Wordpress + SEO: Tips and Tricks

WP + SEO: Tips, Tricks & How To’s
Alex Wolk
President
INSITE ADVICE

Introduction
• I founded INSITE ADVICE 10 years ago on the principles of helping
clients manage their own web sites and market to their customers over
the internet. Over the years we have solved problems for hundreds of
clients, including Word Wide Technology, Cardinal Glennon and Mary
Engelbreit, to name a few.

• Our company initially used its own custom developed CMS called
Sprout to handle those needs. As WordPress evolved, especially after
the extended CMS capabilities in WP 3, it became the ideal solution to
migrate to. INSITE ADVICE services ﬁt perfectly in the WP ecosystem,
including custom theming, plugin development, SEO and social media.

• My growing passion is internet marketing, and I'll show you why
WordPress is hands down the most robust SEO-friendly platform
available. You can follow me at @insiteadvice and http://
www.insiteadvice.com.

I also practice what I preach for SEO :)

In fact I spend so much of
my time doing SEO I haven’t
spent much time recently
presenting it, so please bear
with me :)

Overview
• Wordpress is far and away the best platform for SEO. Just out of the box, its
well designed structure, advanced blogging and pinging capabilities and
permalinks option make it a winner.

• But with the help of some free plugins, it can help take your campaign to the
next level.

• We'll talk in detail about how to master your on-page optimization with
Wordpress using these tools, but ﬁrst, we need to take a step back and review
the ﬁrst and often overlooked step of SEO, keyword research.

• GOOD KEYWORD RESEARCH is ESSENTIAL to a successful SEO
campaign. Otherwise, You're wasting your time and money optimizing for the
wrong keywords.

• I've seen countless examples of people 'going-with-their-gut' arbitrarily
picking keywords instead of doing the research. They work and work for
months to get terms to the ﬁrst page in Google, and then are disappointed with
both the amount and quality of trafﬁc that comes from it.

• THE 3 BIGGEST MISTAKES I SEE
• 1. Picking a term you think people search on but really don't
‘st. louis lawyers’ gets just over 100 searches a month, but 'st. louis personal injury lawyer' gets almost
500.

• 2. Optimizing for a term that gets searches but not qualified traffic
'free legal advice' is highly competitive and gets over 18,000 searches a month, but are these visitors you
even want?

• 3. Using 'broad match" search results when estimating traffic.
We’ll talk about this in more detail now..

• Broad, Phrase and Exact Match in Search Stats
In the screenshot below, I have asked Google AdWords Keyword Tool for stats on “unusual christmas
gifts” using all 3 match types: Broad, “Phrase”, and [Exact].

• But it’s giving 3 different numbers. Which is right?
It depends what you’re asking for.

• unusual christmas gifts (without punctuation) is showing the Broad match results,
i.e. “how many people search for all of these words, but not necessarily in that order, and possibly among
other words too”

• “unusual christmas gifts” (inside quotes) is showing the Phrase match results,
i.e. “how many people search for those words in that exact order, but with possibly other words/phrases
before and after”

• [unusual christmas gifts] (inside square brackets) gives Exact match results,
i.e. “how many search for those words exactly in that order, and no other words around it”

How to Understand the Differences

You’ll always get more results for Broad match over Phrase and Exact, and you’ll
always get more results for Phrase than you do for Exact. (Of course, if you type
in a single-word query, the numbers for Broad and Phrase will be the same.)

• So what’s most useful when it comes to predicting traffic? For phrases of at least
2 words, I generally use Exact match type, which I find gives the best
conservation indication.

• Estimating conservatively also means I’ll often be pleasantly surprised from
traffic results. That’s because we’ll often rank and get 'bonus' traffic from related
phrase and broad matches to those terms.

If I always used broad match I would set unreasonable expectations and be
disappointed with the results.

Picking good keywords and avoiding the 'bad' keywords
What makes a 'good' keyword good, and what makes a 'bad' keyword bad? There are a
few criteria that we can use to find good keywords, these include:

• Low competition. What defines too much competition? There are no hard and fast
rules. But using the Competition checker in Traffic Travis (download at
traffictravis.com) will give you a good idea of whether a keyword has too much
competition or not. Traffic Travis uses multiple factors to calculate competition. And
provides a difficulty rating on a scale from 'very easy' to 'very difficult'.
In this example (found using the Traffic Travis Competition checker - 'SEO' ,
'Competition') you can see that 'dog training' is going to be very difficult to rank for,
while 'problems with training dog' will be much easier.

• High search volume. There is no point ranking highly for a keyword if nobody is
searching for it. Generally the higher the search volume the better. However, this needs
to be balanced with the level of competition. A good minimum to aim for is 200 global
'exact' searches per month

• Relevant to the website topic. Most websites are based around a theme or niche. You
want the keywords you are building your site around to be relevant to the topic. For
example, if your website is about dog training, then keywords about training your
hamster are going to be of little use.

• Likely to convert. There is a big difference between 'browsers' and 'buyers'. You want
keywords that attract buyers (for higher conversion rates) rather than those who are
simply browsing for free information - even though the search volume for buyer
keywords is usually much lower. An example of a browsing keyword would be 'free
dog training tips' compared to the buyer keyword 'best dog training book'.

• Competitive costs per click (CPC) - If using PPC model. If you are going to be
marketing your website using pay-per-click advertising like Google Adwords then you
want keywords that won't cost you a fortune to build an ad campaign around. If your
site sells a $30 product, then it's going to be hard to make money if you are paying $5
a click.

SHORTCUT TO FINDING THE BEST KEYWORDS
You may have heard what we just covered before, but here is where we
change directions.

Most of the other keyword presentations continue like this:

• They will tell you to the Google Trafﬁc Estimator we just showed and/or
WordStream (a similar tool) to put in some starter keywords and have them
discover the 'best' variations.

There is always a place for these tools and we do use them, but they miss an
essential point; they are only going to show you the estimated search volume for
keywords, not insight into which keywords will get results in your industry.

• Next, SEO experts often recommend buying Adwords ads around some of those
broad search terms, like 'website design' and measuring the exact keywords trafﬁc
coming to your site over a couple months time. While this can have some success,
it can be very time consuming and EXPENSIVE because you are paying to test.


ENTER SEMRUSH.com
SEMRUSH is a freemium tool that estimates not only search volumes for keywords
and their related siblings (similar to Google Keyword Tool), but gives you the actual
keywords your COMPETITORS are currently getting trafﬁc from.

This is a HUGE time saver because for most of us, it can be assumed there is at least
one competitor that is running a successful SEO campaign. You can often ﬁnd them
by entering a general search term in your niche and grabbing the top organic result.


For the purposes of the presentation moving forward, we are getting into the
pinball business :) Here is our machine at work!

So let’s grab that ﬁrst organic google result, www.bmigaming.com, and plug that
into SEMRUSH


This is a great candidate because as you see here they are getting trafﬁc from (and likely ranking for) 4,711
keywords and getting over 23,000 visits a month from just their top 20 keywords!

This tells me they know what they are doing and their model gives great insight into this entire industry.

Why try to reinvent the wheel when you'll never even get close to getting real data like this anyway :)


Now I did say SEMRUSH is 'freemium' because they will give you the top 10
search terms only for free. This is a good start but if we want the 4k plus results,
you'll have to upgrade at $69.95 a month. If you are serious about SEO, this is a
small price to pay. If you are interested, they have a 7 day trial and I would
appreciate it if you signed up through our afﬁliate link at http://insiteadvice.com/
semrush.

However, to all the attendees that signup on our site at http://insiteadvice.com/
wordcamp I will provide you a full csv export of any competitor url they provide :)

Note we are just using one site in this example for the purposes of time, but its a
good idea to run a few competitors and look for keyword trends across your entire
industry.

Here is a snapshot of the csv export for bmigaming.com. You'll see that the default sort is by the estimated
percentage of trafﬁc that keyword is bringing to their site. I'll often sort by search volume as well to
undercover interesting trends.


For instance, 'pinball machines' brings the lions share of their traffic (over 16% of
search traffic), and its no surprise they are ranked #1 for that term.

However, you'll notice 'arcade games' gets significantly more search volume, but
since they are only ranked 18th they are getting a very small part of the pie.

Even though we are only selling pinball machines, If I were bmi's SEO company this
would be a great keyword to target because its currently the 9th biggest word in
terms of getting traffic to their site and they are ranked at the bottom of the 2nd page,
where almost no one goes.

Even jumping them up to the bottom of the first page (position 10) would see a
HUGE increase in potential traffic.


From this generalized pie chart you'll see that the entirely of 2nd page results only gets about 10% of total traffic
on average, and position 18 (which they rank for ‘arcade machines’) would likely be lower than 0.3% of total
traffic for that keyword. Bumping them to just position 10 could increase their traffic on that keyword by
1000%!

I will typically go through this type of evaluation and narrow down until I can get to say 20-30 keywords that
are in my target market, have good traffic results and are terms my competitors are capitalizing on.


That takes us to the next step of keyword evaluation, which is determining if your site
can actually rank for these keywords within your budget and time restraints. There are
a couple tools to do this. The best FREE tool out there is at traffictravis.com, which
we showed earlier.

However, the BEST tool to find relative keyword difficulty is the Keyword Tool from
SEOMOZ.org. It's just more precise and in depth, and is part of the best collection of SEO
tools out there, including great educational resources. They have a free 30 day trial and if
you contact me I think I can get you an extended trial. I would encourage everyone to take
it for a spin for a month and cancel as you have nothing to lose. I'll be using SEOMOZ for
the next example.

What I generally do first is run the difficulty tool for one of the 'crown-jewel' keywords (like ‘pinball machines’)
just to see the competition level at the top of the heap in the industry.

This gives me a difficulty score of 47% (from 1 to 100) and calls it 'moderately competitive'. These percentages
take on almost an exponential feel as anything generally above 50% is considered highly competitive.


This is a pleasant surprise to me (at least as an SEO professional) because I have a track
record of getting high placements for myself and clients on keywords far more difﬁcult.

Heck, even just the local based search of 'St. Louis Web Design' which we rank well for is
at a 56% difﬁculty. And our keyword 'pinball machines' is likely one of the hardest terms
in that niche to rank for.

Now while that score gives a nice overview, we need to go further into the competitive
numbers the keyword tool will also show.


Let's walk through these numbers highlighting the differences between Page and Domain metrics. These metrics are primarily
looking at link-building, which is an important part of SEO we aren’t covering today. But it’s still important to understand these
numbers to see the competition level.

So while ranking for this term isn't a walk in the park, I think it's doable (over time of course) within my time/budget. I’ll repeat
this process with the rest of the keywords, ranking each using a formula involving the highest searched terms that bring the
most qualiﬁed trafﬁc and have the least competition.

OPTIMIZING KEYWORDS WITH WORDPRESS

Here is our site 'Alex's Pinball Shack' at pinballshack.insiteadvice.net. It’s just a default wordpress installation with a
'products' landing page containing content I grabbed from wikipedia.

Pinball is a type of arcade game, usually coin-operated, in which points are scored by a player manipulating one or more steel balls on a play field inside a glass-covered cabinet called a
pinball machine. The primary objective of the game is to score as many points as possible. Points are earned when the ball strikes different targets on the play field. A drain is situated
at the bottom of the play field protected by player-controlled plastic bats, called flippers. A game ends after all the balls fall into the drain. Secondary objectives are to maximize the time
spent playing (by earning "extra balls" and keeping the ball in play as long as possible) and to earn free games (known as "replays").

History of pinball
Pre-modern: Development of outdoor and tabletop ball games

The origins of pinball are intertwined with the history of many other games. Games played outdoors by rolling balls or stones on a grass course, such as bocce or bowls, eventually evolved into
various local ground billiards games played by hitting the balls with sticks and propelling them at targets, often around obstacles. Croquet, golf and paille-maille eventually derived from
ground billiards variants.

The evolving and specializing outdoor games finally led to indoor versions that could be played on a table, such as billiards, or on the floor of a pub, like bowling and shuffleboard. The tabletop
versions of these games became the ancestors of modern pinball.

Late 1700s: Spring launcher invented

Billard Japonais, Southern Germany/Alsace ca. 1750–70. It already has a spring mechanism to propel the ball, 100 years prior to Montague Redgrave's patent.
In France, during the long 1643–1715 reign of Louis XIV, billiard tables were narrowed, with wooden pins or skittles at one end of the table, and players would shoot balls with a stick or cue
from the other end, in a game inspired as much by bowling as billiards. Pins took too long to reset when knocked down, so they were eventually fixed to the table, and holes in the bed of the
table became the targets. Players could ricochet balls off the pins to achieve the harder scorable holes. A standardized version of the game eventually became known as bagatelle.

Somewhere between the 1750s and 1770s, the bagatelle variant billard Japonais 'Japanese billiards' was invented (in Western Europe, despite the name), which used thin metal pins and
replaced the cue at the player's end of the table with a coiled spring and a plunger. The player shot balls up the inclined playfield toward the scoring targets using this plunger, a device that
remains in use in pinball to this day, and the game was also directly ancestral to pachinko.

1869: Spring launchers become mainstream

In 1869, British inventor Montague Redgrave settled in the US and manufactured bagatelle tables in Cincinnati, Ohio. In 1871 Redgrave was granted US Patent #115,357 for his
"Improvements in Bagatelle",[1], another name for the spring launcher that was first introduced in in billard Japonais. The game also shrank in size to fit atop a bar or counter. The balls became
marbles and the wickets became small metal pins. Redgrave's popularization of the spring launcher and innovations in game design are acknowledged as the birth of pinball in its modern form.

1931: Coin-operation introduced...

Now that we have our ﬁrst keyword, 'pinball machines', the next step is to see how well my on-page content is currently
graded for it. Again, there are some free tools out there, but the best in my opinion is the On-Page report card from


A 'C' isn't actually too bad for literally copying and pasting content. That just shows the SEO friendliness and power of
wordpress right out of the box!

Enter YOAST Wordpress SEO Plugin

The Yoast SEO Plugin is the easiest-to-use and most comprehensive SEO plugin available for Wordpress. It simpliﬁes
once difﬁcult on page SEO tasks like creating XML site maps, optimizing page titles and url's for the proper keywords,
and much more...

First let’s install and activate the Yoast SEO Plugin

Here is the initial screen you'll see after activating and clicking off a popup offer banner

Wow, look at that! Right
out of the gate it's telling
you to update your
permalink structure and
gives you a button to 'Fix it'
right there.

You'll see the permalink structure
reﬂected in our edit page screen as well

Most of the default settings are fine to just leave alone and let them do their magic! But there are a few quick tweaks we
can make.

You need to think about what you want your site to show up as, www.example.com or simply example.com. Make sure
that in your general settings, under Settings → General, the version you want to show up is properly reflected:

You will also want to set this correctly in Google Webmaster Tools. Make sure to set up your site with Google
Webmaster Tools and set the preferred domain, you can find this setting under Settings → Preferred domain:

You will probably want to check this in the general settings to avoid any incompatibilities with existing WP plugins

XML Sitemaps

The Sitemaps protocol allows a webmaster to inform search engines about URLs on a website that are available for
crawling. A Sitemap is an XML ﬁle that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional
information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to
other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

Yoast takes care of all this automatically! If you are regularly updating your site content (which you should for
good SEO), this is an invaluable tool to alert search engines to your new content

Now just a couple last checks on the permalink settings page and we are good to go. It's nice to strip /category/ out
as this has no seo beneﬁt and pushes your url keywords further down the url string.

There are general title templates that you can set for different types of content types across your site. For our
example, we can leave the defaults here as well, but it just shows you the level of control Yoast offers.

Now let's use Yoast to further optimize our 'Product' landing page. You'll immediately notice a settings bar in every
page and post. The plugin allows you to write meta titles and descriptions for all your category, tag and custom
taxonomy archives, giving you the option to further optimize individual pages.

You can even set a focus keyword in the page settings in yoast and it gives you a similar on-page analysis to
seomoz!
It checks, for instance, if you have images in your post and whether they have an alt tag containing the focus
keyword for that post. It also checks whether your posts are long enough, if you've written a meta description and if
that meta description contains your focus keyword, if you've used any subheadings within your post, etc. etc.


Let's try to knock out the 'red' and 'orange' ﬂags ﬁrst as these are critical.

Meta Description

Page title and URL, this also will update the SEO title preview in the Yoast ﬁeld, but that ﬁeld also allows you to overwrite it
in Yoast if needed.

Article Heading and first paragraph reference

ATL Tags for our Images

Maximizing keyword density of page content to around 1-2% (This involves either adding more 'pinball machines' or removing other
content to get that ratio). I will just add 'machines' to some of the references to pinball for this exercise

Now, DRUM ROLL please, let’s take a look at our results


MUCH BETTER! And while not completely necessary, let's get a second validation with SEOMOZ.


WELL DONE! We got an A!


We have covered the main Yoast SEO Plugin, but they also now have complementary modules to help optimize other
important seo aspects, such as:

News SEO - The free News SEO module for the WordPress SEO plugin creates XML News Sitemaps for your WordPress
blog, including images. It’s based on the latest standards for XML News sitemaps and should allow your WordPress site to
show up in Google News

Video SEO (one time $89 fee)- If you use video’s on your site, in your posts or pages, you don’t want the search results for
those pages to look bland like any other result, do you? No, you want them to be video results, so they catch the attention of
the searcher more, rank better and thus get you more visitors! This is exactly what the Video SEO for WordPress plugin does
for your embedded video’s.

Local SEO Module coming soon!

The point is the Yoast plugin is an already great and growing platform to 'hitch your WP SEO trailer' to, so to speak :)

CONCLUSION

We've found the right keyword(s) for our campaign and used the power of WordPress and the Yoast SEO Plugin to quickly
maximize our on page grade for our site and landing page. Assuming you repeat this process for multiple keywords and
create optimized landing pages for each of them, you can see nice ranking beneﬁts for lower competition terms with these
methods alone.

As an added bonus, these methods can be used help improve your Adwords quality score, resulting in lower CPC and higher
paid placements.

However, for a competitive term like 'pinball machines' the SEO process is not complete until we develop an extensive link
building strategy and implement it over time. Social Media is also a rapidly growing factor in the ranking algorithm. Link
building especially requires considerable expertise (it would be hard to cover in a format such as this) and is often best
implemented with a professional seo agency.

CONCLUSION
We would love you to visit our website, especially our learning center at http://www.insiteadvice.com/learning-center. You'll
ﬁnd extensive guides covering everything from SEO fundamentals to copywriting for the web to maximizing social media
tools.

And remember, go to http://www.insiteadvice.com/wordcamp to get your free semrush export!

Q&A
We would love you to visit our website, especially our learning center at http://www.insiteadvice.com/learning-center. You'll
ﬁnd extensive guides covering everything from SEO fundamentals to copywriting for the web to maximizing social media
tools.

And remember, go to http://www.insiteadvice.com/wordcamp to get your free semrush export!

Wordpress + SEO: Tips and Tricks

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