I recently did a talk at the North Sydney WordPress Meetup about Search Engine Optimization for beginners and best practices in WordPress.
It was the longest talk I’ve done because there’s so much to cover, and you could really talk for weeks about SEO, but I tried to stick to beginner skills. You can see my slides below; I hope they make some sense without the talk, but if not or if you have a question please ask in the comments.
I mentioned toward the end of the talk that while Mobile Friendly is not currently a factor in search engine rankings, it is set apart in search results and may be a factor soon. Apparently even sooner that I thought.
Since the slides are images and I’m not sure how well Slideshare does accessibility, here are the slide points in text form as well.
- SEO for Beginners
- SEO
= Search Engine Optimisation
not the same as Search Ranking - Some notes about search
- EVERYONE gets personalised search results
- Location
- History
- Social signals
- Google wants to produce the best & most relevant results, so BE relevant & be user-friendly
- EVERYONE gets personalised search results
- What contributes to SEO?
- Everything on your site!
- Speed
- HTML
- Theme
- Plugins
- Content
- Readability
- Clarity
- Metadata
- Titles
- Descriptions
- Assessing your theme
- Read the description
- Look at the demo
- Reviews
- ThemeCheck (plugin or website)
- w3 validator
- ThemeCheck.org
- validator.w3.org
- Content
- Quality
- Research
- Words
- Engagement
- Freshness
- Content in WordPress Title
- Don’t be obtuse
- Use Formatting
- Headings & subheadings
- Lists
- Blockquotes
- Content in WP: images
- When uploading/inserting images give them a decent title
- Give them a descriptive Alt Text
- Content in WP: links
- Add or Edit links using the icon in the editor
- First select link text, then click icon
- Use relevant keywords
- Add or Edit links using the icon in the editor
- Metadata
- Title
- URL (permalinks)
- Description
- Canonical URL
- Robots
Keywords- SEO Plugins
- SEO Plugins
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- All in One SEO
- probably several others
- WordPress SEO by Yoast
- FREE: wordpress.org/plugins/wordpress-seo/
- Features: yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/
- SEO Guide: yoast.com/articles/wordpress-seo/
- Speed
- What impacts site speed?
- Hosting
- Number of files
- CSS
- JavaScript
- images
- Code quality
- Number of plugins
- Caching
- Caching
- Caching plugins
- WP Super Cache
- Quick Cache / Zen Cache
- Hyper Cache
- W3 Total Cache
- Minifying
- Reduces file sizes
- Reduces number of files
- Plugins
- Autoptimize
- W3 Total Cache
- Better WordPress Minify
- AssetsMinify
- CDNs
- Content Delivery Network
- Comprehensive services: Cloudflare, MaxCDN
- Easy image CDN: Photon in Jetpack
- A quick note on mobile friendly http://google.com/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/
- Guaranteed front page?
- All of this doesn’t guarantee you front page search results ?
- There are still the off-page factors to consider
- Who links to you
- What text they use to link with
- Social shares
- But it gives you a MUCH better chance
- Anything else I can do?
- Webmaster Tools
- Submit a sitemap
- Monitor crawling problems
- Webmaster Tools
- Even more info http://moz.com/learn/seo/on-page-factors
- SEO Table of Elements http://searchengineland.com/seotable
This is a goldmine of information, not just for beginners but also for those who have been in the business for many years but in need of refreshing their SEO knowledge and skills.
This is a such simple and to the point article. I think by deciding to go with wordpress one can be 40% sure about good SEO. After that while writing a content need to work carefully to achieve a good on-page SEO score. Yoast SEO plugin & EasyWPSEO could play a wonderful role here.