Wordpress SEO: Advanced Technical SEO Made Easy

Key Takeaways

WordPress is much more than just another blogging platform in fact popular websites like TechCrunch and BBC America use WordPress to attract and host millions of search visitors every single month but using WordPress out of the box won't cut it if you want to reach that kind of scale you need to make sure that your site's being is lightning fast and that your technical SEO is structurally sound and in this video you're about to learn exactly how to do that from the ground up stay tuned [Music] what's up SEO Sam oh here with eight reps the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic research your competitors and dominate your niche now this is the second part in our WordPress SEO series and we've already covered a lot of the basic set up and how to create SEO friendly posts and pages in this tutorial we're gonna cover a lot of the technical SEO aspects particularly with PageSpeed duplicate content and internal linking all within WordPress let's get to it before we begin I'm gonna run a full site audit on my website using HRF site audit tool and I'll occasionally make reference back to some of the reports which will help us identify which pages to fix the first thing we're gonna do is configure our WordPress site for optimal speed and performance and this is important because Google has officially stated that PageSpeed is a ranking factor in their algorithm for both desktop and mobile so for site speed we're setting up the framework which would include things like caching compression CDN zja and minification and there are three plugins that I use specifically to boost my site speed the first one is w3 total cache with WordPress caching you're essentially creating static versions of your posts and pages so it can be rendered quickly but browsers and since you're probably not updating these every day it should result in faster load times and a better user experience after you've installed the plug-in you'll see a new menu in the left sidebar called performance if you go to the general settings you'll see the main settings I have enabled our page cache minify browser cache and CDN and you can see short descriptions of what each one does under the checkbox to customize each of these options you can go to the corresponding submenu in the sidebar now it's important to note that what works for my site speed won't necessarily work for yours and there are way too many variables to sitter like your server setup ie Apache vs. nginx vs engine Tron your hosting plan ie shared vs. VPS vs. dedicated and more so rather than going through every single setting for the site I'll leave a link to the screenshots of my w3 total cache settings in the description the second plug-in I use is called short pixel and this one automatically compresses and optimizes images when you upload them to your server so if you look at my media library you'll see that there were some images uploaded and short pixel automatically compress these by quite a lot without compromising image quality and the final plug-in I use is called speed booster pack after you've installed it you can access it by hovering over settings then choosing the plug-in name in the submenu the one that I want to touch on here is lazy load images now by enabling this option it only loads images as it's needed for example when you load this page images that are further down in the page will only load as you scroll to its location play around with these settings and as you update them you should see your home page loads that's beside it you can also use a tool like Kingdom's full-page test which will show you the page load times and performance optimization tips just make sure to pin your page from the same location to get more accurate representations of PageSpeed site on a tool also tracks page speed over time so let's go to our report insight on it in HFS and see if there are any pages that load particularly slow so I'll head on over to the performance report and here you can see that there are five pages that have a loading time of greater than two seconds so I'll click on that which will show us the results in data explorer the first result is one that gets organic traffic and it looks like the time to first byte as well as the file size seem higher than I'd like so I'll copy the URL and paste it into Google PageSpeed insights and the results seem pretty good for the most part now scrolling down you'll see some suggestion to optimize images if your pages have issues with images CSS or JavaScript then you should see a link at the bottom of the page to download optimized versions for this page so I will just download the optimized versions of these images and replace them in the post now doing this for all of your pages may take some time so start with pages that get organic traffic and move down the list from there if you're really obsessed with speed right so our site is nice and speedy which is great for Google and for the user experience next is to add internal links to pass link equity to pages you want to rank using this custom filter and data Explorer I'm able to identify URLs that aren't a part of the page archive have less than three internal links pointing at them and return a 200 response code and it looks like there are a hundred and thirty-one URLs on this website looking through the list the vast majority are ones that I plan to delete but I'm sure there are others that we plan to keep and rank higher now let's order the pages by organic traffic in descending order in this one on borax versus boric acid seems like a good one so I'll go to the alt host page and use the search box here and search for the keyword borax to see if there are any posts I can link from to my borax versus boric acid post and it looks like this one on cleaning with essential oils includes that keyword in the post alternatively you can do this in Google by searching for site colon your domain comm and then adding your keyword or multiple keywords by using the or search operator and you'll see that we now have 15 pages that match our search queries since Google is searching through all index pages which includes both posts and pages another very cool yet effective way to use internal links in WordPress is to add a popular articles widget now these might be pages that you've found to convert particularly well or pages that you want to rank higher in Google looking at backlink OHS blog you'll see that he's done that here with some of his bigger guides you can also take this tactic a step farther and install a plug-in called custom sidebars this lets you insert a custom sidebar configuration on any post or page for example you may want to include a custom sidebar with links to other articles or product pages that are relevant to the content in the post now these kinds of tips aren't something that you have to do in fact a Jeff's blog and a lot of other popular plugs don't do this but from my experience I found it to work well the last thing I want to go through deals with duplicate content issues now in the first video I briefly touched on installing the Yoast SEO plug-in and setting up your sitemap and everything else works pretty good out of the box but there are a few advanced features that deal with indexation and it'll help you avoid creating unwanted duplicate pages so first hover over the Yoast settings and choose title slash metas and we'll make sure that a few settings are in place go to the post type settings and make sure that your meta robot settings for both pages and posts are unchecked which will ensure that all of your blog posts and pages are set to get indexed by default personally I set the media settings as no index follow because WordPress will often create separate media pages like this that have nothing more than just the image and this would certainly be classified as thin content next head on over to the taxonomy staff in most cases you'll want to know index the tags and formats option tags on WordPress have essentially no SEO value it's more of a way to categorize your posts which I don't see too many sites doing now for example if you look at this tag page it just lists a couple blog posts that can be accessed on their blog archive page and there's no real value in telling Google to index the tag page two the other one is categories now this one is debatable some people prefer not to index these pages while others will try to rank them and in my opinion if you're using breadcrumbs like this or use your categories as navigation items like many large publications do then I would recommend leaving them as indexable in most cases or if you think that people will find value in discovering them in Google then leave them as is I wouldn't stress too much about this unless you're creating thousands of pages that can potentially lead to issues with crawl budget faceted navigation or devaluing the link equity next is the archives tab here you'll actually find a section on avoiding duplicate content since this site is a single author blog I've chosen to no Index both your author archives and date based archives and the reason being if you leave this to be indexed by Google your blog homepage or list of posts will be identical to the author archive finally is the other tab here I recommend no indexing your archive sub pages and you can see in the example that this would be on an archive page with a URL like slash page / - in fact Google made a video on the best practices regarding pagination and they recommended a few different options the best one in my opinion was to create a view-all function and for all archive pages to include a canonical tag to the view all page there were certain conditions that should be met like the amount of time it takes to render the page but I'll let you watch full video if this is a concern that you have the last thing you should know regarding WordPress indexation is that you can no index specific pages or posts just scroll down to the Yoast SEO settings on the page that you want no Index click on the gear icon and then select no Index from the drop down this may be advisable for pages that you don't want to be in Google's index like a landing page that your split testing or a page with in your email or sales funnel if you want to dig deeper into duplicate content issues then go to the content quality report with an HR site audit tool and for this website you'll see that there are only green clusters of duplicate pages which means that the canonical is matching something that you'll want to be on the lookout for are bad duplicates or where a canonical is not set as you can see for this WordPress website now there's a lot more to technical SEO than what I've shown you here but by combining WordPress with some of these plugins and techniques you should be able to speed up your website and prevent a lot of easily avoidable duplicate content issues now if you found this video helpful make sure to like share and subscribe and let me know if there's anything that I missed in the comments specific to doing search engine optimization with WordPress so keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next tutorial