Wordpress SEO Expert

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

How best to tag your images for SEO on WordPress

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How best to tag your images for SEO on Wordpress Wordpress SEO Expert

The correct approach to image tags may surprise you.

Here’s a reminder about why they are best optimised using a plugin.

Because of the way WordPress evolved over time from a simple blogging tool to an advanced content management system, traditionally people have set alt & title tags per image, using the media manager.

But that’s not best for SEO. Images should reinforce what the page is about, not just what the image is of.

To give an example, if you have one image that’s used on two pages, you might not want them to both have the same alt tags. So the systems I set up does an excellent job of setting those tags in the live code whenever a page is visited. It mixes the page title with the name of your site to make sure both your branding and (most importantly) what the page is actually about is being reinforced.

It’s the best approach for image tags and search engines.

(My favourite plugin for this is PB SEO Friendly Images.)

Preparing for Voice Search SEO

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41% of adults search for something using voice at least once a day, and for young adults it’s over half!

This applies to Google voice search, Alexa home devices, Siri…anything you can ask a question and expect a result.

The good news is the way we approach SEO for voice search hasn’t drastically differed.

Yes, voice searches tend to be longer and more conversational. And direct too.

Here’s an example, let’s say I want to know what the highest mountain is in the UK. Previously I might have entered highest mountain uk into a search engine.

But when asking a voice assistant, I’m more likely to say something along the lines of tell me what is the highest mountain in the uk. So it’s longer and more conversational. But despite its length it is more direct; I’m being clearer about what I want to know, which is what the highest one is.

That text search could bring up a page of results that list several high mountains, or articles that talk about a recent event or news story that took place on the highest mountain.

At this point in time search engines are taking these voice questions and dumbing them down for their own purposes. So when a voice search tool is actually working out what results to return, the example above could well be turned into that simpler 3-word version behind the scenes.

What’s really going to have an impact is when that directness starts to be factored in a lot more intuitively. Because at that point in time search will become less like looking up relevant information based on a subject (like an old encyclopedia) and more to do with answering really specific questions.

It’s very early days to think about how the approach we take to SEO might change when that happens. But the key will be in line with the major engines’ existing ethos – your website should have a clear purpose, and be written in a natural human readable way so that visitors can easily find the information they’re looking for.

And in that regard voice search is really just a continuation of the direction the search engines have been heading toward for well over a decade.

Fill in your social media profiles

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Far too many WordPress sites end up with empty social links

I see this all the time; in the header or footer of WordPress sites, a series of little social media icons that links to – nothing.

A lot of WordPress themes have sections for you to fill out your social profiles, so those little buttons can link to them correctly. But a lot of those themes will show them regardless of whether or not you’ve entered proper URLs. Some go a step further, and by default will have a link entered as #. That just means it links back to the page you’re on, but it’s enough to get the buttons showing and essentially linking to nothing.

It’s an easy enough oversight to make. But it means you have dead links which isn’t great for your SEO, and if visitors notice then it just seems wildly unprofessional.

If you have social buttons, they really need to link to social sites. It’s not hard to do – these sorts of WordPress themes are intended to make everything as simple as possible – but at the very least have a quick check of your own site and make sure your social button links, well, link.

In all honesty I see this in perhaps a third of WordPress sites overall, so there’s a good chance it affects your’s.

How to find your Google rank

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Searching for yourself is a terrible idea

I still get asked a lot about discrepancies between what a client sees when they search for themselves, and either the official stats, or what their friend might see, etc.

So this is a refresher about why you shouldn’t search for yourself as a way to measure your ranking.

Google does all kinds of personalisation on your search results (based on your network’s IP address, if you’re logged into any Google accounts, even your location) and the more often you look for your own site, the more skewed those results will be.

To give an example, most people searching for “Peter Mahoney” see my site on the first page. But I see myself on the fourth. Essentially because I’ve searched for myself so often – and then not spent much time on my site or even bothered to click it – Google has “learnt” that I don’t like it and therefore ranks it down for me, uniquely.

The right place to get Google’s official rank for your site is their own monitoring systems, which is where I get my stats.

Their stats are actually an ‘average’ of your rank which is the statistically most useful approach. Because of personalisation, not everyone sees your site in the same position. Where someone is searching from geographically for example has an impact. So the average rank is the best indicator of where you rank.

There’s a commonly held belief that if you use a private browsing window somehow you’ll see the proper rankings in the search results. But all that does is prevent Google from knowing your account – they still know where you live, your IP address, in some cases the unique code for your network card – there’s *plenty* for them to skew your results with.

I love a good new year

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Welcome to 2018!

I don’t usually do resolutions or anything like that, but as this site is now a few years old it makes sense to resolve to make myself a new one.

It might take a bit longer than usual because I’ll be doing it all with a “static site generator”, which is simply a useful way to generate sites that don’t have really advanced features, like e-commerce. But it allows for blindingly fast sites (in fact they load about 4x faster than a WordPress site!) so is a good direction to head in.

Of course if you want a new website for 2018, or just to make sure your existing one gets as many visitors as possible, let me know.

I’ll be here all year.

 

Google mobile search

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One of things I’ve talked about a lot in the past couple of years has been Google’s move toward “mobile friendliness”. Last year they made a small change that meant sites that are mobile friendly would appear higher in search results when someone was looking from a mobile device.

Well they’ve really increased this as a search signal – sites that are NOT mobile friendly will now have a very hard time competing with those that are.

They’ve also updated their mobile friendliness test to make it more restrictive—it’s worth retesting your sites to make sure they still pass. Of course the best test is always the information displayed within Google Search Console which reports on the entire site, not just one page at a time.

The extra good news for those of you with mobile responsive sites is that any of your competitors who do not have mobile friendly sites will now suffer in their rankings.

One related point, there is a growing body of data that suggests this change also affects (in a smaller capacity) sites from normal desktops – that Google is prioritising sites that are mobile friendly on searches from ALL devices.

They haven’t confirmed that yet, so it’s not certain, but I am keeping an eye on it.

If you don’t have a responsive site for mobile devices yet and you don’t want to get caught out, please contact me and I can help make you a new, fully mobile complaint one.

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