My presentation slides from WordCamp Montreal 2019

3. Glossary
Search Snippet – the search engine result from a keyword search.
Ranking Signals – the things that search engines (particularly Google)
consider, when deciding if your website is relevant to searches.
Keyword – a word/phrase, searched for by a would-be website visitor
Taxonomy – hierarchy/structure and naming convention
Pagination – splitting of content into (multiple) pages
Canonicalization – designation of authoritative pages, when two or more
pages have the same content
SERPs – Search engine results pages
CTR – Click-through rate. The rate (as a percentage) that users click on a link
(such as a search result)

5. What is “the garbage?”
• WordPress, and many other online tools, produce a lot of different
code, some is used, and some is not
• Lots of code can slow web pages down
• The way code is handled (containers, minification) is also relevant
• WordPress operates in a plugin-based ecosystem
• This tends to produce even-more page code
• WordPress produces a lot of pages
• Plugins can do this (Wordfence, RSS Feeds)
• Page-post dichotomy

7. What is a search engine???
• Like Pinocchio, it’s just trying to be human, and wants to do that all
day, every day, forever. To become the searcher
• Any search engine rewards a website with relevance (ie. rankings)
based on 4-5 fundamental principles. Search engines want sites to be:
• FAST!
• Fresh
• Relevant
• Genuine
• Local

8. Nip it in the Snippet!

9. Dissecting the search snippet
Page title
Title Tag
SEO Title
URL
meta description

10. Page Title – Title Tag – SEO Title
• The most important SEO Element of any page
• RULE: 55 Characters in length without the brand
• Search engines will append the brand
• Page Titles are meant for search engines and searchers
• so they should be keyword-optimized

11. URL & Meta Description
• URLs are not considered to be ranking signals
• Many SEOs have conducted experiments, somewhat-disproving that assertion
• Top level domain (TLD) is important (Canadian business = .ca)
• Meta descriptions are not relevant for search
• so, they are 100% about user – tell the user what the page is about
• Formerly limited to 156 Chars, but currently up to 200 or more seems to be
working

13. Content & Keywords
• Each important page should have 250 words of static content (if
possible)
• There should be 50 words of keyword-optimized content above the fold
• Content should be structured in a hierarchy (h1, h2, h3…)
• H1 (primary on-page title) should be keyword-optimized
• Keyword Research (KWR)
• Template kwr.xltx available for download, check the website. I’ll post a Google
Sheet of it also
• KWR can take 2 hours or 40 hours, it’s up to you, and it’s about effort.

14. Optimizing Content & Metadata
• Start with the title tags, use your focus keywords to optimize
• Separate characters using a | (doesn’t really matter)
• 55 chars in length, don’t use the brand (especially if it’s in the URL)
• Most important/relevant focus keywords come first