WordPress SEO Mistakes that Kill - BigDigital 2017 - Peter Mead
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This document discusses 7 common mistakes that can negatively impact a WordPress website's SEO performance: 1) Not conducting an SEO audit, 2) Poor crawling issues, 3) Bad website migrations, 4) On-site SEO issues in the Yoast SEO plugin, 5) Slow website speed, 6) Duplicate content problems, and 7) Missing important metrics tracking. The document provides examples and suggestions for avoiding each mistake to help WordPress sites succeed with SEO.
WordPress SEO Mistakes that Kill - BigDigital 2017 - Peter Mead
- 1. Avoiding The Mistakes That Could Kill Your Business @petermeadit Peter Mead
- 2. Peter Mead Who am I? * Been in Digital since 1997 * WordPress SEO Consultant * Hands on, Technical, Strategic My Ethos? * Communication, * Community, * Culture. My Contacts? * Peter Mead iT * Melbourne SEO Meetup @petermeadit
- 3. WordPress SEO Mistakes That Kill Top 7 1. Not doing SEO Audit 2. Poor crawling 3. Bad Migration 4. Yoast SEO on-site Issues 5. Slow Website Speed 6. Duplicate Content 7. Missing metrics @petermeadit
- 4. 1. Not doing SEO Audit Audit before your campaign? No time; find issues as we go. What problems lies ahead? Help learn more about SEO Pay a pro to do an audit? @petermeadit
- 5. SEMrush Data study for common audit issues SEMrush Collected Anonymous data from the Audit tool Q: What are the most common on-page technical SEO issues? The data: ● 100,000 websites ● 450 million pages ● Top % of sites affected ● If 25% are WordPress ● Infer 25,000 WP sites Link: SEMrush Audit tool @petermeadit
- 6. The stats, percentage of sites with issues? Link: SEMrush Audit Data @petermeadit
- 7. Title tags, meta description issues very common @petermeadit
- 8. Broken links, broken external and internal links @petermeadit
- 10. Bloated Themes, & missing language declaration @petermeadit
- 11. Audit regularly, use good tools Some good tools: SEMrush Moz Screaming frog Google Search Console Bing Webmaster Tools Educate yourself and Learn more about the issues @petermeadit
- 12. Definitive DIY Advanced Audit Alan Bleiweiss - Checklist Spreadsheet with percentage scores @petermeadit
- 13. 2. Poor Crawling Blocked crawlers? Crawl errors in GSC Block .js & .css in robots.txt Code in Theme for Tabs? Noindex in Yoast SEO? @petermeadit
- 14. Less can be more in robots.txt @petermeadit Learn: SEObook robots.txt tutorial - Aaron Wall
- 15. Edit your robots.txt file with Yoast SEO @petermeadit
- 16. 3. Bad Migration Ask Why migrate? A new domain! Better URL structure! Website Redesign Change of CMS Redesign over 30% Looks like a new site @petermeadit
- 17. Migration strategy A website migration strategy is key! All migrations cause re-indexing Afterwards Monitor URLs for crawl errors HTTPS poor 301s, old site still reachable SSL migration plan - Aleyda Solis @petermeadit
- 18. Use Redirection Plugin Redirection plugin vs .htaccess file… management vs speed Plugin: https://wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/ @petermeadit
- 19. 4. Yoast SEO Onsite Issues A plugin helps with on-site SEO Yoast SEO for on-site SEO Can use All in one SEO Pack Red is stop, green is go? Not always. It’s a guide, to help your on-site SEO. @petermeadit
- 20. Beyond the Yoast SEO traffic lights Learn more about on-site SEO Improve your titles & H1 tags Name images, and ALT attributes Use friendly URLs for blog posts Internal and external links for juice Would you click on a link in 1st sentence vs footer Google’s Reasonable Surfer Patent - Bill Slawski @petermeadit
- 21. Panda has a strong right hook Bad on-site SEO, Panda #25 hit in March 2013 Client thought SEO sucked until 2016! A redesigned site & improved content @petermeadit
- 22. 5. Slow Website Speed Web server slow response times Poor Theme design, too many Plugins Large files & images Do you rush into AMP? https://www.webpagetest.org/ https://tools.pingdom.com/ https://gtmetrix.com/ @petermeadit
- 23. Fast site slow Browse to Site: realestate.com.au feels fast; but the tools say it’s slow @petermeadit
- 24. PageSpeed Insights PageSpeed ranking factor 2009 PageSpeed Insights tool Not a speed test! It’s a score out of 100 A lower score mean a slower site? 100/100 may not be a faster site? Learn About PageSpeed Insights @petermeadit
- 25. Waterfall vs perception of speed Long list of files to load. What's in waterfall? Not easy to fix, may need a Theme redesign. Key is to make your site feel faster. Use a Lazy Load Plugin Compress images with WP Smush WP Super Cache Plugin or WP Rocket - Paid Resource: Use SSL & HTTP/2 - Jon Henshaw @petermeadit
- 26. What a Cache Plugin can do Caching skips processing heavy PHP scripts; serves static HTML files direct from Apache :) @petermeadit
- 27. Check GSC Crawl Stats, another speed check How long for crawler to download the HTML Under 350 milliseconds is a good measure @petermeadit
- 28. 6. Duplicate Content Duplicate Content Myth But it can cause problems Which page to optimise? Pages with similar meanings, near duplicate, can cause Cannibalization of similar content @petermeadit
- 29. Beating duplication Canonical to pass link juice like a 301 Noindex taxonomies or optimize them Use internal links to to definitive pages Don’t repeat blog topics, be unique Webinar: avoid cannibalization - Dawn Anderson @petermeadit
- 30. 7. Missing Metrics Setup: Google Search Console Analytics, Adwords, Bing Webmaster Tools Plugin Insert Headers and Footers Then use Google Tag Manager Don’t bother Developers with tracking code @petermeadit
- 31. Metrics for important business goals What User Actions Contribute to the Goals of the Business? Don’t use goals to measure useless metrics, use events, tag manager. Rankings come and go, define the metrics that matter Using money in the bank metrics? Can be hard to measure. Plugin MonsterInsights formerly Yoast Analytics if you need inline Analytics @petermeadit
- 32. Avoid WordPress SEO Mistakes That Kill Dig deeper into WordPress Don’t just assume it’s all ok! Some mistakes are deadly. What kind of risks to take? Learn & upskill, get Technical. Reach out to me with questions. @petermeadit