245 - 'S' is for SEO

‘A-Z of WordPress’ with Nathan Wrigley and David Waumsley

Hello. It’s another A-Z of WordPress. The series where we attempt to cover all the major aspects of building and maintaining sites with WP. Today is for S for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)…

Usually we have an interview followed by a chat with David and Nathan, but we’re bucking the trend this week with back-to-back discussions. Shocking I know!

Preamble

As with every topic, we are not experts in this. But I would say the skills of an SEO expert are very similar these days to those of anyone who is a generalist building site for clients and helping with basic online marketing.

I imagine Pete Everitt’s (SEO Hive) basic skill set is similar to ours. We are really only dealing with on-page SEO with WordPress.

SEO – what is it? Dead or Alive?

Making sites the way Google prefers is not likely to go away, and rarely seems a priority in most builds. Folk love the “eye candy” and interactions.

I think mostly, all we need to follow is Google’s advice.

We need to think about our keywords and place them carefully in the header and body text to not only help Google, but visitors as well. Markup our image and media content (again not just for Google, but visitors (particularly those who use assistive technology).

SEO seems more wholistic.

WordPress speed has become a bit of a topic. Google confirmed Core Web Vitals is more than a tie breaker. Again, we probably only need to follow Google’s advice to make site perform well.

To see how AI is changing the landscape look at this new SaaS app called Outranking on Appsumo.

Google does state that they do not like AI generated content, but it will be tricky for them to spot it going forwards. David has been trying Rytr recently – another Appsumo purshase.

WordPress’s reputation for good SEO out of the box

More of a myth, but still…

• Pretty links helped – when many old CMS’s did not do this
• Adds the Metadata automatically 
• Having taxonomies – against page template systems like WIX and Squarespace
• Not messing up the image URL – like WIX and Squarespace
• Recently added a sitemap by default

So it’s SEO friendly rather than optimised then?

What we use…

David:

I tried “All in One SEO” ages back (it did not allow me to add things to some WooCommerce categories then). Mostly I used Genesis, which has some SEO built in. Then Yoast came along and I used that, now I’m toe dipping with SEOPress, and also https://wpschema.com/

Appsumo deals:
Site auditor (like screaming frog) https://www.accuranker.com/ (watches the ranking of a site keywords)  https://serpstat.com/

Nathan:

I’m only using SEOPress these days as it seems to do all of the things that it need to do without an upgrade path that some rivals have.

Main Plugins in the WordPress repo in order of popularity (this might be wrong now, they change all the time!):

Yoast SEO

Rank Math SEO – Best SEO Plugin For WordPress To Increase Your SEO Traffic

All in One SEO – Best WordPress SEO Plugin – Easily Improve SEO Rankings & Increase Traffic

The SEO Framework

SEOPress, on-site SEO

Slim SEO – Fast & Automated WordPress SEO Plugin

SEO 2021 by Squirrly (Smart Strategy)

Other supporting Plugins

Broken link checkers

Redirect plugins

Do we even need a plugin?

https://www.searchenginejournal.com/wordpress-seo/wordpress-seo-without-plugin

If you’ve got any thoughts on things that we got wrong / didn’t include or perhaps you’ve got a rival SEO resource you prefer, please add a comment below, or in the WP Builds Facebook group.