WordPress Websites
WordPress is much more than just another blogging platform, in fact, popular websites like 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, you're about to learn exactly how to do that from the ground up to stay tuned.
Advanced SEO for WordPress Websites 2020 + Easy SEO
What's up to 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.
How to Create SEO Friendly Posts and Pages
we're gonna cover a lot of the technical SEO aspects particularly with PageSpeed duplicate content and internal linking all within WordPresslet's get to it before we begin I'm gonna run a full site audit on my website using the HRF site audit tool andI'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 minification and there are three plugins that I use specifically to boost my site speed.Best WordPress SEO plugins 2020
1. W3 total cache -
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 this every day it should result in faster load times and 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 mini 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 Apachevs. nginx vs engine Tron your hosting plan. 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.
2.Shortpixel -
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 homepage loads that are 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 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, seems 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 to 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 speedywhich is great for Google and for theuser experience next is to add internallinks to pass link equity to pages youwant to rank using this custom filterand data Explorer I'm able to identifyURLs that aren't a part of the pagearchive have less than three internallinks pointing at them and return a 200response code and it looks like thereare a hundred and thirty-one URLs onthis website looking through the listthe vast majority are ones that I planto delete but I'm sure there are othersthat we plan to keep and rank higher nowlet's order the pages by organic trafficin descending order in this one on boraxversus boric acid seems like a good oneso I'll go to the alt host page and usethe search box here and search for thekeyword borax to see if there are anyposts I can link from to my borax versusboric acid post and it looks like thisone on cleaning with essential oilsincludes that keyword in the postalternatively you can do this in Google by searching for site colon your domaincomm and then adding your keyword ormultiple keywords by using the or searchoperator and you'll see that we now have15 pages that match our search queriessince Google is searching through allindex pages which includes both postsand pages another very cool yet effective way to use internal links in WordPress is to add a popular articles widget now there might be pages that you've found to convert particularly well or pages that you want to rank higher in Google looking at backlink OHSblog you'll see that he's done that herewith 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 sidebarconfiguration on any post or page forexample you may want to include a customsidebar with links to other articles orproduct pages that are relevant to thecontent in the post now these kinds oftips aren't something that you have todo in fact a Jeff's blog and a lot ofother popular plugs don't do this butfrom my experience I found it to workwell the last thing I want to go throughdeals with duplicate content issues nowin the first video I briefly touched oninstalling the Yoast SEO plug-in andsetting up your sitemap and everythingelse works pretty good out of the boxbut there are a few advanced featuresthat deal with indexation and it'll helpyou avoid creating unwanted duplicatepages.
so the first hover over the Yoast settings and choose title slash metals 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'reusing breadcrumbs like this or use your categories as navigation items like many large publications do then I would recommend leaving them as indexable inmost cases or if you think that people will find value in discovering them inGoogle then leave them as is I wouldn'tstress too much about this unless you'recreating thousands of pages that canpotentially lead to issues with crawlbudget faceted navigation or devaluingthe link equity next is the archives tabhere you'll actually find a section onavoiding duplicate content since thissite is a single author blog I've chosento no Index both your author archivesand date based archives and the reasonbeing if you leave this to be indexed byGoogle your blog homepage or list ofposts will be identical to the authorarchive finally is the other tab here Irecommend no indexing your archive subpages and you can see in the examplethat this would be on an archive pagewith a URL like slash page / - in factGoogle 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.
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.
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