An SEO plugin controls how your pages appear in search results and gives search engines a sitemap of your content.
Installation
- Install and activate Rank Math or Yoast SEO from Plugins → Add New.
- Run its setup wizard — it asks for your site type, business name and social profiles.
- Make sure the XML sitemap option is enabled.
Submitting your sitemap
- Your sitemap will be at
https://yourdomain.com/sitemap_index.xml(Yoast) or/sitemap_index.xml(Rank Math). Open it to confirm it loads. - Create a free Google Search Console account and add your domain.
- Verify ownership — the easiest method is the HTML tag, which your SEO plugin can insert for you.
- Go to Sitemaps in Search Console and submit the sitemap URL.
Per-page basics
On each important page, set a unique SEO title of roughly 60 characters and a meta description of roughly 155 characters that describes the page honestly.
Common mistake
Check Settings → Reading and make sure Discourage search engines is not ticked. It is frequently left on from the development stage, and it stops the site being indexed entirely.
