Are you struggling to get traffic to your Divi website? Well, to help you, we have brought you the ultimate Divi SEO guide, where we will discuss how to use Divi’s built-in SEO features to boost your site’s visibility.
Also, we will use SEO plugins to streamline the optimization process and as a bonus, we will share our secret SEO checklist that’ll take your site to a new height!
Divi Built-in SEO Optimization Settings
The Divi theme is one of the best SEO-friendly WordPress themes because it has great SEO features. To use the default Divi SEO options, follow these steps-
- Go to your WordPress Dashboard > Divi > Theme options.
- Navigate to the SEO tab.
You will see three sections: Homepage SEO, Single Page SEO, and Index Page SEO.
Homepage SEO
In the Homepage SEO section, you can enable the custom title, meta description, meta keywords, and canonical URL options.
Adding Custom Title
In the homepage SEO tab, the custom title will represent the title of your entire website. For example-
The custom title you choose to use will be displayed here.
Using custom titles can bump up your site’s visibility as you can use keywords here that you want to rank for.
Now, to use a custom title for your website, you need to enable the “Enable custom title” option. Then you should also notice a field for writing the custom title.
When using custom titles, try to keep it within 60 characters, otherwise, it will get truncated.
In the context of SEO, title tags are important, as they tell the search engines what your website or your web page is about. So, by using a custom title tag, you are telling Google what your website is about.
If you do not want to use a custom title (which we do not recommend), there are two options for you at the bottom.
With the “Enable Custom Title” option disabled, you can choose to autogenerate a title, which combines your site title and site description, or only use the site title.
The last option lets you choose a separator if you choose to autogenerate your site title.
Adding Meta Description
Apart from the site title, meta description also helps search engines determine what your website is about.
Custom title is limited to only 60 characters, which may not be enough to properly describe your website’s purpose. That’s why you should use the meta description to further strengthen your SEO.
To take advantage of the meta description, simply enable the “Enable meta description” option and write your meta description in the field below.
There is, however, a character limit for meta descriptions too, which is 160 characters.
Once you have decided on a proper SEO-optimized meta description, it will be visible here-
Adding Meta Keywords
No matter what your website is about there are some specific keywords that you would like your website to rank for. For that purpose, there’s a field for meta keywords that you can utilize.
Just enable the “Enable meta keywords” option, and use the field to input the keywords you would like to rank for.
Disclaimer: Meta keywords lost relevancy due to being misused by site owners. For now, meta keywords do not have any impact on your SEO. Keywords are picked by the search engines automatically from the website content.
Enabling Canonical URLs
Canonical URLs are another way of optimizing your website. But before we tell you how to use it, allow us to explain a little bit about it.
By enabling canonical URLs, search engines will automatically select the best URL for your website if your web pages have duplicate URLs.
It’s common for websites to have duplicate URLs due to different regions, different versions of devices, or differences in protocols.
For example, the homepage of “DiviFlash” can be accessed through multiple URLs, such as:
Even though these URLs lead to the same homepage, search engines see them as separate pages. To avoid confusion and maintain search ranking signals, the website would choose one of these URLs as the “canonical” or official URL.
By enabling the “Enable canonical URL’s” you let Divi select the best URL for your homepage and it lets search engines know that this is the official URL for the homepage of DiviFlash.
So, if you do not enable canonical URLs, it will confuse search engines which will affect your rankings.
Single Post SEO
The Single Post SEO tab has the same options as the homepage SEO, but these only apply to each website’s pages and posts.
Adding Custom Title, Meta Description, and Meta Keywords
Just like before, to utilize these meta tags (title, description, keyword) for your web pages, you need to enable these options. But since the values of each of these meta tags will be different, how are you going to input them?
To answer your question, follow these steps-
- Save the changes you made and go to Pages > Add New Page.
- Click on the three dots in the top right corner.
- Go to Preferences > Panels, enable the Custom Fields option, and click on Show & Reload Page.
- Once you do, the window will close, a blank page will appear, and right at the bottom, you should see this-
- To be able to use the meta tags for each of your web pages, you need to add a new field for each of the meta tags using this option.
- Now, click on “Enter New Field” and you should be able to set a name and value for the custom field.
- Set the name to whatever you want, (for example, you can use “seo_title”), give it a random value, and click on “Add Custom Field.” With this, you just created a custom field for the title.
- Using the same process, add two more custom fields for Meta Description and Meta Keywords.
- Once you are done, go back to the Single Post SEO tab and you should see these fields.
- Put the names of the custom fields you just created on the appropriate field.
Now, each time you create a new post or add a new page, you can add custom meta tags for that specific post or page.
These values will be displayed on the SERP when your post comes up. The value you use in those custom fields will be passed to Divi, which will then be passed to the search engine.
Note: Google may or may not accept your input as the meta description. In most cases, it will automatically select a portion of your content to be displayed as the meta description. Also, Google will probably ignore the meta keywords you input and pick them on its own.
Enabling Canonical URLs
Just like your homepage, your posts can also have duplicate URLs, which impacts your search rankings. So, to avoid this from happening, you should enable the canonical URL’s option.
Index Page SEO
There’s a third tab named “Index Page SEO” where you have four options-
In this context, Index Page means the blog page, where all of your posts will be. Using these options, you can enable canonical URL and meta description, and choose an autogeneration method.
Note: With Homepage and Single Post SEO options utilized correctly, Index Page SEO becomes kind of irrelevant. But we recommend enabling the canonical URL’s option.
Divi SEO Optimization Using a Third-Party Plugin
The SEO features of the Divi theme are good but if you want the best results, they may just not be enough. To bridge the gap, there are already a lot of SEO plugins in the WordPress market that can get the job done.
However, not all SEO plugins go well with the Divi theme. So, even if you are up for using an SEO plugin to boost your content, choosing a tool that fits your theme is crucial.
To that end, we have done the research and we found that Rank Math is the best SEO plugin to use with Divi. Other than this, AIOSEO, Yoast SEO, etc. work well too.
To optimize your Divi website with Rank Math, you need to properly install the plugin, then we can get started. Once you set up the plugin, here are the basic steps you can follow to improve your site’s SEO.
After installation, you will see the Rank Math integration within the Divi theme when you enable the builder.
This icon opens the Rank Math SEO window, where you can optimize the SEO of your webpage all in one place.
General Tab
In the Rank Math SEO window under the general, the first thing you should see is a preview. This is the preview of the snippet of your webpage in the Google SERP. Below that, there’s the “Edit Snippet” button.
Also, you can see the overall SEO score of your webpage. The higher the score, the better your content is optimized.
Snippet Editor
by clicking on the “Edit Snippet” button you can open the snippet editor where you can input the title, description, and permalink of your post.
The length indicator on the right side will show the optimal character limit for each option. Try to limit the characters and keep the indicators to the green part.
Content Optimization
Coming back to the Rank Math SEO panel, you will see a field for the “Focus Keyword”. This focus keyword is the most important thing for optimizing your website because Rank Math SEO will make suggestions based on this focus keyword.
Follow these suggestions to get a higher SEO score.
Social Tab
From the social tab, you can edit the thumbnail of your social media post, by adding a custom title, image, and post description.
Schema Tab
Schema markups are codes in the form of structured data that help search engines understand the content better, which you can use from the schema tab.
Using schema markups in your content can increase the chances of your content being featured in rich snippets, which boosts organic search traffic.
To add schema markups, click on the third tab of the Rank Math SEO window and click on Schema Generator.
It will open another window, where you will see two more tabs: Schema Template and Custom Schema. If you are using the free version, you can only use one from a small selection of schema templates. Also, you cannot use custom schemas.
Choose the appropriate schema for your content by clicking on the plus icon, which will take you to the schema editor, where you can input your structured data.
In the tab next to the code editor, you can verify your code, but it’s only available for Pro users.
Rank Math Pro also has other advanced features, which you can use to optimize your Divi website further.
Getting the Most Out of Divi SEO
Apart from the default Divi SEO options, there are some ways you can further optimize your website for search engines.
Setting Up Permalinks
Setting up a permalink structure can provide your website with a consistent, unchanging URL for each post. To set up permalinks-
- Go to your WordPress Dashboard > Settings > Permalinks.
- Set “%postname%” as your permalink structure.
Permalinks are not related to the Divi theme, but it’s very important. Because this URL structure makes it easy for the search engine to find and read the post.
Even WordPress recommends that you set your permalink as the post name.
Using Alt Text For Your Images
To produce top-quality content, the use of images is inevitable and the SEO quality of these images is enhanced by alt text.
Alt text is a short description of an image that will help the search engine crawlers understand the content of the image. Using proper alt text can increase the chances of the image being ranked, which will eventually drive more traffic.
But where do you add alt tags for your images in Divi? Here’s how-
- Enable your visual editor.
- Hover over the image and click on the gear icon to open the image settings.
- Go to Advanced > Attributes and you will find the fields to input image Alt Text and Title text.
Generating an XML Sitemap
Sitemaps are crucial for SEO as they help search engines easily discover and index website content.
They especially help with new or updated content, making sure that the search engines are aware of these changes. Sitemaps are also useful for finding orphaned pages that usually remain undiscovered.
If you have a site with multilingual content, a sitemap will help inform search engines about different language versions. Other than this, HTML sitemaps improve user experience, which leads to longer dwell times and lower bounce rates, improving SEO performance as a result.
Now, creating an XML sitemap could be a hassle, but with Rankmath Pro, you can create one with a couple of clicks.
Mobile Responsive Design
One of Divi’s top features is that you can optimize your site for smaller devices. Sure, it’s great to have different versions of your site for different devices. But, you can gain a lot of SEO benefits from this.
Google gets 99,000 searches per second, and among them, 54% of users use their phones to search on Google.
That’s why Google deems the mobile responsiveness of your site as a vital factor. Otherwise, your site will be hard to navigate via mobile devices.
In the Divi builder, you can click on this phone icon to access different design options for different devices.
Also, you can use these options to see how your design looks on smaller devices.
So, if you haven’t optimized your site for mobile devices, do it ASAP.
Speed Optimization
If your site has lots of bloats and loads slowly, all of your SEO efforts will be in vain.
Google prioritizes user experience, so if your site is slow, it will fall behind on rankings.
That’s why it’s very important to increase the speed of your website.
FURTHER READING: 11 Divi Speed Optimization Guide for Faster Websites
Divi Best SEO Practices Checklist
Up until now, we have discussed some tool-based methods to boost your SEO. But SEO isn’t related to only tools, rather it’s a combination of certain skills and tasks.
To help you get the best possible results, we have some tips on the best SEO practices in the form of a checklist.
Conclusion
With our Divi SEO guide and checklist, we wish you the best of luck in your WordPress journey. Keeping up with the latest trends will help you stay on top of the constantly changing world of SEO.
FURTHER READING:
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