WordPress SEO - The Absolute Basics
- 1. DESIGNBigger WordPress SEO, The Absolute Basics Christopher Smith | August 21, 2013
- 2. This Will Be High Level (902 feet high to be exact)
- 3. Three Four Things To Worry About Base Installation Themes Plugins Content
- 4. Start At The Beginning If WordPress is running your entire site, install at the root of the domain. If your host doesn’t allow this, find a new one! Good: http://www.mysite.com/ Bad: http://www.mysite.com/wordpress/
- 5. To WWW Or Not WWW? On a new site, it doesn’t really matter. If you have an existing site, find out which one is more authoritative using Open Site Explorer, and stick with that. We don’t want this if we can help it.
- 7. Permalinks (continued) Tags And Categories This will help prevent redirect issues, should you accidentally name a page and category with the same.
- 8. Reading Check this box while you’re building the site, but don’t forget to uncheck it when you launch!
- 9. Themes I prefer the StudioPress Genesis Framework. It has good built-in SEO capabilities, and plays nicely with the major SEO plugins. Also good: Thesis Headway Theme Hybrid Building your own from scratch? Use the Web Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet.
- 10. Plugins There are several good ones out there: All In One SEO SEOPressor Yoast’s WordPress SEO HeadSpace If you like what you’ve got now, consider sticking with it and becoming an expert with it. Any plugin can be improved upon!
- 11. WordPress SEO I prefer the Yoast WordPress SEO plugin. 1. It has a ton of built-in functionality: sitemaps, OpenGraph, Authorship markup, page analysis, etc. 2. There are plugins to extend it for Video SEO, Local SEO, News SEO, and WooCommerce SEO. 3. Quick updates and bug fixes.
- 12. WordPress SEO Posts Titles and Meta
- 13. WordPress SEO Pages Titles and Meta
- 14. WordPress SEO Categories and Tags Titles and Meta Leaving this unchecked can cause duplicate content issues!
- 15. WordPress SEO Author Titles and Meta If you have a single-author blog, DISABLE the author archives.
- 16. WordPress SEO Date Archive Titles and Meta Disable date-based archives; it’s a huge duplicate content issue!
- 17. Content Each post or page is should have a central theme or idea. If you can’t sum it up in one sentence, it might be better off as multiple posts or pages. Use tools like UberSuggest or the AdWords Keyword Tool for topical inspiration.
- 18. Content Use the Yoast built-in tools to assist in search optimization once you’ve got a draft of your content. (demo)
- 19. Even More Confused? Go back to the basics! Here are some excellent sources to learn SEO from: Google SEO Starter Guide (pdf) Moz’s Beginner’s Guide To SEO Yoast’s WordPress SEO - The Definitive Guide
- 20. Tools Yoast’s WordPress SEO Open Site Explorer UberSuggest AdWords Keyword Tool
- 21. Questions? Get this slide deck NOW at: http://www.slideshare.net/designbigger www.designbigger.com @designbigger facebook.com/designbigger