12 Tips for Immaculate Seo on Wordpress Sites

By Marcus Taylor

I used to dream of a day when all of our client’s websites were built on WordPress. No more 6-month approval times for changing URL structures. No more 5-figure bills from web development agencies to customise our client’s bespoke CMS to enable SEO changes. Generally, less no’s and more yeses.

Today, roughly 60% of my clients use WordPress, which is a nice improvement on the 5-10% that it was back in 2009-2010. Of course, the type of client influences this number, but with 76,214,709 websites now powered by WordPress (as of writing), it’s probably not too dissimilar for most of us.

With the majority of the sites I work on being built on WP, like many of us, I’ve had to do a lot of experimentation around the best plugins, themes, and general tips for making WordPress great for SEO. This list isn’t exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point for someone new to WordPress SEO. For those of you who’ve been optimising WordPress sites for donkey’s years, just skim the headings. There may be one or two suggestions that are new or that have slipped through the cracks on a site you work on.

So let’s start of with prevention, rather than cure.

#1 Use an exceptional theme to begin with

This will be unhelpful advice to most looking to improve their existing site’s SEO performance, but for new sites and clients who are in a rebuild, go for the best theme you can get your hands. This will eliminate most of the annoying and time-consuming problems, and put your site in a good position for years to come.

For less than $50, you can get a beautiful theme with bulletproof code, thoroughly tested cross-browser compatibility, ultra-responsive design (good on larger and small devices i.e. smart TVs and smart phones), and .po / .mo files for easy translation into multiple languages. Here’s a huge list of beautiful WordPress themes to get started with.

#2 Image Compression: WP Smush.it

I’m a big fan of image-heavy long-form content. Most of the posts I write these days are in excess of 2,000 words and have lots of images. To keep page load speed down with image-heavy content I recommend the Smush It image compression plugin, which does what it says on the tin; compresses images automatically as you upload them to the media library.

Smush It works both retrospectively and going forward. Install it, run it on all of your existing images, and then leave it to smush all of the images you upload in the future.

#3 Database Optimisation: WP Optmize

One of the downfalls of WordPress from a speed perspective is that all of your drafts are saved in the database forever, which means your database can get pretty clunky after a year or two of frequent blogging. I cleaned up a database for one of my sites the other day which had over 1,500 database entries for post drafts. Not good.

WP Optimize is handy as it means that only your past 7 or 8 drafts will be saved to your database. You can also set it to automatically spruce up your database at intervals by deleting any drafts that are more than a certain number of days old. Again, this just helps keep your website running at lightening speed.

#4 WordPress SEO by Yoast

No list on SEO for WordPress would be complete without a hat tip to Joost De Valk’s WordPress SEO plugin. Voted as one of the best plugins by the co-founders of WordPress, it’s not half bad. This plugin will tick off most major SEO issues that WordPress doesn’t do straight out of the box, such as producing an XML sitemap, auto-generating titles & meta descriptions based on excerpts and rules, integrating social & authorship metadata, and making the URL structures neat and tidy.

#5 SEO Smart Links

SEO Smart Links is a handy plugin for improving your internal linking from within body content. For example, you can set a rule to say whenever ‘Bas Van Den Beld’ is mentioned on StateofDigital.com, link to this page.

I recently installed this on a website that had 3,000 blog posts in a relatively competitive niche but hadn’t done a fantastic job of internal linking to the key pages they wanted to rank. After ~10 days of setting up some internal linking rules, the site increased from the bottom of page 2 to the middle of page 1 for its main keyword.

#6 BackupWordpress

About 5 months ago, a site that I spent a solid week building got hacked. It wasn’t backed up. I was pretty gutted. All the hard work done to make the SEO immaculate was lost, and I had to start from scratch.

Lesson learned: use a plugin like BackupWordPress to automatically backup your site to DropBox. I’m so paranoid about this now that I also use IFTTT to sync Google Drive and Dropbox, so that I always have at least two cloud backups of my websites!

#7 YARPP (Yet Another Related Posts Plugin)

An oldie, but a classic. YARPP adds a list of related posts to the bottom of every post, encouraging users to read other posts. Great for reader engagement, improving behavioural metrics, and internal linking.

YARPP being used on the EmuBands Distribution website

#8 SEO Friendly Images

I’m getting better, but I used to be awful at remembering to add alternative tags and image titles. This plugin was a lifesaver as it automatically creates ALT tags for any images you’ve forgotten to add them for, using the page title as the description.

#9 Gravity Forms for UGC pages & contact forms

One of the things that I find quite irritating with Contact Form 7, despite being a relatively decent and easy to use contact form plugin, is that the JavaScript files injected on every page of your site by default, which is totally unnecessary and has page speed implications. Enter Gravity Forms.

Gravity Forms is a great plugin with a tonne of different uses, including quick an easy form generation. It’s slightly more SEO friendly than the alternatives, and can also be used for UGC page creation (Richard Baxter has written a great guide on how to do that with Gravity here).

Another great thing about Gravity Forms is that they’re integrated with Zapier, which while not necessarily impacting SEO, means you can get really smart about connecting anything entered into Gravity to your CRM system, proposal software, cloud documents, or much more.

#10 WP Super Cache (or WP Total Cache)

Both of these cacheing plugins are great and will noticeably improve your WordPress site’s page load speed. I’m a fan of WP Super Cache, but a lot of people swear by WP Total Cache – I don’t think there’s too much in it, to be honest.

#11 SNAP – Social Network Auto Poster

I like SNAP because it fills in the blindspots of IFTTT and Zapier for promoting your content on social networks. Back in the day, when you created a post on WordPress you’d spend the next half an hour logging into all kinds of weird and wonderful social networks to promote the piece of content. Now, thanks to automation tools, you can just hit publish and let the Internet do its thing.

Currently, IFTTT enables you to send content to Twitter, Facebook, Google+ (via Buffer), LinkedIn, and many others. However, you can’t auto-post to Reddit, Pinterest, StumbleUpon, or any of those, which is where SNAP comes in.

#12 WPSocial

WPSocial goes one step beyond Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin in terms of filling out social network meta data. It’s great for setting rich snippet microdata settings and controlling which page types you want to display authorship and social mark-up on.

Summary

I’ll leave it there for now, as I think these tips probably represent the 20% that will have 80% of the difference. That said, I’m sure there are a tonne of other great plugins, tips, and insights out there – so if you know any that should be added to the list, feel free to share them in the comments.

Post from Marcus Taylor on State of Digital
12 Tips For Immaculate SEO on WordPress Sites

Source: State of Digital

12 Tips for Immaculate Seo on Wordpress Sites

Google Updates Search with Resturant Menus

By Tariq Ali

Next time you are getting ready to head out to eat, search Google to make sure the restaurant you are considering has what you want on their menu. Google officially announced the new search feature is now available Next time you’re planning a brunch or a date night, check to make sure the menu has […]

The post Google Updates Search With Resturant Menus appeared first on ISEdb.COM.

Source: ISEDB

Google Updates Search with Resturant Menus

Facebook Updates Paper App with New Features

By Chris Crum

Facebook has released a new update for its Paper news reader app.

It will now let users share articles via Facebook Messages, text message or email, and turn sound effects off. It also now supports languages that use multi-stage input, including Chinese, Japanese and Korean.

The app was first released on February 3rd, and is only available for iPhone in the U.S. for the time being.

“Your Paper is made of stories and themed sections, so you can follow your favorite interests,” Mark Zuckerberg said of the app when he first announced it. “The first section in Paper is your Facebook News Feed, where you’ll enjoy inspiring new designs for photos, videos, and longer written posts. You can customize Paper with a choice of more than a dozen other sections about various themes and topics—from photography and sports to food, science and design. Each section includes a rich mix of content from emerging voices and well-known publications.”

Here’s the iTunes description:

Explore and share stories from friends and the world in immersive designs and fullscreen, distraction-free layouts. Paper includes your Facebook News Feed and sections about your favorite topics.

As Josh Constine at TechCrunch points out, the app’s sharing feature includes the following URL: fb.com/trypaper, which could get more people to give the app a try.

Image via Facebook

Source: WebPro News 1

Facebook Updates Paper App with New Features

Bing Saves is Now Available to All in Open Beta

By Zach Walton

Have you ever thought to yourself, “Man, I wish I could bookmark this Web site in anything other than my browser?” You probably haven’t, but Bing thinks you might have.

Last month, Bing introduced a new feature called Bing Saves. It’s essentially a bookmarking feature within Bing that allowed you to save Web sites to your Microsoft account and visit them later. The logic behind this appears to be that you might want to save some Web sites for later use, but don’t feel they’re important enough to warrant a bookmark in your browser.

When it first launched, Bing Saves was only available to a select number of people. Search Engine Land points out that the beta is now available to all so you can start saving Web sites.

If you feel the need to use Bing Saves, you simply have to visit the Web site. From there, you’ll see a list of trending Web sites and a Public Feed of saved Web sites. To start adding personal bookmarks, you just need to add the “Save on Bing” button to your Web browser.

The Bing Saves feature is still in beta, but it will probably become a real product. After all, a similar feature has already been added to the Bing mobile app. In the recently updated Bing app for iOS, you can now bookmark search results for later use.

Image via Bing

Source: WebPro News 2

Bing Saves is Now Available to All in Open Beta

Twitter Warns a Bunch of Users of Hack, Resets Their Passwords in Error

By Josh Wolford

An email sent to some Twitter users warning them that their accounts may have been compromised was sent in error, according to Twitter.

“Twitter believes that your account may have been compromised by a website or service not associated with Twitter. We’re reset your password to prevent others from accessing your account,” said Twitter in an email to some users.

Of course, users took to Twitter to ask if this warning was legit.

Over the last day or so, you may have seen plenty of tweets that look like this if you searched the network:

Hey @twitter is this e-mail requesting to reset my password really coming from you? pic.twitter.com/06fvP8I8eS

— Teddy Satrio Wibowo (@teddysatrio) March 4, 2014

Although the message was in fact from Twitter, it was sent in error.

“We unintentionally sent some password reset notices tonight due to a system error. We apologize to the affected users for the inconvenience,” said Twitter in a statement.

This isn’t the first time that this has happened. A little over a year ago, Twitter sent the same email to many users–but that time the company had a reason. In November of 2012, Twitter believed that a small subset of user account had been compromised, but they accidentally reset too many user passwords–way more than they felt had possibly been compromised.

Source: WebPro News 1

Twitter Warns a Bunch of Users of Hack, Resets Their Passwords in Error

A Few Adwords Extensions Here, a Few Adwords Extensions There

By Haukur Jarl

Ever since Google updated the way AdWords calculates Ad Rank it‘s more important than ever to utilize ad extensions and if you haven‘t used them before I strongly suggest that you start now. Extensions can assist advertisers to push out more relevant information per impression while at the same time increase visibility which is essentially then name of the game.

Below is a mock-up version of the (relatively) new Ad Rank formula, note the question mark between Quality Score and Ad extensions. According to Google the “… expected impact from those extensions is factored into your Ad Rank” (source: http://goo.gl/SPHiqj), It’s still uncertain as to how they calculate the estimated performance, hence the question mark.

In the following article I’ll walk through some of the extensions available to you via Google AdWords. If this is the first time you hear about this feature you can find them here:

Sitelinks extension

Sitelinks are a neat way of promoting other pages (e.g. related products and offers) within your website alongside your ads which users might be interested in. You can associate up to 20 sitelinks with your campaigns or ad groups (note that Google does not display more than six at a time), create sitelinks specifically for mobile or desktop/laptop devices and lastly create a custom schedule around them.

Below is a screenshot which displays two competing advertisers, one with sitelinks and one not. Notice how the top advertiser takes up much more space while at the same time promoting more pages related to the topic I searched for.

In addition to all of this you can show additional details with your link; these are commonly known as “enhanced sitelinks” and there are two sides to them. One is that Google finds data within your account that matches the sitelink in question and displays it, the other one is that you can add and edit a description yourself.

The copy guidelines behind enhanced sitelinks are similar to writing an ad text; link text (headline) can include max. 25 characters and both description lines can include up to 35 characters. I personally have not seen enhanced sitelinks often on SERPs and when I’ve seen them it’s after I I’ve done a branded search. To me that indicates a very strict policy around them but that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t add them.

Additional notes about sitelinks:

1. Each Sitelink needs to have a unique landing page URL, you can’t use the same URL as you’re using in the corresponding ad copy.


2. You need to have good to great Quality Scores in order for them to show.


3. Your ad needs to be displayed above or below organic results.


4. Try to keep the link text as short as you can, that way you’re more likely to have sitelinks shown.

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/gvkcMe

Call extension

If phone calls are important to your business then Call extensions should definitely interest you, especially if you’re running a local campaign (e.g. restaurants). This extension allows your users to easily get in touch with your business and like sitelinks, they can appear in different formats. On desktop/laptop and tablet devices the phone number appears with the ads but on smartphones you’ll get a click-to-call button (see the below screenshot)

There are two sides in the way you can track your phone call performance;

1. In the US, UK, French and German you have the option of opting into the Google forwarding phone number service. It allows Google to create unique phone numbers which in return allows them to track e.g. phone call conversions. These conversions count calls that last for a certain amount of time defined by you. I recommend that you take into account the average waiting time before pick up so you don’t count conversions that aren’t actual conversions. Using Google forwarding phone number also allows you to see how many times your number was manually dialed versus clicked on


2. Google currently doesn’t support forwarding phone numbers in other markets unfortunately which means that you can’t track phone calls as precisely as in the aforementioned markets but you’ll still get statistics as to how many clicked on the click-to-call button.

Additional information:

1. Call extensions can be used with location extension which is a double win for any advertiser running a local campaign


2. One of the biggest fails I’ve seen from companies that don’t offer 24/7 phone support is not creating a custom schedule. This is very easy to set up when you create a call extension.


3. You can have AdWords only serve call extensions on mobile devices.


4. You have the option to display both headline & phone number or just the phone number (which would replace the headline)

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/MYJrIt

Location extension

If your business has a physical location where you conduct most of your business, you should make it easy for users to find it. There are two ways to set up location extension:

1. Manually enter the address (Legacy location extension)


2. Connect your Google Places and AdWords accounts together and import the information (Upgraded location extension) – I prefer the Upgraded version.

Below is a screenshot that displays an ad with call, sitelinks and location extensions – a beautiful sight if you ask me. The ad takes over most of the „goldenbox“ and is in top position which creates a perfect scenario for a click. The extension appears as a link with the associated location name, in this case it‘s „Keflavik Internation Airport, Reykjanesbær“.

When a user clicks on the link he or she is taken to a Google Maps page where they can e.g. ask for directions to see whether your store is close by.

Additional information:

1. In some countries (like Iceland, sigh…) Google does not allow account managers to manually add locations, here is the complete list of countries that can: http://goo.gl/3BspbT. That means that they’re only able to use this via a Google Places connection.

For more information visit: http://goo.gl/A9U68a and http://goo.gl/IIPlCz

Review extension

Being able to communicate trust towards possible customers is very important and even though you know that your business rocks it can sometimes be hard to convince users that you are everything they’re looking for. That’s where Review extensions come in handy.

Review extensions allow you to include a review from third party websites with you ads on the Google search network and can give your message a tremendous boost and credibility while at the same time assisting you in generating more elbow space on SERPs. This extension is especially brilliant for account managers that currently use quotes in their ad texts as it allows them use that space to deliver a richer message.

There are essentially two ways to set this up

1. Exact quote: means that you copy and paste the text as it is on the source you’re taking it from as well as include the source name. The name needs to be included in the source URL (e.g. naming a source Awesome Reviews requires you to direct users to the page www.awesomereviews.com).


2. Paraphrased: means that you can word the text a bit differently from how it’s actually written on the original source but you need to keep the same tone.

Both ways are limited to 67 characters in total which includes Source and Text

Keep in mind that Google’s advertising policy around Review extensions is strict but they basically require that the review is visible in the source and that the source itself is credible (here’s a link to Google’s review extensions advertising policy).

Additional information:

1. Only English reviews are currently supported


2. Publishers can request that the review is removed via an opt-out form found here

Conclusion

Keep in mind that extensions are known to have poorer %CTR when compared to click-through-rate on headlines (ads) but instead they help you get more real-estate on SERPs. There are more extensions currently available to you that I definitely recommend that you read about: App Extensions and Previous visit-, Seller rating- & Social annotations. On top of these there are new extensions currently in beta that look really promising like image and email extensions.

What’s your favourite extension?

Post from Haukur Jarl on State of Digital
A few Adwords Extensions here, a few Adwords Extensions There

Source: State of Digital

A Few Adwords Extensions Here, a Few Adwords Extensions There

Google’s ‘completely Clear’ Stance on Disavowing ‘irrelevant’ Links

By Chris Crum

We knew that when Google launched the Disavow Links tool, people were going to use it more than they should, even though Google made it clear that most people shouldn’t use it at all.

A person doing some SEO work posted a question in the Google Webmaster Central product forum (via Search Engine Roundtable) that many others have probably wondered: Should I use the disavow tool for irrelevant links?

In other words, should you tell Google to ignore links from sites that aren’t related to yours? The answer is no.

Google’s own John Mueller jumped in to say this: “Just to be completely clear on this: you do not need to disavow links that are from sites on other topics. This tool is really only meant for situations where there are problematic, unnatural, PageRank-passing links that you can’t have removed.”

Google updates and manual action penalties have caused a lot of webmasters to re-evaluate their link profiles. Many have scrambled to get various links to their sties taken down, often going overboard (or even way overboard).

For the record, Google still views backlinks as “a really, really big win in terms of quality for search results.”

In other “how Google views links” news, Matt Cutts just put out an 8-minute video about how Google determines whether your links are paid or not.

Image via Google.com

Source: WebPro News 2

Google’s ‘completely Clear’ Stance on Disavowing ‘irrelevant’ Links