Andrew Dixon
Work for a digital agency call mso since 2000
Technical Director
We are pivoting from a service agency to a product developer in the education sector
Going to talk to you about SEO with WordPress
Simon will talk about SEO in general after me
SEO is hard
No really, it is hard, I’m not making it up.
WordPress has nothing directly to do with SEO
Depends on coding
Depends on content
Ability to get inbound links
Content is king, it really is
Without content, nothing for search engine to see
Good, high quality, UNIQUE content
You are nothing without good content
WordPress Plugins can help
But only if the theme is done right
No plugin can fix fundamental underlying issues with your theme’s HTML, CSS and Javascript
Covers the SEO basics
Does all the basics you need, e.g. titles, descriptions, social, etc…
Pro version available, does a bit more, WooCommerce, Videos, etc… but is pretty pricey.
By far the most popular SEO plugin
While it too covers the basics, like All-in-One SEO Pack, it also has some great CMS features
Social media tags (Facebook and Twitter) added automatically, including a “linked data” (JSON+LD) used by Google Knowledge graph
Automatically generates robots.txt and sitemap.xml files
Be careful with taxonomy, archive, author, etc… sitemap pages
Premium version available, not sure it is worth it.
Most people ignore the important part of Yoast.
The setup wizard sets up good default, use it.
People ignore these or are even annoyed by their existence in the pages and posts lists
Many people ask us if we can “remove them” or “hide them”
They are trying to tell you something important, so don’t ignore, fix!
For each page and post define a focus keyword / phrase or words / phrases (if using pro) for that content
Read the suggestions and act on them. Get as many green as possible.
Gives you information about how “readable” the page or post is.
Again, get as many green as possible and adjust the content as required.
If most / all your content is in advanced custom fields (ACF), then you need this Yoast plugin to make sure the previous two work with your content.
It is just an install. There is no configuration required.
There are some additional “paid” for plugins for Yoast
Additional stuff for WooCommerce sites
Additional stuff for News sites
For sites with lots of videos
Whilst Yoast is great, it is free and they want something for it, they add comments to your HTML that advertise Yoast!!!
Install “Remove Yoast SEO Comments” plugin to remove these.
Redirection is a great plugin for easily adding 301 redirects to a sites
Helpful for fixing issues from Google Search Console.
Automatically compresses uploaded images using TinyPNG
Work for both PNG and JPEG
Compress is industry leading
500 free compresses per month
Paid service, relatively cheap, less than 1 cent per image
Remember, one image upload might result in many more versions of the image
Caches your site pages to improve load speed dramatically
Includes options to use CDN’s for resources, e.g. images, stylesheets, Javascript, etc…
By WordPress creators Automattic
Other caching options are available