Technical SEO for WordPress Developers, Designers and Webmasters

Technical SEO for Developers,
Designers & Webmasters
Henry Visotski
Website Manager, SEO, Front End Coder
Technical SEO | Henry Visotski 1

Henry Visotski
• SEO
• Front End Coder
• Website Manager
• Analytics Specialist
• Ad Ops / Trafficker
• PPC / Search / SM Marketer
• Writer
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/henryvisotski

SEO is the same, whatever the
platform.
The tools we use to achieve our SEO goals are
what differs, depending on the goal, type of
website, CMS, budget, etc.

WordPress SEO

SEO Plugins: Yoast & All In One
• Heavy lifters of WP SEO
• Stable, actively developed & updated
• Automated, editable settings for meta tags &
more: global, page-level, taxonomy-level
• Structured data, social meta
• File editor: robots.txt, .htaccess
• XML sitemaps

Yoast vs. All In One
Yoast SEO
• Better handling of
automated structured data
& Open Graph
• <head> cleanup options (no
post shortlinks, etc.)
• Tools to assist with content
authoring
• Quicker to phase out
depreciated SEO features
All In One SEO Pack
• Easy Google Analytics
injection
• Custom script, CSS, and
meta insertion into <head>
(site-wide, pages, posts)

Redirection
• Three types of redirects (301 permanent, 302
& 307 temporary)
• Regex support
• Automatic 301 when a post’s title changes
• Redirect individual pages, directories, entire
domains
• 404 (not found) error monitoring

Ways to Insert Custom Scripts in WP
• Directly into templates: header.php,
footer.php, page & post templates, etc.
• Native feature of frameworks (Genesis), some
SEO plugins (All In One), certain themes
• Plugins

WP Plugins for Script Injection
• SoGo Header Footer – global, page-level, & taxonomy-
level headers & footers
• Per Page Add To Head – global & page-level headers only
• Insert Headers & Footers – global only headers & footers
• Header, Footer and Post Injections – multiple options,
but risk of redundancy: may duplicate some of the SEO
plugin functionality
• Many more available – test to find your favorite

Google Analyticator
• Avoid Google Analytics-specific plugins in
most cases
• Use code injection plugins, All In One SEO,
theme functionality (if available), or insert into
header.php before closing </head> tag
• Tweak Google Analytics settings in the
application itself

Broken Link Checker
Check Broken Links & 404’s
• Banned from WPEngine,
GoDaddy Hosted
WordPress, etc.
• Makes too many HTTP
requests to the server
Alternatives:
• Chrome extensions: Check
My Links, etc.
• Screaming Frog (freemium)
• Moz Pro (paid)
• Google Search Console,
Redirection Plugin for 404’s

Maintenance Mode vs. Coming Soon Page
Coming Soon Page
• Use in prod while developing a
new site in dev
• Allow bots to index
• Header response: 200 OK
Maintenance Mode
• Use to display a splash page or
message to visitors while you
perform site work
• Bots shouldn’t index this page
• Header response: 503 Service
Unavailable (temporarily – check
back soon)
• Don’t leave up for too long, or
risk being seen as a 404

WP Maintenance Mode (Plugin)
Freemium, maintenance mode & coming soon options
(Don’t forget to test your HTTP response!)

Keeping Your WP Backend In Order
• Delete unused themes, plugins, media
• Noindex drafts of posts and pages
• Delete sample media, posts, and pages that
come with many themes

Pretty Permalinks
This is a minimum, but not enough if you want categories in your post URL’s:

Category-Friendly URL’s
Custom Structure: www.example.com/%category%/%postname%
Put a period in Category Base field to avoid /category/ in your category page
URL’s, or use a plugin to strip it

General SEO

Title Tag
<title>Keyword-Rich Tag | Brand Name</title>
• 60 characters max
• Used as a ranking signal by search engines
• Format:
Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword | Brand Name
(Brand Name | Primary Keyword – Secondary Keyword
optionally allowed for home page)

Meta Description Tag
<meta name=“description”
content=“Description of your page”>
• 160 characters max
• Not used as a ranking signal by search engines
• For human visitors only; consider this a brief
ad for your page

Snippet Optimizers
• Yoast, All In One, Moz will all help you optimize your title &
description tags for character length
• You can also use online tools, such as:
http://www.seomofo.com/snippet-optimizer.html

robots.txt in WP
• Crawl protocol for search engines (it’s up to the crawlers to
honor it)
• Must be a plain text file, and live at the root of your domain
(i.e. www.example.com/robots.txt)
• WordPress has a virtual robots.txt unless your theme comes
with one…
• …You should override it with an actual file; insert via FTP,
cPanel, or plugin

Robots.txt Mistakes to Avoid
• Minimal WP robots.txt file:
User-agent: *
Disallow:
• NEVER do this (unless intended):
User-agent: *
Disallow: /
(Results in a SERP description like “A description for this result is
not available because of this site’s robots.txt”)

Sample Robots.txt
User-agent: Googlebot
User-agent: Bingbot
Allow: /wp-content/plugins/
Allow: /wp-content/themes/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /*?*
Disallow: /cgi-bin/
Disallow: /wp-admin/
Disallow: /xmlrpc.php
Disallow: /wp-content/plugins/
Disallow: /wp-content/themes/
Sitemap: https://www.example.com/sitemap.xml

Some Robots Meta Directives
<meta name=“robots” content=“index, follow”>
(default/implied)
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, nofollow”>
<meta name=“robots” content=“noindex, follow”>
<meta name=“robots” content=“index, nofollow”>
(virtually no use cases)
<meta name=“robots” content=“noarchive”>

Canonical Tags
<link rel=“canonical”
href=https://www.example.com/blog-post>
• Used to set the preferred version on a page for SERPs
• Every page should have one, pointing either to itself
or the preferred version (i.e. web vs. print)
• Watch out for: www vs. non-www; https vs. http;
forward slash vs. no slash

Structured Data – JSON
• Key/value pair scripts that describe page content to crawlers
• Google prefers JSON-LD over HTML markup
• Sample company info script (via Google Developers):
<script type="application/ld+json">
{
"@context": "http://schema.org",
"@type": "Organization",
"url": "http://www.example.com",
"contactPoint": [{
"@type": "ContactPoint",
"telephone": "+1-617-555-5555",
"contactType": "customer service"
}]
}
</script>

JSON-LD Deployment
• Deployed before closing </head> or </body> of
the doc
• Google’s Structured Data Testing Tool:
https://search.google.com/structured-data/testing-
tool
• Must use double straight quotation marks; curly
ones will fail the markup test
• Perfect use case for “add scripts” WP plugins

XML Sitemaps
• Handled equally well by Yoast & All In One
• Lives at the root:
/sitemap.xml – expected URL; often 301 redirects to:
/sitemap_index.xml

XML Sitemap Attributes
• URL
• Change mod (date, not time)
• Change frequency & crawl priority (optional,
mostly depreciated)

Sitemap Submission
• Set up Google Search Console & Bing
Webmaster accounts
• Manually submit your XML sitemap(s)
• Check for errors, fix, then resubmit

Social Meta: Open Graph
• OG protocol is used by Facebook & LinkedIn,
and understood by many other crawlers
• OG helps to properly display your content on
social networks
• Twitter has its own meta, but also
understands OG

Necessary & Optional OG Tags
<meta property="og:title" content=”Best Coffee">
<meta property="og:description" content=”Drink the best coffee from anywhere
in the world.”>
<meta property="og:image"
content="http://www.bestcoffee.com/thumbnail.jpg">
<meta property="og:url" content="http://www.bestcoffee.com/">
<meta property="og:site_name" content=”Best Coffee Roasters">
<meta property="og:image:width" content="400px">
<meta property="og:image:height" content="300px">
• Run Facebook Open Graph Debugger to test your tags

Twitter Card Meta
• Twitter will use OG tags
• Use these two Twitter Card tags wherever you
load your OG tags:
<meta name="twitter:card"
content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site"
content="@BestCoffeeRoasters">
• See Twitter Developer documentation for
more options

Site Speed Insights
• Pageload speed is a ranking factor in the
SERPs
• Google PageSpeed Insights tool:
https://developers.google.com/speed/pagespeed/insights/
• Google Dev / Mozilla Dev tools:
- Capture network performance
- Fix slow-loading files
- Test in responsive mode

Hreflang Tags
• For pages serving similar content in different languages &
countries
• Implement on every page with variation(s), including self:
<link rel="alternate" href="example.com" hreflang="es-es”>
<link rel="alternate" href="example.com/fr/" hreflang="fr-fr”>
<link rel="alternate" href="example.com/gb/" hreflang=”en-gb”>
• Hreflang builder:
http://www.aleydasolis.com/en/international-seo-
tools/hreflang-tags-generator/

Google Analytics Setup
• At least 3 views:
- Unfiltered (no filters, do not exclude known bot hits in main
settings)
- Main (filters, segments, exclude bots, etc.)
- Sandbox (experimentation, training)

GA – Excluding IP’s w/ Filters, Regex
• Create a regex expression to filter out a range
of IP’s:
http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/ipre
gex
• Test your regex statement to see if it properly
filters out an IP address:
http://www.analyticsmarket.com/freetools/rege
x-tester

Depreciated Meta Tags
• Keywords meta tag
<meta name="keywords" content=“keyword1, keyword2">
• Yahoo Directory & DMOZ
<meta name="robots" content="noodp, noydir">
• Authorship
rel=“author”, rel=“publisher”, rel=“me”

Resources
• Moz (Blog, Beginner’s Guide to SEO, Web
Developer’s SEO Cheat Sheet)
• Yoast (blog, documentation, tutorials)
• Search Engine Land, Marketing Land
• CSS Tricks, Smashing Magazine
• WordPress blogs
• Search engines

Questions?

Technical SEO for WordPress Developers, Designers and Webmasters

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