The document discusses the importance of technical SEO for WordPress beyond basic plugins like Yoast, emphasizing a good site structure, relevant content, and responsiveness. It outlines SEO maturity levels, recommendations for plugins, and the significance of adhering to semantic standards. The author underscores the need for ongoing maintenance and quality hosting to optimize organic search rankings effectively.

1. Technical SEO for WordPress
There is more than just installing Yoast
Otto Kekäläinen
@ottokekalainen
WordCamp Stuttgart
November 9, 2019

2. ● A CEO who codes at Seravo.com
● Written WP themes and plugins,
contributed to WordPress Core,
MySQL, MariaDB, Debian, Ubuntu,
Linux kernel, AppArmor…
● Linux and open source advocate
Otto Kekäläinen

3. ● Google’s robots and
others crawl our sites
~7,7M times a day
● Google.fi&com alone
sends visitors to our
customers sites ~600k
times a day
● I am senior enough to
remember Altavista…
Why do I talk about SEO?
statistics from 2018 Dec 11th 00:00–23:59

4. DO YOU WANT TO BE NUMBER ONE
IMMEDIATELY?
Then buy ads.
SEO is all about improving
organic ranking over time.
Nobody outside Google
knows how their ranking
works in detail. Google
penalizes spammers.

5. GROUND RULE:
MAKE THE SITE GOOD FOR HUMANS,
AND GOOGLE WILL LIKE IT TOO

6. Choosing WordPress
is a great strategy for
good SEO, as your
quality content from
blogs, WooCommerce etc
boosts your domain’s reputation.

7. “Google loves WordPress”
– Matt Cutts, Google
WordPress is also a good technology

8. LEVELS OF
SEO
MATURITY
1.
Acknowledged
Easy!
2.
Fully crawled
robots.txt
sitemap.xml
No errors
No link rot
3.
Given
relevance
Relevant
contents
Semantic
structure
Microformats
Pretty URLs
4.
Given value
and high
ranking
Links to site
Social media
Popularity
Responsive
Fast
HTTPS
HTTP2
IPv6?

9. TECHNICAL
SEO
1.
Acknowledged
Easy!
2.
Fully crawled
robots.txt
sitemap.xml
No errors
No link rot
3.
Given
relevance
Relevant
contents
Semantic
structure
Microformats
Pretty URLs
4.
Given value
and high
ranking
Links to site
Social media
Popularity
Responsive
Fast
HTTPS
HTTP2
IPv6?

10. WORDPRESS AND
BUILT-IN SEO

11. WordPress built-in: robots.txt

12. WordPress built-in: language markup

13. WordPress built-in: pretty urls
Never use
example.com/?p=12
3 anymore, ok?
In posts, the
title becomes
the url by
default

14. WordPress built-in: image settings
url
Think about these
next time you
upload an image.
alt attribute

15. WHAT ABOUT
WORDPRESS THEMES?

16. TYPICAL IN WORDPRESS
All modern themes are responsive by design,
and most follow good semantic practices:
- unique <title> for each page
- one <h1> per page
- <article>, <section> etc..

17. IF YOU ROLL YOUR OWN THEME
Strive for (standards) valid and clean code!
Google’s robots value what G’s engineers
value..
Read up on the standard semantic tags in
HTML5, explore microformats and adhere to
schema.org vocabulary.

18. MAKING YOUR OWN CUSTOM POST
TYPES
In most cases you
don’t want to have
custom post types
visible as individual
pages or listed in
sitemap.xml.

19. SEMANTIC MARKUP EXAMPLE
Feed search
engines with
semantic data and
they will use it.

20. SEO
PLUGINS

21. USE SEO FRAMEWORK!
★ Smaller, leaner, faster
★ Creates nice clean
/sitemap.xml
★ Canonical URL
wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/
★ No bloat, no
annoying ads
★ And it even looks
better!

22. YOAST ⇢ SEO FRAMEWORK MIGRATION
= Yoast ≅ SEO Framework

23. OPENGRAPH (FB) AND TWITTER CARDS
Don’t worry – SEO Framework generates these for you

24. SITEMAP.XML
SEO Framework
added
sitemap.xml
automatically

25. AVOID DUPLICATE CONTENT
Spamming does
not help SEO!
(Unless you are
really good)

26. ACCELERATED MOBILE
PAGES
We’ve been building websites
mobile first for years already,
but now Google et al wants us
to go back to the
m.example.com paradigm,
this time the url can be
example.com/amp/ though..

27. / /amp/

28. REDIRECTION – AVOID LINK ROT
wordpress.org/plugins/redirection/

29. MULTILINGUAL PLUGINS?
Polylang! Keep away from WPML.
Polylang does automatically hreflang
attributes too.

30. GOOD HOSTING AND ACTIVE UPKEEP
● low response times
● https
● http/2
Make sure your site and server are being
looked after by progressive Linux admins.

31. WITH GOOD TECH IN PLACE,
IT’S SAFE TO START
INVESTING IN
CONTENTS AND
SOCIAL
1.
Acknowledged
Easy!
2.
Fully crawled
robots.txt
sitemap.xml
No errors
No link rot
3.
Given
relevance
Relevant
contents
Semantic
structure
Microformats
Pretty URLs
4.
Given value
and high
ranking
Links to site
Social media
Popularity
Responsive
Fast
HTTPS
HTTP2
IPv6?

32. Bonus tips
These related plugins are now trending. I don’t have
much experience of them so I can’t recommend them yet,
but you might want to do it yourself:
● wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/
● wordpress.org/plugins/google-site-kit/

33. Thank you!
@ottokekalainen
seravo.de