Technical SEO for WordPressInstalling Yoast SEO is not enough

WordPress Stockholm Meetup 2017-03-30Otto Kekäläinen@ottokekalainenSeravo.com

● 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