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A few ‘key words’ about keywords

August 14, 2019 by Peter Wordpress SEO Expert

A lot of SEO professionals are still selling their services based on a very outdated idea of how SEO works.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

Filed Under: Content, Google, Google Search Console, Hints & Tips, Keywords, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Wordpress

Mobile speed is very important for SEO

August 8, 2019 by Peter Wordpress SEO Expert

We’ve known for a long time that how fast your site loads is important for SEO.

Google have increased the importance of your website’s mobile speed when working out where to rank it.

It’s been true for a while that there’s been some small impact on your ranking based on mobile speed (desktop speed has been important for years) but now that’s been ramped up.

The most important metrics they use remain the sort of SEO work I do in the code and the quality of your content – but when those things are being looked after mobile speed is where you should turn your attention.

Unfortunately the automated tests out there tend to be a bit alarmist (I blogged about that recently) but they can still serve as a reminder that there’s nearly always room for improvement.

WordPress certainly has its issues with speed. And most themes are still being built for desktop-first (meaning how it looks on a desktop computer is the primary concern, and then it’s cut down and limited for mobile) when in fact current standards are clear that mobile-first should be the designers focus.

Be aware that although the testing systems are imperfect, and WordPress is very hard to score upwards of 80% with on most systems – the faster your site is the better.

In fact, mobile speed is now more important than desktop speed as a ranking metric for Google.

As a general piece of advice, my favourite tool for testing a site’s overall speed (not mobile specific) is Pingdom.

They give you a list of different servers to choose from; so it’s easier to get a real-world figure for your loading time in seconds – just like your target market will see it. Choose the nearest server to your primary audience, et voila.

(Although none of the online speed testing tools are perfect, Pingdom has a lot of useful features.)

Filed Under: Google, Opinion, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Website Speed, Wordpress

Using WordPress as a static site generator

July 30, 2019 by Peter Wordpress SEO Expert

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.

Filed Under: Google, Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Website Speed, Wordpress

How best to tag your images for SEO on WordPress

July 15, 2019 by Peter 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.)

Filed Under: Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Wordpress

Fill in your social media profiles

July 12, 2019 by Peter Wordpress SEO Expert

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.

Filed Under: Hints & Tips, Search Engine Optimisation (SEO), Social networking, Wordpress

Problems with Google PageSpeed Insights

June 1, 2019 by Peter Wordpress SEO Expert

Google PageSpeed Insights has become a tad problematic of late.

Firstly, Google PageSpeed is just a list of code changes that might improve your website’s speed. In most cases trying to do everything they list would simple break a WordPress website – it’s usually a matter of having to try lots or permutations of speed settings to see which scores best. So for example with a lot of themes if you minify javascript and defer scripts it it’ll break things, so we have to choose between those.

It’s also true that when Google actually uses speed as a metric for your SEO ranking, they’re looking at the actual load time for the site as opposed to how it measures on the PageSpeed metric.

To give you an idea of why the % scores aren’t a great measure, let’s consider browser caching. We can’t change whether other domains have it or not. So if you reference any other scripts in your site, for example Facebook, we can’t affect that. And you’ll still fail for the ‘browser caching’ section – even though it might already be applied to all your own scripts.

It’s a great irony of PageSpeed that having Google Analytics installed on a site always costs it a few % points, for the same reason. You’d think Google could do better with their own systems.

Google also changed the way they display results recently and it’s made their reports far less useful for the majority of sites out there. They recommend you ‘Serve images in next-gen formats’, even though there’s a lack of cross-browser compatibility for them. (Yes, you can set things up with a fall back so if a visitor’s browser doesn’t support JPG 2000 it will show another image instead – but as yet this isn’t something you’ll find commonly in WordPress themes. In fact I’m not sure it’s in any.)

So suddenly this testing tool is giving biased advice – guess which browser has full compatibility with next generation image formats? Google Chrome.

Like most Google reporting, PageSpeed does give a good idea of possible things to investigate but it’s not worth getting so hung up on you stop focusing on your content creation.

Filed Under: Google, Opinion, Website Speed, Wordpress

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