How To Create A WordPress Website [2020] For Beginners + SEO!

– Hey everybody, David and David here from payetteforward.

com and upphone.

com, and in this video we're going to show you how to build a successfulWordPress website in 2020.

Over the last 10 years, thefundamental building blocks of successful websiteshasn't really changed, but the way to build websites has.

– Yep, there are countlesshow to build a website videos on the internet and on YouTube, you've probably seen them.

There are countless webhosting providers like GoDaddy, countless easy-to-use websitebuilders like Wix and Weebly.

There are countless differentways to build websites and it can all be really confusing.

So, all of these platformshave something in common.

They all say, we're goingto show you how to build a professional-qualitywebsite in very little time for very little money andit's all going to work.

but the truth is that mostwebsites actually fail.

So why is it that 94% ofwebsites on the internet, according to an SEO companycalled ahrefs get zero traffic.

94% of new websites fail.

And it's because they justdon't have the key pieces of information in linebefore they get started that will make your website a success.

And we're going to give youthose pieces of information and help you to create a littlebit of a skeleton outline and a plan for your website that's going to make all the difference.

Whether you choose to follow our tutorial or somebody else's or evenif you say this isn't for me, I'm going to go hire aprofessional web designer.

So we do think that you can do it yourself but let's get started withsome of these questions.

– Sure.

– [David P.

] I'm just going tograb a piece of paper and a pen and the first thingI'm going to write down is what is my business.

You know this one.

We're going to make our websitefor a local graphic designer.

– [David L.

] So whatis the number one goal you want to accomplish? – And this comes downto how do I make money? So the way that Stephen, who is the graphic designer, is going to make money ishe's going to get clients.

And yes, this is pretty simple, but it's going to help, you'll see.

– So the next question is:what does a visitor need to do to achieve that goal, in our case, how do I getnew customers or new clients? – And the answer is, they needto fill out the contact form.

– So our third questionis: what does the visitor need to know to accomplish that goal, and in our case it's fillout that contact form.

– [David P.

] So in Stephen's case it's going to be to viewa portfolio of his work.

– They'll also need to beable to find that contact form or some contact information of Stephen's.

– [David P.

] Next they'reprobably going to want to know a little bit about Stephen himself.

And they're also probably goingto want to know his prices.

So we've got our basic questions down and we've got our answersto these questions so the goal is to get new clients.

That's the point of the website.

It's not to have somethingthat looks pretty that nobody ever visits, it's to get new clients, so pretty simple.

We want to people to fillout the contact form, so we want to make that contactform really easy to find.

'cause if the goal is to get new clients, they need to be able to give Stephen their information very easily.

So we're going to keep that inmind as we build the website.

And then we're going to let these things that people need to know be our guiding lightas we create the pages on Stephen's website.

So we're going to create a portfolio.

We're going to have apage for contacting him, we're going to have a pagewith information about Stephen, we're also going to have a pricing page.

So this is how we startto structure our website and this is going to work well for SEO or search engine optimization because Google likesto see different pages with unique topics.

This is going to be a helpful guide as we go along our journeyof creating a website.

So now that we've identifiedthe number one goal of the website, we have to talk about our number two goal which is actually to getpeople to visit the web site.

'Cause what's the point ofhaving a great-looking website if you built it on Wixor Weebly or wherever, and the nobody ever goes to it.

And we're not talkingabout people visiting it who already have your business card or who already go to your store because those peoplealready know about you.

But these are new people, so a lot of people saythe only way to get people to visit a website is in one of two ways.

You can either pay foradvertising in Google, and those are thosesearch results that appear at the top that say ad next to them, or you can pay an SEO company which stands for SearchEngine Optimization to do these magical tricks to your website that will allow them toshow it for free in Google when people type in a certain keyword.

And a keyword in Google nowadayscan be more than one word, it usually is, it's more of a key phrase than a keyword, but we still say keyword in the SEO world.

So the truth is that you do not need to pay somebody to build a website that SEO optimized.

So we're going to show you how to do that.

And just to prove it, we're going to tell you alittle bit about who we are.

We run payitforward.

com and upphone.

com and other local business websites.

And our websites get over 1.

5million people visiting them every single month throughgoogle organic search.

And that means that we know how to set up websites for success, we are not doing anythingblack hat or any tricks, because Google is filled with rooms full of the smartest people in the world and they catch on to every single trick.

Even if it worked for a month or two, it happened to a major hotel chain, I won't mention which one recently, but they got de-listedfrom Google completely because they tried to cheat.

So we don't encourage people to cheat, we do not cheat ourselves.

And we're not going to show you anything that isn't going towork for the long haul.

But before we get into howto get people on the website, we want to show you an example of website that we built a couple of years ago for a local pizza place that didn't even thinkthey needed a website.

They were totally against the idea.

They said we've beendoing this for 40 years, we don't need a website.

And so I actually decidedto build one for them even without their permission.

Because I knew that theycould make a lot more money if they had a very simple website.

And the truth is, we'regoing to show you how to make a website that looksa lot better than this.

But they pay me a dollar for this thing, so I just spent a fewhours and put it together.

Because I knew that if Ijust laid the foundation for a very simple website, that they would get more business.

When I was creating this website, I thought along the samelines as these questions.

The whole point of thiswebsite is to get people to call them and order a pizza.

So I asked myself, whatdoes a visitor need to do? They need to make a phone call, so I made it very easyfor them to do that.

Then I thought, okay whatare they going to need? They're going to want to look at the menu.

So I uploaded pictures of themenu really really simple.

Google analytics is afree platform that tracks who visits your website.

We're going to show youour Google analytics for Clifton Park Pizza andI think you'll be amazed at how much money they actually make from this little website.

This is our goal completionfor the last month, each goal is a telephone call.

So what I did was I said $25 per call, which is probably on the low end of the average order of this place.

But assuming that it's $25 an order we've had 217 phone callsover the last 30 days for a total goal value of $5425.

And you can take a look over here, and this is what's interesting, is the menu page, 150 goal completions.

150 of them would not have called if they didn't have themenu on the website.

So you might not know exactly which page is going to make you all your money yet, but I had a feeling that the visitor was going to need to see a menuin order to make a decision about whether to call, and sure enough they do.

So this proof that having a website actually makes a lot more money than even if this business was showing up in Google without a menu.

– So we've established that you can have a great-looking website that ranks well, gets alot of good search traffic, generates a lot of calls, a lot of money, you don't need an SEO agency, you don't need to pay for advertising.

But what you do needto do are some simple, fundamental things that willmake your website successful.

– And that's what we'regoing to show you how to do in this video becausewe have experience with that.

– [David L.

] So the truth is, there are a lot of cheapwebsite builders out there, like Wix, that get you started for free, but they won't help youaccomplish the goals that you want and you're notgoing to get the traffic, and eventually you're goingto have to actually pay to add your own domain, they make you pay for thingsthat are actually free like analytics, you can setthat up for free using Google.

Wix, you pay for it, if you wantto get rid of Wix native ads, it's not a good investment.

– The web hosting platformthat we're going to recommend is more expensive thanWix and Weebly upfront, but you're going to get a lotmore value from WP Engine.

Because you get free themes, each of which are worth 100 bucks, and you also get free support from real industry professionals and the truth is with any website that you create, you're going to need ahelping hand at some point, even we've had to callfor support at times when something hasn't worked correctly and then we get right through to a person.

Having that support, whichcould cost $100 and hour if you're responsible for it yourself, is just an amazing featurethat's totally worth the 30 bucks a month that we pay.

We actually pay more than that 'cause our websites get more traffic, but that you can pay per month for having a professional website.

And the other thing thatWP Engine will do for you is they have the top tierhosting speeds nobody's faster, and Google loves to see fast websites.

And so do customers.

Think about it, if youclick on something in Google and the page doesn't loadfor five, ten seconds, you're just going to click the back button and get the heck out of there.

So you want your website to be set up for successright from the start and WP Engine is goingto help you do that.

– So we're ready to go, let's dive in.

We have a special coupon from WP Engine, we'll link that in the card above, and the description section below.

The first thing we're going to do is buy that hosting plan, sign up and get going.

– [David P.

] It's reallyeasy to get started with a WP Engine hosting plan.

They've given us an exclusive coupon code that is the best deal theyoffer anywhere on the internet.

It's even better than the deal you'll see in the screen recording.

With the new coupon code, which will be in thedescription section below and also in a card up above, you're not going to get three, but you'll actually get four months free.

So I'm just going to tap see plans, tap get started under startup, then choose annual.

Yes, this is more expensivethan some of the other web hosting providers out there.

But you get free themes, free SSL certificates, the fastest web hosting out there, and free support.

I recommend not checkingany of these just yet, at some point you may decideto add some of these features, but it's not necessarily off the bat.

Fill in your email, yourfirst and last name, and then choose an account name.

This does not have to be your domain name that you end up using, I just chose mullinaxartbecause we're building a website for a graphic designer who'sname is Stephen Mullinax.

Then just enter yourcredit card information.

And check the box that says, “I have read and agreed “to the terms and serviceand privacy policy” and click create mysite here at the bottom.

– [David L.

] So we just signed up for our WP Engine hosting plan, and we're going to create oursite and start building it.

– [David P.

] Let's tap sitesin the upper left hand corner.

And then tap add siteon the right hand side.

We'll call this Stephen Mullinaxsince that is the person we're making it for.

Click add site.

And now create new.

This name is up to youand it doesn't have to be your final domain name, it probably won't be.

So we'll choose mullinaxart, which is available andclick create environment.

And that's the first step.

So what we're going to getis an email from WP Engine.

– [David L.

] So the emailhas arrived in our inbox.

– [David P.

] Click on that.

– [David L.

] Might take acouple minutes to arrive.

– [David P.

] And here'sthe address of our website and the username is mullinaxart.

And just click log in to WP Admin and that will redirect usto a lost password page 'cause we have toactually set our password.

I'll tap get new password.

Now we have to go back to our email.

Password reset.

We're going to tap this link, it's going to suggest a password to us, which we're going to keep.

Tap reset password.

– [David L.

] You probably justwant to copy that password down on the notes app on your computer.

– [David P.

] Now we willlog in with our username and password and tap log in.

And we're in the WordPress backend.

In WordPress, you can justclick this house button up here to click visit site and then this is whatit looks like right now, but it's going to look like this for long.

And then to get back to the dashboard, which is where you make the edits, just tap up here again.

– [David L.

] So the firstthing we're going to do is select a theme.

That is the look and feel of your website.

– [David P.

] So hover yourmouse over WP Engine on the left and then just click on user portal.

And then at the top click themes.

And there are themes herefor just about every type of business.

If you want to have a blog witha lot of different articles, you might want to check out magazine pro.

And you can click on anyof these to view a demo.

For our purposes, we're making a websitefor a graphic designer, and we liked this theme, essence pro the most.

So, I'm just going to X out of this tab and click download here.

– [David L.

] Next we're goingto need to download Genesis which is the framework we needto actually use these themes on our website.

– [David P.

] So we'lljust scroll to the top and click download next to Genesis.

So for any of these StudioPress these, as David said, we need to have the Genesis Framework and then any of thesetheme packages below.

And we're going to installboth of them the same way, so I'll tap back to the dashboard.

And then mouse over appearanceand click on themes.

Then click add new.

And click upload theme.

Then choose choose file.

This is going to end upin our downloads folder and first we're going to install Genesis, so I'll just tap on that and click open and then click install now.

And then I'm going toclick return to themes page and then click add new.

And click upload theme.

Choose file again, andnow do the essence pro which is the child themein WordPress lingo.

Click install now.

And now just click activate.

Then click set up your website.

– [David L.

] So as wesaid, themes are the way that your website looks and feels whereas plugins give it customizebility, gives it some functionality, as you can see here.

The recommended pluginsthat were installed are Atomic Blocks and WPForms Lite.

That Forms Lite pluginlet's you do things like create a contact form on your website.

– [David P.

] So it says, all done.

Your website setup is complete View or edit your homepageusing the buttons below.

let's first just view the homepage to see what it looks like now.

And this is a far cry fromthe way that it looked just a second ago.

When you install this theme, it gives you a lot ofgreat starter content that we're going to work from.

And we're not going to keep all of it, but this is a really beautifulwebsite, and a great start.

So, let's click on David Payette blog in the upper left hand corner.

It's just pulling that becauseI'm the one who signed up for the WP Engine account.

– [David L.

] So we're going tostart by going to customizer, and that's where you canreally edit a lot of the stuff that you're seeing on agiven WordPress web page.

– [David P.

] I'll justhover over appearance and click customize.

And this will show us a previewof the page on the right, and give us a bunch of settings that we can edit on the left.

First, site identity.

The site title, it's important to giveyour site a site title, even if you're going touse a logo, which we are.

Because Google won't be ableto read what the logo says but it will know what the site title says.

So I'm going to callthis Stephen Mullinax.

And the tagline, which isalso important for Google, graphic designer, illustrator, and art director.

– [David L.

] Now if you want to do a logo, you could click on select logo up here.

– [David P.

] Click select files or you can just drag and drop files in.

So this is the Stephen Mullinax folder, I hit the logos folder.

And this site logo withthe transparent background is the one that I want to use, I'm just dragging this in.

And I can just click select inthe bottom right hand corner.

And it's going to askme to crop the image.

This is Stephen's logo.

Then I'll tap crop image.

And we're going to see it's too big, how do we change it? – [David L.

] We click on change logo, click on the logo we just uploaded, and click on edit image, right there.

– [David P.

] All right soit's too big right now, let's try to 280 wide, I just click scale.

And then we're going to click update in the bottom right hand corner.

And I'm just going toX out of this window, which will bring meback to the customizer.

And since we just edited that image, we actually need to reload this page.

Tap command R or control R on a PC.

Under site identity now, you'll see that we lostwhat we just put in, but you can just clickrestore the auto save and back it will come, WordPress is good at that.

So I can click here toedit this logo again, just tap on change logo, click on the logo again, and this time when I clickselect, it'll be a lot smaller.

I have to crop the image again.

Choose crop image.

Perfect.

– [David L] There we go.

– [David P.

] Let's tap back.

– [David L] So next we're going to change the header background image, right now we're seeing the blond woman.

Stephen is not a blond woman, so we want to change that image and we're going to do that byclicking on Essence Pro settings.

Header background image.

And we're going to add a new image.

– [David P.

] All right, so once again, just going to to upload files, and this time I'll justclick select files.

And I can go to desktop andit'll bring up Stephen's folder.

And we want to use anexample of Stephen's artwork to be our background image.

So what we're going to use is actually in the dark crystal folder and on Mac you can just click space bar to make any of these bigger.

And then click space baragain to make it smaller.

And we liked this one.

– [David L.

] Yes.

– [David P.

] So just clickspace bar to make it smaller and tap open.

This is going to take a minute to upload.

What's great about WordPress too is that it's going to take this image, which is actually verylarge and compress it into a smaller size.

All right, I'll just say select and crop.

And I'll drag this cropbox so that it's centered.

Choose crop image.

– [David L] Great, lookingmuch better already.

– [David P] Looks like Stephen.

So the next thing we wantto do is edit this text underneath the live the life you deserve, which we're going to change in a minute.

So, we don't it to sayjoin our weekly newsletter and get our best articles, I just tapped this blue pencil icon.

Stephen wrote some stuff for us that he wants us to put in.

So let's open that up, it'sin a little text document.

Stephen Mullinax is a graphicdesigner, art director, I'm just going to do somecopying and pasting here.

Looking good.

– [David L] So as you can seethere are two buttons here and we need to think to ourselves, what are the two most importantthings we want people to do when they visit the website.

Number one, obviously contact Stephen so we can get some new clients, and number two is to stay incontact through an email list.

– [David P] So the firstone is already set up to be a newsletter.

And this actually is going to link us to the bottom of the page with this easy-to-setup newsletter box, which we really like.

So I'll just scroll back up here.

Instead of join us today, we're going to make it a little simpler, let's just say, get the newsletter.

And the second one is going to be instead of get more info, it'sgoing to say contact Stephen.

Under URL, even though thispage doesn't exist yet, we're going to just add slash and then as a forward slash contact.

Because we know we're goingto set up a contact page in a couple of minutes.

And now this will be all set to go.

I'll just tap publish.

You can tap publish up here at the top to save your work at any time.

You'll see here thatthere are some blog posts that are being automatically inserted, which is great, we'regoing to change these.

And then we've got our joinour weekly newsletter box down here and we can edit that as well.

– [David L] So there's onelast thing we want to do before we leave customizer and that is to editthe link in the footer.

We don't want that link there because it is bad for SEO.

– [David P] All this stuffdown here is no good.

So we'll just tap back.

And then back again.

And then come on downhere to theme settings and then footer.

This looks a little icky, what you need to do isjust take out everything after the closing bracket after copyright, so it just needs to look like that.

And then you'll see copyright 2019.

– [David L] And then here ifyou want to type in the name of your website, for us Stephen Mullinax, that'll show up next to thelittle copyright symbol there.

– [David P] Right, copyright2019, Stephen Mullinax.

This is called a short code in WordPress, and it's a cool thing because it's actuallyautomatically going to update the year every year, so your copyright is alwaysgoing to be up to date.

And I can just tap publish again.

One last thing we want to point out, I'll just head back once more back again to the main custominzer menu, is that the theme SEP settings here are not something thatwe're going to enter.

We're going to use Yoast SEO to enter SEO settingsfor the entire website because Yoast is thebest plugin out there.

– [David L] So next, let'sgo to the pages section of WordPress and set up the homepage.

If you see the publishbutton grayed out like that and you can't click on it, that means all the changesthat you made have been saved, you're up to date, you're good, you can click that X in the upper left handcorner of the screen.

– [David P] Okay click on that, and now we're going toedit that homepage right? – [David L] Yeah.

– [David P] So tap pageson the left hand side, and you'll know whichpage is the home page because it says front page here.

Just click where it sayslive the life you deserve, these are the page titles.

And we're going to changethis to Stephen Mullinax.

I'll just click update here.

And then click view page.

And we can see that we'vealready changed this and it's starting to look like a website for Stephen already.

– [David L] It sure is.

– [David P] Got his logo, got some information, we've got contact, get the newsletter.

So let's keep editing.

I'll just got back to where we were before by clicking edit page at the top.

So this is the WordPress editor.

Up here at the top is the page title, and then everything you seeunderneath here are blocks, which is new in WordPress in 2019.

There are all sorts ofdifferent types of blocks.

This type, when I mouse over it, you see AB which stands for Atomic Blocks and that comes for free with WP Engine.

AP post and page grid which means that it'spulling in blog posts from the post section overhere that we're going to get to in a second.

And you can see all theblocks that are available just by clicking the plus in the circle up here and you can alsoadd blocks this way.

There are all sorts ofgreat ones from images to image galleries.

And then you can scrolldown and see things like under the Atomic Blocks whereyou can have testimonials and drop caps and newsletters and columns and pricing tablesand sorts of great stuff.

So I'm just going to click out of this.

And the only thing that we need to update is the weekly newsletter text.

So we don't want it to sayjoin our weekly newsletter, or get our best articlesabout body mind and spirit 'cause this is Stephen's website and he's a graphic designer.

So what he would like us to put here is insight for graphics pros, just copy and paste this in here.

Probably look better ifit was capitalized right? – [David L] I would say so.

– [David P] And then, thisis going to go underneath, join our community of professionals.

And then it says you must define your newsletter provider API keys, this is really easy to do, we're going to do it at the end.

Just tap update here.

And then I'll click view page and we can see that we'vegot Stephen's name in here.

We still got our blog poststhat were automatically added, but we're going to change those next.

And then we've gotinsights for graphics pros, join our community where people can enter their email address and subscribe and this is one way that Stephenis going to stay in touch with people who he wantsto sell his art to.

– [David L] It's greatif you have a business for building leads.

People subscribe to your email newsletter, those might be potentialcustomers down the road.

– [David P] So back up to the top.

And let's go back to themain WordPress dashboard.

Just click up here whereit says Stephen Mullinax which is the site name.

Now let's dive into blog posts.

I'll click posts on the left.

– [David L] So by default this theme comes with a handful of poststhat we don't need.

You can click inside of them to see how a post isstructured if you wanted to.

We don think you need to.

What we're going to do is deleteall of these posts right now.

– [David P] So I'll clickthis check box at the top to left of the title, we're just going to select all of them.

I'm going to click on bulkactions, move to trash, and click apply.

Now we've got no posts in here.

And you'll notice, if wego to the home page, quick, all the posts that were here are now gone.

So I'll just tap the back button.

And we're back to the posts and let's add a new post.

In WordPress it's importantto explain the difference between posts and pages.

Pages in WordPress arepieces of static content that never change.

Like your contact page, or your home page or an about page, those thingsare going to stay the same.

Posts on the other hand arepieces of timely content that are arranged chronologicallyin WordPress by default.

– [David L] Posts arefor more timely content like a blog post that you just wrote, or in our case, an art portfolio.

– [David P] So let's tap add new, because we are going to startto build Stephen's portfolio.

Next let's open up thefolder that Stephen gave us, it's in the desktop.

I'll just click on Stephen Mullinax and portfolio.

And in here is a documentcalled portfolio page text.

And then a bunch offolders with images inside.

So we're going to startby taking the title and copying and pastethat here into add title.

And then we're going to copyand paste the body text, just copy that.

Click in here where it says start writing and paste it in there, it's command V on a Mac, control V on a PC.

It's command C to copy, control C on a PC to copy.

– [David L] So we want toactually cut this paragraph in half, it's pretty long, a pretty big wall of text.

So why don't we cut it in half right at the guidelines developed were.

– [David P] All right soI'm just going to click here and tap the enter key on my keyboard and there you go.

And in WordPress we've gotthe page title at the top as we've said, and then we've got blocks.

This is a paragraph block andthis is a paragraph block.

– [David L.

] So the nextthing we're going to do is actually add images to this portfolio by clicking the plus buttonin the upper left hand corner of the screen.

And since we have multiple what we're going to wantto do is select gallery.

If you have a single image, you can just choose image.

– [David P.

] So it says dragimages, upload new ones, or select files.

Dragging seems the easiest to me.

We just come over here and highlight these all at once, I can hold shiftand click on the last one.

Drag 'em all in.

And you can see that allof these are uploading at the same time.

– [David L] Yep, and just likethe image on the homepage, WordPress will compress these images and make the file sizes smaller.

– [David P] When each onefinishes it's going to be replaced by the full-color version of the image.

This might take a minute or two depending on how bigthese images actually are.

– [David L] So as you can see, these images are pretty small, we want to display this artwork, so what we're going to dois go to the column section under gallery settings andmake it a single-column block.

– [David P.

] All right.

– [David L.

] Now theimages are much bigger, much easier to see and thatartwork is on full display.

– [David P.

] If you wantedto remove one of these images or add a caption to it, you just click on that image and then click on that X button.

And, I'm actually goingto remove this one image and I'll show you why.

Just going to click X here to remove that.

And I'll tap publish and publish again.

And I want to show you what it looks like before we continue editing this page.

We'll just tap view post.

You can see it has the samebackground as our homepage, which is a great background, but since this is a portfolio page, we probably want to havea more specific image.

And you can also see thatwe've got our two paragraphs that we created here attop, which look great.

And a whole bunch of imagesthat also look great.

And then a comments section where people can actuallycomment on these posts.

So I'm going to go back to the post editor by clicking edit posts at the top.

And the way that we're goingto edit that image at the top is to add a featured image to this post.

So I'm going to tap onfeatured image over here on the right hand side, click on set feature to image, and then we can see all of the artwork that we've uploaded already.

This is the one.

I'm just going to clickselect on the right hand side, and then I'm going to click update.

And then view post.

And that looks really awesome.

The Center for PuppetryArts Selected Works.

And this is already looking really good.

But there are a few thingsthat we need to clean up.

And we're going to do that.

So first, this says uncategorized, this is because each post canhave one or more categories.

So I'm going to go back to edit post.

And we want to create acategory called portfolio.

I'm just going to click add new category.

And you could create othercategories, too at this time, but we don't have to.

I'm just going to uncheck uncategorized which is going to takeit out of the category, and then click update.

Click view post again, now we can see this is partof Stephen's portfolio.

Next thing we see that we want to change is that it says November6th, 2019 by Mullinax Art, we want this to say Stephen Mullinax.

So to do that, see where it says howdy, Mullinax Art up here, just click edit my profile.

Going to add my first name whichis actually Stephen Mullinax.

And then display namepublicly as Stephen Mullinax.

Scroll to the bottom, click update profile and now I'm just going toclick back a couple of times.

Then I'm going to refresh the page.

And you can see that it's in the portfolio by Stephen Mullinax.

– [David L.

] So the next thingwe want to fix on this webpage is that URL, right now it says ?p=39.

That is not what we want, we probably want something along the lines of Center forPuppetry Arts Selected Works.

– [David P.

] Absolutely, andthis is really good for Google.

This is a hugely important SEO point that David's talking about.

The way we're going to do thisis to click Stephen Mullinax at the top here to go backto the WordPress dashboard, and then we're going to comeon down here to settings and then permalinks.

Permalinks in WordPressare everything that appears after the domain name.

The domain name right nowis mullinaxart.

wpengine.

com and we're going to createour own domain name which is our own .

com after the fact, this is just building the website.

Everything that goes afterthe .

com is the permalink.

So by default it has this plain setting which is the ?p for post, = the post number and it's useless.

What it really should be is the post name.

So I'll just tap post name.

And then click save changes at the bottom.

– [David L.

] So now wecan go back to posts, scroll over our blog post and click view.

And you'll see that URLthat permalink is now what we want it to be.

– [David P.

]Center-for-Puppetry-Arts-Selects-Works.

There can't be any spacesin website addresses, so WordPress is smart enough to go ahead and fill in those gaps with dashes, which is exactly what Google wants to see.

And that is extremely important to do.

So this is looking pretty good.

Let's go to the homepage.

And check this out.

So we just created this blog post and now it's showing up looking awesome on the homepage with get thenewsletter, contact Stephen, we've got insights, looking pretty good.

– [David L.

] So we justset up that one post, what we're going to do next isgo into the WordPress dashboard and set up a few more posts, we'll fast forward through this part and when we come back, they'll be a few more posts in our page.

– [David P.

] Right, I'm justgoing to click new and then post.

We just finished settingup our second post, but before we move on, we want to show you how to create a block to help accomplish one of our main goals of the whole website, which is to get people to contact Stephen.

We want to make that as easy as possible for people to do no matter where they are.

And one of the times they'llprobably want to do that is after they see howawesome Stephen's artwork is.

So down here at the bottom, I can just tap this add block button, and then I'm going to comedown here to Atomic Blocks and choose AB call to action.

And I get this cool little box.

And Stephen had some text thathe wanted us to put in here.

So Stephen would like us to say let's talk here in the title, justcopy and paste that in.

And then it says shoot me amessage, I'd love to talk to you about we can transformyour brand, which is cool.

Copy and paste that in there.

Button text.

Let's just say contact me.

And then this is the URL of that button, which is going to be, juststart typing in contact and you're going to findthis contact us page.

All set, done.

Click that little buttonto apply the change, and now click publish.

Now I can just click view post.

We'll see that we've gotthis awesome featured image at the top with Stephen'sartwork down here.

And then this let's talk button.

And if you click contact me, it comes to this contact page, which we can edit, andwe're going to edit this.

You know what, let's justedit it real quick, right now.

Tap edit page at the top.

Stephen wanted us to addone sentence before the form and if I mouse over the form, I get this little plus sign, just tap that for add block.

We're going to choose paragraph which is just the regular old text block.

And then I'm going to paste in: you can reach me at stephen@mullinax.

co for work inquiries or to just say hi.

You might not want to haveyour email address in here, but Stephen does.

The other change make is, instead of contact us, we'rejust going to say contact me.

'cause there's no us, it's just Stephen.

– [David L.

] View the page, as you can see it now says contact me, you cansee that first sentence right above the contact form.

Anyone could fill that out, click submit, get in contact with Stephen and hopefully work togetherwith some awesome art.

– [David P.

] Just to goback to the homepage, we see we now have two blog posts in here which are both part of Stephen's portfolio that people can thenclick on and start to see what is in here.

– [David L.

] So as you can seeat the bottom of this post, we have our call to action Atomic Block, let's talk, contact me.

And we don't want tohave to set up this block every single time we make a new post.

So what we can do is we canmake it a reusable block so that way we justhave to click one button and it's set up.

– [David P.

] I'm going togo back into the post editor by clicking edit post at the top.

And I'll scroll down tothe Atomic Block itself, just click on that, and thenclick these three little dots which are more options, and then tap add to reusable blocks.

And give it a name, we'll justcall it the let's talk block.

And click save.

Now it's going to be reallyeasy to add this section to every future blog post.

So let's keep making blog posts.

– [David L.

] So now that we'veset up some portfolio posts, we want to show you how to set up what might be a more traditional blog post that's mostly text.

Stephen sent us over alittle bit of a sample post and we're going to show youhow to set that up right now.

– [David P.

] So what we have from Stephen is an image that hewants to be part of it, the featured image, and the title and a bunch of text.

So I'm just going to copy andpaste in the text for the title.

Top Four Tips For Graphic Designers.

And then I'm going to copy and paste in all the rest of it at once.

The reason this says H2 is that these are supposed to be headings, and all text on the internetis structured a certain way and it's actually pretty simple.

There are paragraphs which iswhat everything is right now, and then there are six levels of headings.

H1 is the primary heading andthat is always the page title and there should alwaysonly be one H1 on a page.

H2s are subheadings thatgo underneath the H1s.

So, this is paragraph andthen this should be H2.

So I can get rid of this whole H2 thing, I think Stephen just wanted us to know that that should be an H2.

And then I can click on this, click on change block type, and then click heading.

And then H2 is preselected, I could select H3 or H4.

You should never reallyuse an H5 or an H6.

It's pretty much unnecessary.

Do the same thing here, learn to use PhotoShop.

– [David L.

] Now let'ssay you weren't happy with your top four tips.

You wanted to switch tips oneand two, reverse the order.

It's actually pretty easyto move these blocks around.

You can just go over tothe left side of the block and you'll see the arrows tomove them up and down on block, or you can use that little six dot button and drag 'em up and down.

There you go, super easyto rearrange the content using WordPress blocks.

– [David P.

] Couple more things to do, just click document over here on the right to get back to the maindocuments settings.

We want to add this to our blog category, which we created forthe regular blog posts.

And we also want to add a featured image.

And let's see.

Stephen gave us one.

Best tips for graphic designers.

Just dragging this in here tothe featured image section.

Tap select and click publish.

And publish.

Now we can view this post.

Looks great.

– [David L.

] Yeah.

Start scrolling down, seethe intro, all the headings.

One thing we forgot here isour reusable Atomic Block for the contact form, so what we're going to dois go back to edit post.

So now we'll click add block using that plus button over there.

– [David P.

] Scroll down to reusable.

Let's talk block, clickon that, there it is.

But not everybody's goingto get all the way down here to the bottom of the post, let's actually move this up a little bit.

And it's going to breakup the post nicely.

Let's put it right in the middle.

– [David L.

] Perfect.

– [David P.

] Nice little ad for Stephen there inthe middle of the post, click update.

View post.

Looking good.

– [David L.

] Looks good, and as you can see, that permalink structureis exactly what we want, it is the title of the post.

– [David P.

] Right, Top FourTips For Graphic Designers.

Let's take a look here at the homepage.

And what we're going to see is that it's a little bit disorganized, but it's starting to look really good.

And this is looking really good.

This is just a regular blog post, this is another regular blog post, portfolio posts, read more, insights for graphic pros, but really I think thatwe can organize this a little bit better.

So let's go to edit page.

So if I move my mouse over themiddle of any of these blocks and just click on it, on the right hand side, I get block settings.

So as David said, at the top, we want to have just portfolio posts.

And the way we're going to do this is choose a category.

Instead of displaying allcategories at the top, we want to have portfolio.

And instead of just two items, let's add three, let'smake it three items.

With three columns.

– [David L.

] Looking good.

– [David P.

] Pretty good.

Post and page grid content here.

It looks a little cluttered.

We don't really need it tohave the author and the date, so om just going to get rid ofdisplay author and display date.

Looking really good.

Now down here, let's make these just blog posts.

But there are only twoblog posts which is fine.

It says that no posts are found, but what we need to do is where it says number of items to offset, this means that it's actually skipping the first two blog postsand there are only two.

So I'm just going to dragthis to the left to zero.

Now we see our blog posts.

Let's change this to two items.

We want two columns.

And then under post and page grid content we want it to show the author and the date and the excerpt.

And a continue reading link.

– [David L.

] Great.

– [David P.

] Looking pretty good to me.

And the excerpt link looks a little long.

And we're going to displaythis continue reading link.

I'll just tap update here at the top.

Click view page.

– [David L.

] So we havesuccessfully organized the homepage the way we want it, but we don't want these links to say continue reading on the portfolio.

We'd rather have them saysomething like view portfolio 'cause that way they knowthere are more images to view.

So let's go back to edit page, and we'll click on that top block again.

– [David P.

] Then on the right hand side under post and page grid content, come on down here to the bottom, instead of continue reading, we're just going to say viewportfolio and click update.

And you can say that it's stillgoing to say continue reading down here 'cause thisis a different block.

View page.

Then people can click on anyof these to view the portfolio, learn more and see this, and I added the let's talk box.

And people can actuallyleave comments too.

Right now, this websiteis looking pretty good.

There's one more minorissue we need to address on the homepage and it'sthis read more posts link.

We want this to say view my portfolio and then link to a list of all of Stephen's portfolio blog posts.

– [David L.

] Yeah becauseright now on the homepage, not every portfolio is being displayed, not every single projectis being displayed and we want people to havean easy way to view them all and this button is a great way to do that.

– [David P.

] Let's just tap edit page.

Come on down to read moreposts, click on that.

First we can click into read more posts and change this to view my portfolio.

And second we need to linkto the portfolio category we created.

Here's a little WordPress trick.

Type slash and then type category and then type slash again, and then the name of thecategory which is portfolio, tap this little apply button here.

And click update.

Click on view page, we'll just test this outto make sure it works.

Click on view my portfolio and here we are in the portfolio where people can see allof Stephen's projects and everything in this portfolio category.

[David L.

] So the next thingwe want to do is take a look at this menu.

Right now you can see blockexamples and landing page.

We don't need those in our menu.

They're interesting if you'venever used WordPress before to click on those pages and see how those pages are structured, but we don't need them for our website.

– [David P.

] No, we certainly do not.

Now let's do some housekeeping.

I'll tap Stephen Mullinax inthe upper left hand corner to go back to the WordPress dashboard.

Then I'm going to tap on pages and we're going to see of all these.

So contact me, that one's staying.

Block contact examples, that is not staying.

So we're going to click trash.

Landing page is not staying, we're going to click trash.

The pricing page is going to stay 'cause we're going to turnthis into our services page.

If we tap view, I can just show you whatit looks like right now.

We see pricing page.

There's a two-column layout, a three-column layout and a four-column layout allof which are pretty beautiful.

We're just going to choosethe three-column layout because Stephen has threedifferent options for pricing.

Let's set it up.

– [David L.

] All right soclick edit page at the top of the screen.

And the first thing we're going to do is just get rid of the two-column packages and the four-column packages 'cause we don't need those.

– [David P.

] So I canclick into this block and then tap the three vertical dots to bring up more optionsand click remove block.

Same deal, click into here.

Remove block.

Next we've got threecolumns which is actually what we want to keep, so I'll just remove what's underneath here with four columns.

So now all we have on thispage are three columns which is a heading.

We don't want it to say three columns and we've got the pricing page.

Let's start with the page title.

So, let's say services.

Stephen gave us a little bitof copy for this page too.

Let's take a look.

So he wanted us to put: forbusinesses of shapes and sizes here underneath services.

And now we're going edit these packages.

– [David L.

] So package number one, Stephen has said is the starter package.

– [David P.

] So I copied this in and it's not bold, so Ican just re-highlight it and choose bold.

Package number two is called professional.

Okay so we have successfully added all of Stephen's information.

And we do have to hook upthese get started buttons.

We're just going tostart typing in contact, because we want to sendpeople to the contact page.

Contact me.

Contact me.

Contact.

All right, now let's clickupdate and choose view page.

We got services.

And now people will beable to click on this to get in touch with Stephen.

Just tap back.

You'll notice that theseedit buttons are down here, this is just a littleshortcut that appears for you when you're logged in.

This will not appear for people that are visiting your website, so don't worry about that.

Next let's update the about page.

So we want to have a littlebit of information here about Stephen himself.

Just going to tap edit page.

So Stephen gave us some information that he wants us to put on the page.

It says meet Stephen Mullinax.

Actually that's what hewanted the page to be called.

Does that work for you? – [David L.

] That works for me.

It's up to him.

– [David P.

] It's up to him.

And then, this is the textthat he wanted to be in here.

I can see, hello, this is the default, I'm just going to ridof this little block.

And see where it says about, here? I'm going to be a little creative.

I'm going to take this, hellomy name is Stephen Mullinax and just hello my nameis Stephen Mullinax.

I'm a graphic designer and illustrator.

And then there's contact us, we don't want this to be contact us.

Because we have a separate contact page.

So what I want to do isI'm going to take this out, remove this block.

Remove this block.

Remove this block.

And put a picture ofStephen in here instead.

So I'll just tap on here and then click the add block button.

And then instead of doing gallery, 'cause there's only one image, I'm just going to click on image, upload.

Stephen Mullinax.

Images of Stephen.

And it's this one.

– [David L.

] There he is.

– [David P.

] Nice little work image.

What a good-looking guy.

And I'll just tap update, go to view page.

Meet Stephen Mullinax.

And here he is.

– [David L.

] So as you can see, we still have the default featured image, that wintery background.

Doesn't really apply to our website, so we're going to get ridof that and tap edit page.

– [David P.

] Over hereunder featured image.

– [David L.

] Replace image.

– [David P.

] And there was onethat I thought would be cool.

This one.

And we'll tap update.

And view page.

There we go.

– [David L.

] Pretty cool-looking.

– [David P.

] Hello myname is Stephen Mullinax.

– [David L.

] So onething we notice here is that the menu item meet StephenMullinax is a bit too long.

Fortunately, we can changethe name of the menu item without changing the name of the page.

– [David P.

] Let's come overhere to Stephen Mullinax and this is how we getto the dashboard usually, but just come on downhere and click on menus.

And you can see here that we'regoing to see some warnings because we deleted these pages.

So WordPress isn'tdisplaying this anymore.

We can just click on thedown arrow next to the page, and click remove.

The down arrow next to thepage again, click remove.

So we've got home, whichalways a good idea to have.

Meet Stephen Mullinax.

We're going to changethe navigation label, which is what it appears, to about.

And we've got contact me, this can simply be contact.

And services.

Now these aren't really inthe right order, either, so we're going to dragservices up here to the top.

Or actually, let's make about second.

Home, about Stephen, thenwe're going to have a services and then contact.

But, we also want people to be able to get tohis portfolio from here.

So, those aren't pages, but that's the category.

So let's first add aportfolio category to the menu and drag it up here next to services.

And then we'll add ablog category to the menu and drag it up here under portfolio.

At the bottom, we can see that this menu is being displayed in the header, but let's also put it in the footer.

So that way if people are atthe bottom of the website, they can also easily getwherever they want to go and contact Stephen which isreally what it's all about.

I'll click save menu.

– [David L.

] Now let's go to the website and see what it looks like.

– [David P.

] All right.

Home, about, services, portfolio, blog, contact.

– [David L.

] And if we scroll down.

You'll see all of those itemsin the footer menu as well.

– [David P.

] Right, so Ican go to his services, say okay, for businessesof all shapes and sizes.

Go to his about, learn alittle bit about Stephen here.

I can take a look at his portfolio.

Dive deeper into each of these.

And then contact him.

What a great website.

– [David L.

] Yeah, we'revery functional at this point and now we're going to startinstalling some plugins to help you get even more out of it.

So the next thing we're going to do is install Yoast SEO that is a search engineoptimization plugin.

It's really going to help yourwebsite improve its presence in search engines such as Google.

– [David P.

] So let'stap on Stephen Mullinax in the upper left hand corner, the name of the website.

And come down here to plugins.

And just hover overthat and click add new.

We're going to install a fewplugins as we said before.

Themes control how your website looks, plugins control how your website works and add functionality.

Yoast is Y-O-A-S-T.

Yoast SEO.

To install a plugin, just click install now.

And then click activate.

That's it.

We see that we get a newnotification here at the top and also you'll see thatan SEO menu has appeared down here in the bottom lefthand corner of the screen.

If we click on that, we'regoing to be able to go through our first time SEO configuration wizard.

So let's just do that.

We're going to choose option B because my site is under construction and should not be indexed.

Click next.

This is a small offline business.

Does your site represent aperson or an organization? We're going to say it represents a person.

And the name of the personis Stephen Mullinax.

This is appearing becausewe set this up before in the users section.

Tap next.

Search engine visibility.

This is going to talkabout which pages show up in search engines.

So posts and pages we'regoing to say yes to.

Will the site have multiple authors? We're going to say no.

– [David L.

] So for website name, you'll probably want to choosethe name of your business here like if you got a pizza shop, it'd Clifton Park Pizza, for us, Stephen's website, we'll leave it asStephen Mullinax for now.

And for title separator, wedo like the vertical line the most 'cause it takes upthe least amount of space in Google.

– [David P.

] Tap next.

Continue learning, you canget this free MyYoast account, we're going to skip thatfor now, we don't need that.

Tap next.

You've done it.

Now I'm just going to tap close.

And Yoast is set up.

Here it says we have a huge SEO issue, you're blocking access to robots.

We're going to fix this, robots meaning search engines.

We're going to fix this afterwe hook up the domain name.

We don't want google to indexmullinaxart.

wpengine.

com, we want them to index our own .

com.

So that's why we choseto not index it just yet.

– [David L.

] So there's acouple more advanced settings we need to tinker with in Yoast, so first click on search appearance.

And then click on the taxonomies tab at the top of the screen.

– [David P.

] Now we want to turn off the show categories in search results.

Because what happens inWordPress a lot of the time, is the same content thatappears on a category page is also the content ofthe blog post itself.

Sometimes a category page can get indexed when a blog post itself should be indexed.

Just take our word for it, this is going to saveyou a lot of headaches and this is one area wherea lot of people go wrong when they're building websites.

This is something we dofor all of our websites.

We're also going to clickon tags and turn that off.

And formats and turn that off.

Save changes.

Next, go over to archives.

Author archives are already disabled, but we also want todisable the date archives.

Click save changes.

Now you'll notice that nothing changes in the front end of the website.

But we've given Google anidea of what we want to index.

For instance, this is a category page.

This page is not goingto show up in Google, but it doesn't have to.

Because all these pages, which are posts, are going to show up in Google.

And that's exactly the way it should be.

– [David L.

] So nowthat we've set up Yoast, we're going to show you acouple things with Yoast to improve your SEOstarting with the homepage.

– [David P.

] So let'sgo back to the homepage.

Let's click on the logo.

And then I'm going totap edit page up here.

As David said, now thatwe've installed Yoast, underneath each page and post, we're going to get this Yoast SEO box.

With a snippet preview.

And this is what it's goingto look like in Google.

Right now it says Stephen Mullinax and then we have our pipeand then Stephen Mullinax.

– [David L.

] Not ideal.

– [David P.

] No.

So the reason it says that is the formula for Yoastis the title of the page and then that separator, which is the up and down line or pipe.

And then the site title, which is Stephen Mullinax.

So, this page is called Stephen Mullinax 'cause it's our homepage.

But let's just call it, I'm just going to takeout the title of the page, graphic design servicein Atlanta, Georgia.

Usually when you're looking at this box, the default setting is going to be fine, but it's the homepage and the homepage is the exceptionto the rule in WordPress.

We can also take this slug out of here, this is just leftoverfrom the sample homepage that we imported and thenit replaces it automatically with Stephen Mullinax.

You can just leave that the way it is.

And then meta description.

So meta description is whatappears below the title in Google search results.

And Yoast is really cool.

It tells you how long the title should be with this little green barthat goes across the screen.

And it's going to do the samething for the meta description.

– [David L.

] So that's apretty good start for us, pretty simple.

We've got the green barin both the SEO title and the meta description.

Looking pretty good here.

Let's just update this page.

– [David P.

] And nowI will click view page to go and look at it in the front end.

And you'll see that nothingchanged in the front end.

But, just to give you a quick idea of what this actually does, in Google structured data testing tool, which is a technical thing, you don't have to know how this works, but just check this out.

Description, this is where Google reads the description of the page.

This wouldn't appearif Yoast wasn't there.

Also the name of the page is graphic design servicesin Atlanta, Georgia, Stephen Mullinax, we enteredthat in Yoast as well.

And then Yoast also fillsin all this other stuff which has to do withidentifying the website and who created it.

Let's head back.

This can really make or break your website in Google search.

– [David L.

] So we've prettymuch set up our website at this point.

There's a few more stepswe need to complete.

So let's go to the portfolio page.

– [David P.

] What you'll see here is that underneath entryis the entire blog post.

We just want the portfolioto be an overview of the posts that peoplecan then just click into to view all the content.

So, this is a pretty easy switch.

Just going to click on customize.

And let's go to theme settings.

And content archives.

Portfolio is a type of archive, categories are archives in WordPress.

And instead of having the entireentry content being shown, let's just change this to entry excerpts.

And now we can see that itjust takes the beginning of each post, PayetteForward, Good Electric.

And now people can just scrollright through the portfolio.

If they want to go to a specific post, they can just click on it.

I'll tap back.

And I'll click into one of these.

You can just click intothis and stay in customizer.

And this is another cool thing for SEO.

Breadcrumbs.

We want to enablebreadcrumbs on single posts.

And that's going to make this you are here home, portfolio, UpPhone, showup at the top of the page.

And this is really good for Google, 'cause Google likes to see okay, I got here by comingthrough the portfolio and then that comes fromthe homepage itself.

And you'll also noticethat the blog section will also have just these excerpts and when we add more blog posts, they're all going to bedisplayed nice and neat, and people can just go inthere and click on 'em.

Looks great.

– [David L.

] It looks excellent.

– [David P.

] Let's tap publish to save.

And then we're going to X out of this.

There's one more thing we need to do to make this website fully functional.

'cause right now it's looking great, but I'm just going tohead back to the homepage.

We need to set up this email opt-in form.

So I'm going to tap edit page.

And then come on down here.

And say configuration your settings.

So I'm just going to click on that.

This brings us to Atomic Blocks settings and it's looking for a Mailchimp API key.

You could just click here where it says find your Mailchimp API key.

And then click over herewhere it says sign up free.

Tap get started.

Check your email.

Activate your Mailchimpaccount, click on that and then click activate account.

Click I'm not a robot.

We're going to click the free plan.

Which gives you up to 2000 contacts which is pretty cool, and then click completeon the right hand side.

The laws have changedrecently with regard to spam, so you actually need togive people the address.

Tap continue.

No, I do not have a list.

Tap continue.

I don't want to continue my social media.

I'm just going to tap continue.

And we're not going to doa marketing path right now.

You could do it if you want to, it has some great advice.

But the account's ready, Freddie.

Want to stay in the loop? Nope.

Tap let's go.

So now we're in the Mailchimp backend.

And what we need to do is get that API key that Atomic Blocks wants.

I'm just going to tap this downarrow on the right over here and choose account.

I'm just going to tap on extras over here and choose API keys.

Create a key.

And now we see this key.

So I'm going to click onit, which will highlight it and then click command C to copy it.

It'd be control C on a PC.

Now I'm going to head backto Atomic Blocks settings, command V to paste that in there.

Control V on a PC.

Click save settings.

All set.

So if I got back to the homepage here, before this is going to work, we need to change one setting, so I'm going to tap onStephen Mullinax up here to go to the dashboard, and then hover oversettings and choose general.

Now I'm just going to add an S even though this isn't goingto be our final domain name, we're going to set that up next.

For the Mailchimp to work, we need to have this https and https://mullinaxart.

wpengine.

com not just regular old http.

Then I'm going to come downhere and click save changes.

Because we updated the domain name, it's going to kick us out, we'regoing to have to log back in.

I'm going to head back to the homepage.

Now that we've updatedthe WordPress site address from http to https, there's just one morething we need to update in order for the email opt-in to work.

Just click edit page at the top here.

And then scroll down to the email opt-in.

Just click right down here intothis container, this block.

And then on the right hand side, click newsletter to expand this, then where it says mailinglist, click select a list.

Click Stephen Mullinax graphic design this is coming from Mailchimp.

And then choose update at the top.

Page updated, view page.

Now let's try to subscribe.

Let's use contact@upphone.

com.

It's just a different emailaddress, click subscribe.

And we see thanks for subscribing.

We did it.

So now we're building an email list.

When you go to Mailchimp, you'll start to see these emails appear.

Just click on your face up in the upper right hand corner here, and now it says ouraudience has two contacts, both of whom aresubscribers, one new contact.

And if I click on that, I can see that it's contact@upphone.

com which is subscribed andcame through the API, which is great.

So I'll close out of Mailchimp, head back to our website.

And the website's done.

This looks amazing.

– [David L.

] And it's functional.

So we've shown you how toset up the meta description in Yoast on the homepage, we just want to show youhow to do the same thing with blog posts.

– [David P.

] Tap Stephen Mullinax in the upper left handcorner of the screen.

And then tap posts, this is just anotherway to get to the posts.

And let's optimize Top FourTips For Graphic Designers.

Come on down to the bottom here and underneath, we seethe snippet preview.

The title is fine the way it is and it sticks in the image.

Please provide a meta description.

I just clicked on that to open this up.

Let's also just add a focus keyword here.

– [David L.

] How aboutTips For Graphic Designers? – [David P.

] Now when we do this, you see this little orange meh face? If you come down here for SEO analysis, click on that.

Yoast is going to tell youwhat you're doing well, what you can improve, and problems.

So it thinks that therearen't any outbound links and it would like to see those.

It thinks that therearen't any internal links.

This is not a perfect science, this is Yoast's analysis, this is not Google's analysis.

Important things are keyphrase in the introduction, we've put it in the first paragraph.

It's a good length.

We haven't used it before on this website.

It's in the title.

It's in the slug, which is the domain name/ Top Four Tips For Graphic Designers.

So we're doing really welleven if this is orange and not green, that's okay.

Let's add a meta descriptionand we're going to make sure we get this focus key phrasein the meta description.

David, what do you thinkwe should put here? – [David L.

] Perfect.

It's green.

– [David P.

] So we're in the green.

And now we can see here this is what we're suggesting to Google.

It's also important to note that if we didn't enter anything in here, that would be okay too, because Google is going to automatically pull some content in from the post itself.

But if there are specific thingsyou definitely want to say, then go into the posts, go into those pages and set up this box atthe bottom of each one.

– [David L.

] Yeah it'sespecially important for blog posts too, we always recommend gettingyour focus key phrase in the meta description.

– [David P.

] Absolutely.

And tap update.

We'll just take a look at this post.

Looking really good.

Head back to the homepage.

Right now everything is working perfectly.

We've got our blogs, we'vegot portfolio happening.

We've got an email opt-in form.

It's really easy to contact Stephen, which is the whole point.

So the next step is justto set up the domain name mullinaxart.

wpengine.

com isgreat for getting started, it's not great for longterm success.

– [David L.

] So werecommend buying your domain from Google Domains.

– [David P.

] Just open a new tab here and type in domains.

google.

Google makes it really easy to set up a business emailaddress using G Suite so you can have @yourdomainname.

com.

Let's search for a new domain here.

Let's just type in stephenmullinax.

See what we get here.

Stephenmullinax.

com is taken.

Okay, so we did a little bit of searching and we found thatmullinaxart.

com is available.

Pretty good name.

Shall we? – [David L.

] Let's do it.

– [David P.

] All right, just tap this button on the right hand side to addthe mullinax.

com to the cart.

And I'm going to click goto cart here at the bottom.

Privacy protection is on, this is great.

Auto-renew is on, thisdomain will automatically be renewed every year for $12.

– [David L.

] Great value.

– [David P.

] All right, mullinaxart.

com is being registered now.

We've got privacy protection on which means your address isgoing to be kept private.

If you want to you can also choose get a custom email address.

You@mullinaxart.

com, stephen@mullinaxart.

com would be a great email address.

You can click down here to get G Suite for five bucks a month.

If you want that, I highly recommend it.

And you can just ignore thiscreate a website section.

None of these options areas good as the website we just showed you how to make.

Now we need to hook up WP Engine, which is our web hosting provider with mullinaxart.

comwhich is our domain name.

Let's head back to theWP Engine user portal.

I got to choose sites up here at the top.

I'm going to click here on mullinaxart.

And I'm going to click ondomains on the left hand side.

Now I'm going to clickadd domain over here.

We just created mullinaxart.

com.

I'm going to click next.

Going to click return to domains.

And then I'm also goingto add www.

mullinaxart.

com because I want it to work either way.

We're going to eventuallychoose one within WordPress but I want both to go to the same place.

So you have to add them both, that's a quirk of the internet.

Tap next.

And say return to domains.

So now down here we see mullinaxart.

com and www.

mullinaxart.

combeing listed, pending check.

So down here at the bottomwe see a CNAME record and an A Record.

We're going to have toset up the A record first and then we're going toset up the CNAME record.

I'll show you how to do that.

First I'm going to copy this IP address, this string of numbers.

And I'm going to goback to Google Domains.

I'm going to click DNSon the left hand side and scroll to the bottom where you see custom resource records.

The first one, I'm justgoing to make this an @ sign, with is shorthand for mullinaxart.

com.

I'm going to leave this 1H one hour blank.

And I'm going to just pastein the IP address here and click add.

All right one more to go.

Going to head back here.

And grab the CNAME this time.

Mullinaxart.

wpengine.

com.

I'm going to head back to Google Domains, going to enter www.

Going to change this to CNAME.

And I'm going to enterthe CNAME here, click add.

And we're done.

So now Google Domainsknows to send traffic, when people type inmullinaxart.

com to this IP address and this domain.

Users will never see this, this is just how the internet works.

So I'm going to head back to WP Engine.

Now it says pending check over here.

We will check this domain soon.

This will automatically refresh, but I'm just going toclick on these three dots over here on the right andchoose schedule refresh.

And I'm going to do thesame with the www version.

This process can take up to an hour.

I am going to click on thisone and choose set as primary.

Because I want www.

mullinaxart.

comto be my primary domain.

And let's see if it's working yet.

How about that?- [David L.

] There you go.

– [David P.

] So it redirected us to mullinaxart.

wpengine.

com, but that means that it's working, we just have a couple more things to do.

The first thing we wantto do is set up SSL.

SSL gives your website security and it encrypts all the information that's sent between a client's computer, a visitor's computer, and your website.

– [David L.

] And it'sreally essential for SEO at this point to have anSSL certificate set up on your website.

– [David P.

] And other webhosting companies like GoDaddy charge for these things.

It's totally not necessarily, WP Engine is great.

We're just going to tapget free certificates.

And we're going to checkboth of these boxes at once.

Choose I have read and agreedto terms and conditions and tap get SSL certificates.

At the top we see yourcertificates are being set up.

If I refresh the page, we'll see that both of theseare pending, but that's okay.

They're going to workin just a minute or two.

Refresh.

And we see enabled here.

This is great.

WP Engine is going toautomatically renew these, you do not have to dothis every three months, it's going to be set on auto-renew.

Up here it says WordPress admin pages.

Do we want to secure these with https? The answer to this is definitely yes and we can just leave thisfor unconfigured pages.

But we do not want peopleto be able to get into our login or admin pages.

Or be able to spy on uswhen we log in, really.

So I clicked saved.

Now the last thing we need todo to hook up our domain name, is actually to switchit over in WordPress.

So, let's go back to our site.

Click on Stephen Mullinaxto get to the dashboard.

Come on down here tosettings and choose general.

And, we're going tochange both of these to www.

mullinaxart.

com.

I'll just do the same thing here.

Let's set our time zonejust to be neat about this.

Day format looks good.

Week starts, week starts on Sunday.

And save changes at the bottom.

Now we get kicked out becausewe changed the address and we need to reenter ourusername and our password.

And now we're in, save the password, sure.

Mullinaxart.

com is now live.

– [David L.

] Looking really good.

– [David P.

] Looking good.

So let's head back to the dashboard.

And come on down here to Yoast, which is still complaining.

Click general.

Huge SEO issue, yourblocking access to robots.

You must go into your readingsettings and uncheck the box for search engine visibility.

So at this point, you might want to giveyou website a second look, just make sure thateverything's set up correctly.

That it's really to be indexed by Google.

Looks good to me.

– [David L.

] Sure does.

– [David P.

] Yep.

So I'll head back to the dashboard and then go to settings.

Hover over this andchoose reading this time.

And uncheck this box that says discourage search enginesfrom indexing this site and click save changes.

Settings saved.

And here we go, we are live.

– [David L.

] Looks great.

– [David P.

] What a great website.

You can search, for instance, if I were type in Payette.

I get the two pages wheremy name is mentioned.

And UpPhone, which is one of our sites.

And also on Payette Forward, Stephen's a really amazing artist.

So now that our website looks really good, I just want to point youin the right direction, we're going to be comingout with more videos that the next steps that area little bit more advanced to help you rank in Google.

But one of them that Ireally want to point out to everybody watching our video, is that if you go to SEO down here and come to search consol.

Google search consol connectsGoogle to your website, let's Google know thatyou exist on the internet.

So, it sounds important, it is important.

What you want to do is just click get Google authorization code.

I'm going to sign in with an account, click allow down here, and just copy this, paste it in here, and choose authenticate.

It says that there werenot profiles found, but that's okay.

What we need to do is, let's just do a Google searchfor Google search consol.

Click up here into Google search consol, say start now.

The domain is mullinaxart.

com.

Let's say continue.

It is automatically verified because we have an affiliated product, because we registered itthrough Google domains really.

I can just click go to property now.

Click start.

Now if I head back to Yoast and refresh.

We see mullinaxart.

com appears here and I can just click save profile.

Now this is going to beverified with Google.

I want to come back toGoogle search consol, then click over here on site maps.

And this is very important.

Enter the site map URL.

So, you're just going to haveto copy what I write here.

Https://www.

, yourdomainname, mullinaxart.

com/sitemap_index.

xml and you can check to make sure this works.

Just visit it.

And in the browser we'vegot a post site map, page site map.

These are specific designedby Yoast for Google.

And you'll see that everything here are things that we want Google to index, and there's nothing in here that we don't want google to index, which is just as important.

This is why Yoast is so great.

Click submit.

And you're all set.

Google will index this website now.

It won't show up in Googlesearch results right away, but Google will find it.

So we're more than done with this website in making it successful.

But if you're interested, you can head to plugins, and add new.

And I just want to mentionone more plugin to you.

It's called Monster Insights.

This will allow you toconnect Google analytics to your website.

It's the easiest one to use, you can just click installnow if you want to have that Google analytics data that we showed you in thebeginning of our video when we showed you howsuccessful Clifton Park Pizza is.

Google analytics is a free service, we can't recommend it enough.

– So that's how to create asuccessful WordPress website in 2020, thank you guys for watching.

We hope this video helped you out.

Feel free to leave us a comment down below with all your questions, we'd be happy to steer youin the right direction.

Google Analytics is a free service, please share this video with them and don't forget tosubscribe to this channel for more great tech videos.

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