Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with Peter Mahoney, 20+ years SEO & Wordpress experience

Do you add all the below to each pages? Page titles, Keywords, Description.

by

Do you add all the below to each pages? if so is there a set number of pages you do and is it different descriptions for each page?

Page titles, Keywords, Description

What your turnaround at present?

Thanks for contacting me, it’s great to hear from you again.

My turnaround is the usual up-to-three business days.

Your other questions actually have quite a bit to unpack though. So I’ll go through them all in turn.

1)
Up to 40 pages per site is usually considered fair. But that just refers to the number of pages you might want to have tags crafted for manually. You don’t always want that for all types of content.

So, the main pages on a site should always have manually strategised and written tags. But the same isn’t always true for other types of content. Sometimes for posts, and nearly always for products, you want those to be created on-the-fly (when a visitor loads the page) based on a series of rules, or schemas, that Google recommends.

There are several reasons for that, but the two main ones are:

AUTOPILOT
When those more dynamic content types can be set up to create tags for you, it saves you having to worry about that going forward. You’re free to focus on creating new content, posts, products, etc.

RELEVANCY
This is the biggie. Google cares a lot about the ‘relevancy’ of your SEO settings and tags. Does the content in the tags match the content on the page? This sort of setup gives a 100% relevancy for description tags which is awesome.

And of course search engines don’t just judge each page by itself, they look at the site as a whole and ascribe SEO authority to the domain too.

So let’s imagine a site has 10 static ‘Pages’ in WordPress, but 100 ‘Posts’. If all those posts have a full, 100% relevancy score then we have a bit more leeway with the main Pages. So we can make them more keyword rich without risking triggering a ‘lack of relevance’ problem.

2)
On to keywords. Those keyword meta tags haven’t been used in a very long time, well over a decade. Google confirmed in 2009 they didn’t (and hadn’t) used them:
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2009/09/google-does-not-use-keywords-meta-tag.html

Bing never used that tag, and Yahoo stopped around ten years ago.

In fact while the Yoast SEO plugin does have an option to use keyword meta tags, but it actually has a comment next to the option:
“I can’t think of any reason you’d want to use this.”

There’s even strong evidence (from Bing) that using them incorrectly will get you penalised!

It can be confusing because in the industry people do still talk about keywords, but they mean it in a different context. You can read about that here:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/a-few-key-words-about-keywords/

That’s rather a lot of information about on-page SEO – but I hope it’s helpful!

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I run a small design agency

by

I run a small design agency and looking for someone to help integrate good SEO practice into the new website for my client.

Someone is working on the messaging and content for the client and I will be working on the front end design and branding. We will probably be going for a WordPress based theme.

I had a few questions:

  • Are there any ongoing monthly fees?
  • Do you integrate Google Search Console?
  • Do you use Yoast or Rankmath?

Would you need more detail about the client/website before getting started?

Look forward to hearing from you.

Many thanks.

Thanks for contacting me!

I have a few answers for you…

1)
I do offer an ongoing SEO campaign option – many people are perfectly happy with the one-time overhaul and the fee for that – but clients that really want to commit to SEO (which is hands down the best, cheapest marketing you can do) will usually carry on.

I actually throw in a free month of that service too, so people can see the value first-hand.

2)
Yes, absolutely. Google Search Console is the authoritative place for Google’s organic search statistics. It’s a vital tool for anyone working in SEO.

3)
Actually, I choose the plugin based on several factors with the site itself. Different plugins are best for different websites–the way you’re using pages, posts etc is important in deciding. I don’t have a favourite, I like to look at a site and decide which plugin would be best for it on a case by case basis.

Something I can say though is in about 80% of cases All In One SEO pack ends up being selected.

Additionally)
The best time to engage me is immediately after the site has gone live. That way I can do all the various submission processes alongside the search engine optimisation.

I’m a big believer that all information is good information – so if you wanted to send through more info on the client that would be welcome. But it’s also true the current content I can see I believe gives me more than enough information about her to base the work on.

Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

I need some help with this site

by

I hope you’re well. I need some help with my site.
1. Increase speed, reports tell me it’s slow
2. SEO audit & recommendations
3. SEO optimisation

I think 2 & 3 are covered in your offer here. Can you also help with 1?
I think I already have most of the set up bit in place (site map, SEO pack etc).

Thanks for contacting me!

I have a few thoughts around this…

1)
I don’t do speed work by itself anymore – only bundled with SEO. I can probably make the site faster – I usually achieve around an 35-40% increase in loading time (I can’t make promises of course!) but because your iste currently loads in around 6 seconds that’s still not going to be terribly fast.

You can see from the attached benchmark in the ‘File Requests’ graph towards the bottom that the thing taking most of the loading time is actually just the very first ‘connection’ bit. That suggests it could be a problem with the server causing the slowdown, not the site, which I wouldn’t be able to resolve for you.

2)
Your SEO could do with an overhaul to be honest. Just looking at something as basic as the homepage description it’s already breaking one of the main rules – it has too many commas. Too many of those and Google assume you’re just keyword stuffing. Which to be fair is what you’re doing here.

So I can certainly overhaul your SEO, and look to improve the loading time as part of the job with the add-on.

Up to you obviously! Thanks again,

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Help us rank higher on Google

by

A colleague recommended me to your page and service. I just wanted to know a little bit more about how you would be able to help us rank higher on Google. We are a full service commercial real estate firm and would need to rank high for brokerage and Management mostly. We do have active social media accounts.

Thanks for contacting me. It’s always good to be recommended!

My offer would be appropriate for your site: you don’t have a lot of SEO work on there currently so it would certainly make a difference.

A few general thoughts:

1)
Your homepage is a bit light on text. Personally I’d recommend you rewrite the main About page text (to ensure it’s unique) and include that on the homepage too. If that isn’t feasible I’d suggest moving the main About page text to the homepage instead.

2)
It’s good you have active social media accounts. They can work well for social related traffic to your site (when you link from them to pages on the site) but actually have very little SEO impact. Facebook for example has marked all their outbound links as ‘nofollow’ for some years. So links don’t count towards your SEO authority. In my experience social accounts are best used to create a mini ‘community’ on those platforms you can have your own specific strategies for.

Thanks again!

Peter Mahoney
WordPress SEO Expert

Case Study: Turning SEO work off

by

I had a client recently who (for reasons exclusively to do with the inexperience of their website’s designer) turned off one of the SEO plugins I had installed and configured for them.

It happened shortly after I carried out an initial SEO overhaul on their site, so gives us a valuable insight into the effect of getting SEO done, and the removing it again.

It’s a very small (and brand new company), but you can see the effects in this graph – taken directly from Google Search Console.

Initially after my work their SEO stats began to shoot up, gaining traction and upward momentum. Immediately after deactivating just one plugin it plummeted back to its original position.

This didn’t use to happen so quickly. If you took SEO work off a site, or just fell behind with updates and changes to best practice, things would trail off over time. It now appears not having the very best SEO at all times leads to an immediate decrease in SEO authority. Because so many website owners (your competitors!) invest in SEO these days it means any time you don’t have it working, they can rise above you in the rankings.

But other SEO professionals have tried the same thing (turning off a single SEO plugin on their own testing sites) and see the same result. The drop is nearly immediate.

Reminder, JPGs are for photos

by

Please remember when saving images to upload to the web – photos should be saved as JPGs.

PNG is another popular format for the web but it works best on images like logos, with large blocks of the same colour.

Anything like a photograph that is made up of 1000s of different colours will always be best as a JPG – and usually about one 10th the filesize.

Of the clients that ask me to speed up their WordPress websites (in addition to their SEO work) perhaps the most improvement comes from simply converting their photos they’ve saved as PNGs into JPGs. If a site has several photos that are saved as the wrong file type it’s easy to shave several megabytes off the page size, and therefore speed up the site’s loading time.

Part of the problem is a lot of software for editing images will default to PNG when you use their “Save for web” function. Which is fine for icons and logos, charts and even text saved as an image.

So many websites these days focus on really high quality imagery (understandably – people love photographs!) but don’t know that not all file types are created equally, they all have different purposes and use cases and those wonderful product shots should always be saved as JPGs.

It’s good to get in the habit of doing this right away – after an image is uploaded into WordPress there’s no simply way to convert it to JPG and change all the references in the code to use the different filename. So try to get it right from the outset!

Prices are quoted exclusive of VAT unless expressly stated.

RSS

Peter Mahoney, WordPress SEO expert blog