section:

Title, Description, Keywords.

You can now start writing the information needed for your homepage at the right side of this section. You can also choose an Open Graph image which will be used when people share your homepage on Social Media.

There’s a preview in that section, of how things will look like. It’s powered by our TrueRender technology, so it will show the end result (there’s no other plugin which does that; they show info from before the wp page is rendered).

Scroll more, down to SEO for all posts / pages.

WARNING: read the text carefully in this section. It says “Exclude”, so only do click one of the boxes if you have a couple of WordPress post types for which you 100% DON”T want Squirrly to show.

Good!

This tab is now done.

Go to the next tab from the upper menu.

Structured Data.

Give it information in all the fields it has.

The information you write here is super helpful for JSON-LD settings. Read more about structured data with JSON-LD here.

This is all about Semantic SEO. (Squirrly SEO offers more for Semantic SEO than just this, but in this step this is what you need to setup).

Completing your Social Media Profiles inside Squirrly SEO’s settings will also boost you JSON-LD definitions.

Social Media.

Now move to the Social Media tabs.

Here you setup your Open Graph and Twitter Cards.

Also, here’s where you write the social media accounts of your brand. This is important for Google!

Site icon.

Here you setup an icon for your website.

This will be displayed as Favicon and also as Apple Icon for Apple Devices of the people from your audience.

Tracking Tools.

Here you setup your tracking tools.

Facebook Admin ID

Google Analytics ID

Facebook Pixel. (more about fb pixel here)

Connections.

Here you integrate your WordPress site with various other tools!

Do NOT skip this step. This is super important.

Search Console (ex-Google Webmasters) (if you don’t have a Google Search Console account yet, create one now. You’ll need it)

BING Meta code

Alexa Meta Code

Setup your Pinterest RICH PINS (highly valuable for e-commerce sites)

Sitemap XML.

Let Squirrly Create you an amazing Sitemap and also an amazing Collection of Sitemaps.

It is pretty advanced.

Select to PING your articles. Once you publish a post, it will be pinged so search engines learn about the update. This DOES NOT guarantee indexing. That’s up to Google to decide what it wants to do, according to your Website Authority. Don’t expect Google to easily index a site with low SEO Audit Score or with very low Authority Scores (you can see these inside your weekly SEO Audits)

Next: tell Squirrly for which Post Types from WordPress you want it to build sitemaps.

Then, select if you want your sitemaps to contain images and videos (it’s recommended that you do).

Tell the Sitemap Feature how often you update your Website. This is important for Google. Try to give an honest answer.

Feed Pagination – select how many items you want to have in your sitemaps. (sitemaps with tens of thousands of items can be problematic, that’s why we provide an option where you choose how much should be included).

We personally use 1000 for our setup.

Ranking Options: Google Rank Checker.

Here you make settings related to the Country for which you want the SERP Checker to verify your positions in Google.

Also, you’ll be able to make other settings for the Rank Checking Option.

Advanced Settings.

Here you can make some more settings for your site.

I personally would ALWAYS use the NEW version of the SEO Live Assistant, always let Squirrly download images from blog posts to your WP Media Library (it’s fair play for other creators because you don’t make them pay for bandwidth that’s not being use on their own sites, and you can never run into non-existing images on your posts).

Correct Feed links and images – make sure it’s on.

Robots.txt

Here you can make additional settings to your robots.txt file.

Patterns – make sure you’re using them!

These patterns do SEO Automation on your behalf.

You can easily use this function to optimize a WooCommerce site with 2,000 products in a couple of minutes.

You can make settings for each post type in your WordPress!!! YES!! Squirrly SEO lets you choose any post type you have in WP, not just from a narrow definition of post types.

If you don’t understand what this means, it’s better to just leave the setting on and move on.

You can learn more about the SEO Patterns later on. The important thing is to have them activated, because they help remove a lot of duplicates.

Import.

Use this one for Imports and Backups.

It’s not at all necessary to use it now, unless you want to import settings made with other plugins you’ve been using prior to Squirrly SEO.

c) OPTIONAL: Import Previous SEO

If you want, you can start IMPORTING all the settings you’ve made with previous wordpress SEO plugins you were using.

Great!

Now the settings from Squirrly SEO are active! You are now ready to move to Step number 2.

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