Technical SEO for WordPressInstalling Yoast SEO is not enough
WordPress Stockholm Meetup 2017-03-30Otto Kekälä[email protected]
● Seravo.com – WordPress hosting and upkeep
● CEO, sysadmin and developer● Linux and open source advocate● Contributed to WordPress Core, fi
and sv translations, Linux, Docker, Nginx, Redis, MariaDB…
● Twitter:@ottokekalainen
Otto Kekäläinen
● Google’s robots and others crawl our sites ~789160 times a day
● Google.com and others sends visitors to our customers sites ~100179 times a day
● Senior enough to remember Altavista…
Why do I talk about SEO?
statistics from March 27th 00:00–23:59
DO YOU WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE IMMEDIATELY?Then buy ads.
SEO is all about improving organic ranking over time.
Nobody outside Google knows how their ranking works in detail. Google penalizes spammers.
GROUND RULE:MAKE THE SITE GOOD FOR HUMANS,
AND GOOGLE WILL LIKE IT TOO
Choosing WordPressis a great strategy for good SEO, as your quality content fromblogs, WooCommerce etcboosts your domain’s reputation.
“Google loves WordPress”– Matt Cutts, Google
WordPress is also a good technology
LEVELS OF SEO MATURITY
1.Acknowledged
Easy!
2.Fully crawled
robots.txtsitemap.xml
No errorsNo link rot
3.Given
relevance
Relevant contentsSemantic structure
MicroformatsPretty URLs
4.Given value
and high ranking
Links to siteSocial media
PopularityResponsive
FastHTTPSHTTP2IPv6?
TECHNICAL SEO
1.Acknowledged
Easy!
2.Fully crawled
robots.txtsitemap.xml
No errorsNo link rot
3.Given
relevance
Relevant contentsSemantic structure
MicroformatsPretty URLs
4.Given value
and high ranking
Links to siteSocial media
PopularityResponsive
FastHTTPSHTTP2IPv6?
WORDPRESS AND BUILT-IN SEO
WordPress built-in: robots.txt
WordPress built-in: language markup
WordPress built-in: pretty urlsNever use example.com/?p=123 anymore, ok?
In posts, the title becomes the url by default
WordPress built-in: image settings
urlThink about these next time you upload an image.
alt attribute
WHAT ABOUT WORDPRESS THEMES?
TYPICAL IN WORDPRESS
All modern themes are responsive by design, and most follow good semantic practices:
- unique <title> for each page- one <h1> per page- <article>, <section> etc..
IF YOU ROLL YOUR OWN THEME
Strive for (standards) valid and clean code! Google’s robots value what G’s engineers value..
Read up on the standard semantic tags in HTML5, explore microformats and adhere to schema.org vocabulary.
SEMANTIC MARKUP EXAMPLE
Feed search engines with semantic data and they will use it.
SEO PLUGINS
FORGET YOAST – USE SEO FRAMEWORK!★ Smaller, leaner, faster★ Creates nice clean
/sitemap.xml ★ Canonical URL
wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/
★ No bloat, no annoying ads
★ And it even looks better!
YOAST ⇢ SEO FRAMEWORK MIGRATION
= Yoast ≅ SEO Framework
OPENGRAPH (FB) AND TWITTER CARDS
Don’t worry – SEO Framework generates these for you
SITEMAP.XML
SEO Framework added sitemap.xml automatically
AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT
Spamming does not help SEO! (Unless you are really good)
ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES
We’ve been building websites mobile first for years already, but now Google et al wants us to go back to the m.example.com paradigm, this time the url can be example.com/amp/ though..
/ /amp/
REDIRECTION – AVOID LINK ROT
wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/
MULTILINGUAL PLUGINS?
Polylang is best!
Polylang is best!
Polylang is best!
It does automatically hreflang attributes too.
Yes, I have issues with WPML.
GOOD HOSTING AND ACTIVE UPKEEP
● low response times
● https
● http/2
Make sure your site and server are being looked after by progressive Linux admins.
WITH GOOD TECH IN PLACE, IT’S SAFE TO STARTINVESTING INCONTENTS ANDSOCIAL
1.Acknowledged
Easy!
2.Fully crawled
robots.txtsitemap.xml
No errorsNo link rot
3.Given
relevance
Relevant contentsSemantic structure
MicroformatsPretty URLs
4.Given value
and high ranking
Links to siteSocial media
PopularityResponsive
FastHTTPSHTTP2IPv6?
THANK YOU!
SERAVO.COM@Seravo
@ottokekalainen