SEO with WordPress

I gave a talk at the Tunbridge Wells WordPress Meetup tonight about SEO with WordPress, which plugins to use and how they can help. Covering All-in-One SEO, Yoast, TinyPNG, WP Super Cache, and much more.

Here is the slide deck from the presentation:

Slide Notes

Slide 3

• No really, it is hard, I’m not making it up.
• WordPress has nothing directly to do with SEO
• Depends on coding
• Depends on content
• Ability to get inbound links

Slide 4

• Content is king!!! It really is.
• Without content, there is nothing for the search engine to see.
• Good, high quality, UNIQUE content

Slide 5

• You are nothing without good content

Slide 6

• WordPress Plugins can help.
• But only if the theme is done right.
• No plugin can fix fundamental underlying issues with your theme’s HTML, CSS and Javascript.

Slide 7

• Covers the SEO basics.
• Does all the basics you need, e.g. titles, descriptions, social, etc…
• Pro version available, does a bit more, WooCommerce, Videos, etc… but is pretty pricey.

Slide 8

• By far the most popular SEO plugin.
• While it too covers the basics, like All-in-One SEO Pack, it also has some great CMS features.
• Social media tags (Facebook and Twitter) added automatically, including a “linked data” (JSON+LD) used by Google Knowledge graph.
• Automatically generates robots.txt and sitemap.xml files.
• Be careful with taxonomy, archive, author, etc… sitemap pages.
• Premium version available, not sure it is worth it.
• Most people ignore the important part of Yoast.

Slide 9

• The setup wizard sets up good default, use it.

Slide 10

• People ignore these or are even annoyed by their existence in the pages and posts lists.
• Many people ask us if we can “remove them” or “hide them”.
• They are trying to tell you something important, so don’t ignore, fix!

Slide 11

• For each page and post define a focus keyword / phrase or words / phrases (if using pro) for that content.
• Read the suggestions and act on them. Get as many green as possible.

Slide 12

• Gives you information about how “readable” the page or post is.
• Again, get as many green as possible and adjust the content as required.

Slide 13

• If most / all your content is in advanced custom fields (ACF), then you need this Yoast plugin to make sure the previous two work with your content.
• It is just an install. There is no configuration required.

Slide 14

• There are some additional “paid” for plugins for Yoast

Slide 15

• Additional stuff for WooCommerce sites

Slide 16

• Additional stuff for News sites

Slide 17

• For sites with lots of videos

Slide 18

• Whilst Yoast is great, it is free and they want something for it, they add comments to your HTML that advertise Yoast!!!
• Install “Remove Yoast SEO Comments” plugin to remove these.

Slide 19

• Redirection is a great plugin for easily adding 301 redirects to a site.
• Helpful for fixing issues from Google Search Console.

Slide 20

• Automatically compresses uploaded images using TinyPNG.
• Work for both PNG and JPEG.
• Compress is industry leading.
• 500 free compresses per month.
• Paid service, relatively cheap, less than 1 cent per image.
• Remember, one image upload might result in many more versions of the image.

Slide 21

• Caches your site pages to improve load speed dramatically.
• Includes options to use CDN’s for resources, e.g. images, stylesheets, Javascript, etc…
• By WordPress creators Automattic.
• Other caching options are available.

• Category: Speaking, WordPress