Beginner SEO for WordPress | Wordcamp Raleigh 2017

WordPress SEO
Presented by @tonyzeoli
Founder,@dswks
https://tonyzeoli.com
https://digitalstrategyworks.com
A Beginner’s Guide
WordCamp Raleigh 2017

WordPress SEO: A Beginner’s Guide
By Tony Zeoli | WordCamp Raleigh 2017
@tonyzeoli
• Founder
Digital Strategy Works
@dswks
• Digital Strategy Coach
Mountain BizWorks
@mtnbizworks
• Co-organizer
WordPress Chapel Hill Meetup
@wordpresschill
• Focused on WordPress, Social
Media, SEO, Digital Strategy,
Content Marketing, Email Newsletter
Marketing, E-commerce, Analytics,
Content Management
• B.S. Digital Communications and
Media from NYU

Search Engine
Optimization

Organic Traffic
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” It is the
process of getting traffic from the “free,” “organic,”
“editorial” or “natural” search results on search engines.
http://searchengineland.com/guide/what-is-seo

What is a search
engine?

example 1

example 2

example 3

example 4

example 5

example 6

example 7

example 8

example 9

example 10

Other Types
• business.com
• LinkedIn
• FindLaw
• LexisNexis
• Trulia / Zillow (Real
Estate)
• Craigs List
• Yelp / FourSquare
• Apple / Google Maps
• Kayak / Expedia
• hotels.com
• autos.com

• With Google, Bing, etc., you are optimizing your own
website or blog to be found in search. You publish content
and Google crawls your site to index your site’s pages and
posts, as well as media content to return in search results.
• For “other” niche search engines, you input data into those
search engines, so people using those tools can return, for
example, all homes for sale in a specific locale (Trulia), all
hotels in a 20 mile radius of Raleigh (hotels.com), all flights
leaving from Raleigh at 2 pm today (Kayak), all restaurants
in downtown Raleigh (Yelp), all lawyers in Raleigh
(FindLaw), and all businesses in Raleigh (business.com)
• While Google may return intended results, niche search
portals provide extended information through UGC (user
generated content).

Search Engine Usage
• Overall, 6,586,013,574 search performed everyday
• In words, that’s six billion, five hundred and eighty
six million, thirteen thousand, five hundred and
seventy four!

Smart Insights
http://www.smartinsights.com/search-engine-marketing/search-engine-statistics/

% Paid vs Organic
https://www.similarweb.com/corp/solution/ecommerce-industry/seo-ppc-marketing-report-2016/

Why Google?
• 77.43% desktop
market share2
• 96.01% mobile
market share2
*March 2017
1. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/04/most-popular-websites-google-youtube-baidu/
2. https://www.netmarketshare.com/search-engine-market-share.aspx?qprid=4&qpcustomd=0
• The world’s most visited website1

How do search engines
work?
http://www.bitrebels.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/how-google-works-explanation-infographic.jpg

SERP

Search Result Types
https://www.link-assistant.com/news/serp-guide.html

Page Rank

PageRank Checker

PageRank is dead!
• Google removed PageRank from their toolbar feeds
in April 2016.
• PageRank spurned the link buying economy.
• Introduced “nofollow” so SEOs could have a way to
not pass link authority.
• You can no longer check your PageRank, however
you may see older page rank checkers render a
score.

Alternative Metrics
Tools
• MOZ - https://moz.com
• SEM RUSH - https://semrush.com
• SCREAMING FROG -
https://www.screamingfrog.co.uk/seo-spider/
• MAJESTIC - https://majestic.com/
• SEO Power Suite from http://link-assistant.com

MOZ Page Authority
(PA)
https://moz.com/learn/seo/page-authority

MOZ Domain Authority
(DA)
https://moz.com/learn/seo/domain-authority

Google Analytics Dashboard
for WordPress

Google Search Console: Links
To Your Site

Google Search Console:
Search Analytics

WordPress SEO
• Intention is to build page and domain authority resulting in page
rank through the implementation, optimization, and management
of:
• keyword/phrase optimization
• back links
• robots.txt & nofollow
• page speed optimization
• mobile responsive design
• SSL (secure socket layer encryption)

Getting Started
1.Set up a Google Analytics account:
https://google.com/analytics
2.Set up a Google Search Console account:
https://www.google.com/webmasters/tools
3.Install All in One SEO Pack for WordPress SEO via
Plugins admin or download from WordPress.org
Plugin page: https://wordpress.org/plugins/all-in-one-
seo-pack/

Find UA tracking
number

Add UA tracking
number
https://semperplugins.com/documentation/setting-up-google-analytics/

Verify
• Register domain name with Google Search Console
• Click “Verify”
• Select “Google Analytics.” If you have GA set up
already with your UA code in AIOSEO, then you
should be able to verify instantly.
• Alternatively, use Google Meta to verify.

Google Meta
Copy value between “” marks

Alternative Verification
Paste value between “” marks in GWT field, then save.
Same for Bing and Pinterest

XML Sitemap
• AIOSEO has a built in XML sitemap generator
• A sitemap is a list of all URLs you want Google and
other search engines to crawl. It makes it more
efficient for Google to find, crawl, and index your
site.
• Authenticates your site and let’s Google know you
exist.
• Generates sitemap with a click. Then, find your
sitemap at http:// or
https://mydomain.com/sitemap.xml

Sitemap View

Add Sitemap to Search
Console

Bing Webmaster Tools
Note: To verify, Bing may require upload of html file to top level directory

Other Webmaster Tools
• WordPress.com Help:
https://en.support.wordpress.com/webmaster-tools/
• Pinterest:
https://semperplugins.com/documentation/pintere
st-site-verification/
• Baidu:
http://zhanzhang.baidu.com/?castk=LTE%3D (in
Chinese)
• Yandex: https://webmaster.yandex.com/

News Sitemap

Video Sitemap
Available in All in One SEO Pack Pro

Image Sitemap
Coming Soon in All in One SEO Pack

Get free SSL Encryption

Ways to get free SSL
• Google views SSL encryption as a minor ranking signal.
• Some hosts are now providing free SSL. WP Engine is one of them.
• LetsEncrypt.org
• Transfer DNS to cloudflare.com and site will be automatically SSL
enabled. Need to install WordPress Cloudflare plugin.
• Extended Validation (EV) SSL is not free. Visit VeriSign, Comodo, or
other providers. Adds company name next to the green lock icon in
the browser URL bar:
• In Google Webmaster Tools you want to add both http and https
URLs and Sitemaps, so if someone types in either, your site is tracked
with both methods.

Set WordPress
Permalinks

Edit Post Permalink

Page Speed
Optimization
• Google Page Speed Insights
• YSlow
• GT Metrix

GPSI Report

Page Speed
Optimization• Optimize server response time by tuning Apache or leveraging NGINX
on the server.
• Cache your site pages and media either with Amazon Cloudfront and a
caching plugin (Total Cache or Super Cache) or your hosts caching
service. WP Engine comes with object caching and you can upgrade for
media caching.
• Compress all images using WP Smush, EWWW Image Optimizer
• Minify HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (remove whitespace)
• Above the Fold Optimization
• Fix Render Blocking javascript issues
• Leverage Browser cache expiry

Above The Fold
Optimization

Autoptimize

Warning
• Don’t implement Autoptimize or Above The Fold
Optimization on a LIVE site.
• Work in staging, optimize, check in a browser
testing tool, then launch when all is well.

On Page SEO
• Deep, rich, relevant, contextual content (1,000 to 2,000 words)
• Concise keyword optimization:
• Title
• Post Content
• Media (Images, Video, PDF, MP3…)
• Permalink
• Category
• Tags

If you do nothing…
• Google will pull your H1 Title as the primary title.
• Google will pull the first few lines of your page
content as the description
• This is obviously not optimized for search, which is
why you would use an SEO plugin like All in One
SEO Pack or others to construct optimized titles
and descriptions for post/page content.

Robots.txt

http://searchengineland.com/infographic-nofollow-tag-172157
• The nofollow tag is a
way publishers can
tell search engines
not to count some of
their links to other
pages as “votes” in
favor of that content.
Why would publishers
need to block such
votes? Doing so can
help them avoid
problems with search
engines believing they
are selling influence
or are somehow
involved in schemes
deemed as
unacceptable SEO
practices.
Nofollow

Accelerated Mobile Pages
(AMP)

WordPress AMP Plugin

AMP for WP

schema.org
• For Local SEO
• Supported by All in One SEO Pack
• Hours of Operation, Reviews, Show Times,
Playlists, etc…
• Google will not publish star reviews against your
home page - will only publish them on an inside
landing page.

WP Review

All in One SEO Pack
Demonstration

Questions?

Beginner SEO for WordPress | Wordcamp Raleigh 2017

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