Wordpress SEO Expert

Improve your Google ranking with 24-year experienced SEO professional Peter Mahoney

Reminder, JPGs are for photos

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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!

Crawled – currently not indexed

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This is a creative use of Google Search Console I’ve come up with for some easy SEO wins

And it’s been working really well on all my testing sites.

Google Search Console (GSC) is Google’s official stats system for organic search, and has the most useful data about your site’s ranking, visits, clicks, etc.

They changed the interface for it some time ago and keep adding more data in it. One new page will show you all the pages in your site they’ve crawled, but chosen not to include in search results.

So they know about these pages, but don’t think they’re worth including in their results pages. The effect of that is these pages are not actually helping with your SEO at all. From an SEO viewpoint they may as well not be there.

There are two main reasons I’ve found why otherwise useful content is being ignored by Google:

  • It’s just too short
  • It’s not on-topic enough

Your content might just be too short

This is fairly self-explanatory. Unless you’ve got 300+ words of text on a page it will often be ignored.

Your content might not be on-topic enough

The best way to explain this is with an example, let’s think about a digital marketing firm. Perhaps when they started they offered a variety of services from social media content to web development and SEO.

Well now they just focus on the latter. Their homepage is about it, all their services pages are too – but they have old blog posts about their older services.

Google knows what a site’s core service offering is. And things that might fall outside that – either because they’re just off topic or simply old and reflect what a business *used* to be about – they’re likely to get ignored as well.

Re-purpose old content to get it indexed and working for your SEO!

Here’s my recommendation. Have a look through the list of crawled but not indexed pages and see if there are any you can fix.

Doing this myself I found any short pages I fleshed out, or outdated ones I re-tooled to reflect what I’m doing now – every single one got picked up again by Google.

In some cases it was just a matter of adding an extra paragraph to an existing post. That’s not nearly as cumbersome as writing an entirely new one but essentially gets a whole extra page indexed.

Homepage FAQ structured data to improve your SEO rank

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Using FAQs on your site to get extra traffic from search results

Google loves a good Q&A, and they’re great for your search engine optimisation.

This is an excellent technique that Google has been responding to very positively recently. It involves a fairly interesting type of structured data.

Structured data is a series of tags and what’s known as microdata that Google, Bing and Yahoo all use to work out what content on your site matches specific, common types of information like phone numbers. It primarily sits in your pages’ code – it’s not something the user sees directly. Although in the case of FAQs you do want them to be able to see them as well – that way your front-end information matches what’s happening behind the scenes. Google definitely wants to see that the information you’re supplying them is also what you’re giving to your users.

You may have noticed little ‘People also ask’ click-to-open sections like this on Google results pages before:

Those questions and answers are being pulled from web pages with ‘FAQ’ structured data on their homepages.

This technique involves adding an FAQ section to your own homepage, and then having the appropriate code added to those so Google can pick them up correctly.

I’ve tried this with a handful of clients and most have seen a 3-4 ranking place increase as a result! Even if Google doesn’t end up using your FAQs on their results page, the effect is the same; they just like to see the code in place.

So this is well worth implementing as part of your SEO strategy.

When writing FAQs for this purpose though it’s best to make them somewhat generic – they should be about your industry generally rather than about your specific offering. (If you take a look at the ones I wrote on my own homepage, you’ll see they’re predominantly about SEO and it’s advantages rather than being about the services I offer myself.)

If you’d like me to implement this for you please just get in touch – and of course I can do it all for you as part of an ongoing SEO campaign too.

Trust the WordPress SEO Expert to advise on your WordPress SEO

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No one should be surprised to hear blogging is good for SEO.

I had an unexpected email interchange with a client a few minutes ago.

I’d been recommending blogging to him for months. He keeps making excuses why he can’t; lack of time, what would be write about – the usual string of things. But I kept pushing because as we all know unique, topical, regular content is great for SEO.

It’s important to point out that while I call it blogging really it can be news, updates – whatever – just as long as you get well written topical content on your site regularly.

Here’s what you want from a blog post:

  1. Unique
    • It needs to be original content to avoid any possibility of a duplicate content issue.
  2. Topical
    • The copy needs to be related to your business. You can’t just write about your recent holiday if you’re trying to sell greeting cards. Having said that if you went exploring a variety of greeting card shops while abroad – that might be enough to make it on topic. (It wouldn’t be easy to do well though.)
    • Included in this is it needs to be interesting information, authoritative and useful.
  3. Regular
    • Posting something every week, or even better twice a week, is ideal. Search engines learn to come back and rescan your site for new content often, and it’s great if there’s something new for them to index every time. What’s no good is if you post just a few times a year at fairly random intervals; it’s better than nothing, but not by much.

This client thought he really had me on the issue today when we said he’d checked with his developer (not another SEO expert, just the person that pieced together his site) and he said not to bother. Because if you search for anything online you’ll very rarely see a blog post on page one.

He’s half right. You do rarely see blog posts on page one. But everything else there is wrong.

Just because a blog page might not rank highly on its own merit doesn’t mean it’s not adding to your overall domain authority. In fact it’s definitely adding to it. There’s a reason sites with lots of well written content tend to have homepage’s that rank more highly than other sites.

If everything in SEO was purely on a page-by-page basis it would be enough to have a single page website that ticked all the boxes and expect it to rank in the top spot. But we all know in industries with any competition that’s simply not going to happen.

Good content on your site all adds up towards the overall SEO authority of the domain. Those weekly blogs might not be found a lot, but they’re a large part of the reason your homepage is.

A few ‘key words’ about keywords

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A lot of SEO professionals are still selling their services based on a very outdated idea of how SEO works.

Anyone telling you they target a set number of keywords really isn’t doing SEO right.

Firstly, an important terminology definition. The term keywords has meant a few different things over the past 20+ years in the Search Engine Optimisation industry. As such I prefer not to use it and try to use other words that do a better job of explaining what I mean. So when it comes to describing the concept of ‘phrases you want to rank highly with in search results’ I use the term search queries. That does a much better job of conveying what we mean – the words people search for that your website gets found for.

Years ago SEO services would be sold based around (in part) a concept of how many search queries your site would be optimised for. But search doesn’t work like that anymore (and hasn’t for a number of years). It’s not as simple as having a list of a few terms we target – since Google brought their Rankbrain (artificial intelligence system) online for website indexing, everything is far more nuanced.

Technically a site can rank and be found for ANY of the words and terms on it.

I’ve blogged about a few of these issues before, so these articles might help give useful background:
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/googles-rankbrain-and-seo/
https://peter.mahoneywebmarketing.com/does-google-use-meta-keyword-tags/

SEO work is all about reinforcing your key content so it stand out for search engines. But anything within the content can (and often is) indexed by them. As an example if you ever get a chance to see the Google Search Console performance report you’ll often see hundreds of things a site is found for.

For example my site is clearly about being a WordPress SEO expert, and services around that. But in search results it comes up for over 1000 different searches, and a lot of those aren’t related to my core offerings. But they’re all related to words, brands or nouns I’ve used in the past. Google does a great job of working out the context of your site, but with good SEO you can be found for just about anything.

Using WordPress as a static site generator

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My WordPress site is so fast, I’m not even sure I can call it WordPress anymore.

Static site generators are awesome.

They create blindingly fast sites, with very few drawbacks (more on those later).

But I’ve been using WordPress since it was a small blogging platform call b2. I’m used to it, I like it, and already have a swag of sites built on it for myself; not just my clients.

Because I work in SEO speed is really crucial to what I do. I do a lot of caching and optimisation work for people, but wanted to see what would happen if I really pushed the envelope out.

Initially I was keen to make a front-end that pulled data out of a basic WordPress install using JSON. I set up a proof-of-concept successfully, but wasn’t so keen on remaking all my layouts and front-end design from scratch for it. Besides, basic things like the WordPress menu editor, text widgets etc. are something I very much enjoy using.

I did some research, and came across a plugin called WP2Static. It’s a slick plugin that basically does just what I wanted – it packages up WordPress sites as static sites you can deploy anywhere. With a bit of configuring you can actually use it to output to a folder on the same server, and use some basic .htaccess rules so that becomes the public facing side of things.

Which is cool, but I wanted to go for MAXIMUM SPEED. My end goal was to get the site hosted on GitHub Pages, and then use Cloudflare to CDN it around the world.

(WP2Static does actually have a system to deploy to GitHub Pages built-in, but I found the deployment process just too slow.)

So when I considered everything I was trying to achieve, which included keeping the live site on the same URL it was already on, I opted to do the following:

  • move the WordPress install of my site off its current server, onto my localhost machine (it’s fast and I back it up regularly)
  • use WP2Static to output the site to a local folder
  • use git via the terminal to publish the site

In theory, for a nerd, it seems fairly straightforward. And on the whole it worked much more easily than I anticipated. The main glitches to overcome were that a number of font files weren’t being picked up by the plugin for inclusion in the static site. But it has a configuration option to force it to include certain file paths, so that was easily overcome.

I did need to create a manual 404.html page (GitHub Pages looks for that in the top directory of a site) but that’s neither here nor there.

There were a few other tiny things that were really specific to my own WordPress setup – like realising my sitemap.xml file needed to be a flat XML file rather than an index linking to other XML files – because they weren’t going to be wrapped up by the plugin.

The thing you really lose with any static site system though is (logically) user interaction. In my case that was just forms, but I was happy to replace my contact form with a simple email address – anything else I might need in the future I can do by embedding forms directly from another system like Google Forms.

I used to sell a couple of SEO packages directly through my site, but Woocommerce was always overkill for that anyway. In the future I’ll just use a combination of Paypal buttons to replicate the same functionality – and in fact it’ll be simpler for the end user because I don’t need to know all their billing address information to start an SEO job with them.

The really big day-to-day drawback is that clicking ‘Publish’ in WordPress doesn’t publish anything anymore. The process to run a new export with WP2Static and then send it to GitHub Pages takes about two minutes. But considering how often I blog or change anything on the site that’s not a major issue. Like with anything, you need to weigh up the processes, pros and cons against how you actually use something to determine if it’s right for you.

The site I did all this too, fyi, is the one you’re on right now. This is a static site, hosted for free on GitHub Pages and replicated on servers around the world using Cloudflare.

Google PageSpeed Insights gives a 99% speed rating for Desktop. And the missing 1% is simply because I include an external file that I can’t set an expiration header for – ironically that file is the script for Google Analytics.

Pingdom (my preferred speed testing system, because you can choose a server location for the real-world load-time to be tested against – so if your clients are predominantly in London then choose that server to get an idea of the speed as they’ll see it) gives the homepage a 0.212 second loading time. For something ultimately based on WordPress as a content management system, that’s impressive.

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