When it comes to SEO, most of us just don’t know where to start. We thought optimizing our WordPress sites was just too complicated. Actually it’s not complicated … once you discover the easy WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin.
Yes, it’s that simple. Yoast works perfectly for all levels of website owners and developers.
Yoast SEO is the most complete and easy WordPress SEO plugin that exists today for WordPress users. It incorporates everything from a snippet editor and real time page analysis functionality that helps you optimize your pages content, images titles, meta descriptions and more to XML sitemaps, and loads of optimization options in between.
The plugin also forces us into doing the right thing and this is important.
For example, in keeping with best practice, Yoast won’t allow you to enter more than one focused keyword. You have to clearly define one keyword phrase per page or post to allow the search engines to best know which piece of content it should deliver in search results.
This plugin is by far the most complete SEO solution that is available for WordPress with over a million downloads.
Unlike most other plugins, this one is way more than simple meta tag additions. Add custom post title, meta description, and meta keyword for posts, pages, and taxonomies (tag, category, etc). When writing the meta information, WordPress SEO plugin shows you a Google search result snippet preview, so you can see exactly how your content will look when someone searches for it in Google.
It helps you create XML sitemaps that support images. It notifies search engines automatically once your content is published.
It has social integration that shows you the correct title, description, and image for Facebook using the Open Graph meta data. It also lets you add twitter cards in WordPress.
The WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin has a ton of cool features which you can read about here:
Full Feature List.
J&M Group Announces New SEO Service
Marcia will now install, setup and configure the Yoast SEO Plugin on your WordPress site. The package will also include keyword research. Please call her at 561.906.3436 for all the details or send her an email.
Small Business SEO
How To Speed Up Your Website
Here are some great optimization tips from Blue Host that will help you improve your site’s speed, user retention, and SEO rankings.
How to Optimize Your Site
The #1 optimization tip: Reduce and compress your images.
Images are the largest part of webpage content, so it’s critically important for web developers to take control of their image sizes and quality to deliver a fast loading, responsive site for their users.
For your images to load as quickly as possible, it is important to resize them before uploading them to your website. Don’t upload images larger than what you actually need to display. Scaling images in the HTML code might display them as desired, but it won’t reduce its original file size. For example, a JPG image that is 800×800 pixels with a 100kb file size will take just as long to load when coded to display at a 200×200 size as it would if you displayed it at full size. If you optimize the JPG to only 200×200 before you upload it, you might be able to get it down to 20kb and reduce the load time significantly.
The PNG image format is actually the best choice as it allows you to store high quality images with a high level of compression. Unfortunately, PNG files are usually large due to the simple fact that they are not compressed.
To compress PNG images, you can use TinyPNG.org, a free online tool that allows you to compress PNG files without losing quality while preserving alpha transparency.
What’s worse is that users have to pay to download your website. While bigger pages hurt performance for desktop users, too, the biggest victims of page bloat are mobile users.
Did you know that Google says site speed plays an important role in their ranking factors. Now you do!
Resources:
10 Steps to Speed up Your WordPress Website or Blog
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia @ 561.906.3436.
Follow @jmgroupdesign
Simple Trick for Click-Throughs: The Title Tag
“Meta tags are a great way for webmasters to provide search engines with information about their sites. They can be used to provide information to all sorts of clients, and each system processes only the meta tags they understand and ignores the rest. They are added to the <head> section of your HTML page. “ – GOOGLE
SEO jargon and search terminology can be very overwhelming, particularly when you start talking to an “expert” in the field! So it’s important that business owners know the basics of on-page SEO so they can do some of it themselves.
Start with the single most important on-page SEO element: the <title> tag.
The <title> tag defines the title of the document and is required in all HTML/XHTML documents. SEOmoz, the largest SEO community in the world, believes that it is the single most important on-page SEO element (behind overall content). The title tag appears on the results pages just above the URL and also appears at the top of a browser.
Titles give users a quick insight into the content of the web page and how it might be relevant to their query. It is often the primary piece of information with the meta description that is used by potential visitors to decide which search result to click on, so it’s important to use high-quality and meaningful titles when you optimise your web pages.
Title tags generally should be less than 70 characters long so the whole tag fits on results pages when it is displayed and people can read it at a quick glance.
Every title tag on your website should be unique with distinct, descriptive titles for every page on your site.
Use keywords in title tags and place important keywords close to the front of the title tag. Search Engines will “bold” (or highlight) those terms in the search results when a user has performed a query with those terms.
Avoid keyword spamming. There is no reason to have the same words or phrases appear multiple times.
Google recommends titles include your brand so include your site name at the beginning or end of each page title, separated from the rest of the title with a delimiter such as a hyphen, colon, or pipe.
What is a meta description tag?
Title tags and meta descriptions are important elements of your website’s content. Like the title tag, meta description tags should include keywords relevant to the content of the web page they describe. This helps Search Engines understand what the page is about and index your web pages accordingly for relevant keywords or keyword phrases.
Matt Cutts, Google’s head of Webspam announced in 2009 that neither meta descriptions nor meta keywords factor into Google’s ranking algorithms for web search. However, he stresses that it is still important to write a meta description as Google will sometimes use the summary in search results snippets (located below the URL) if the Search Engine believes it is an accurate synopsis of the page.
– By Marcia Coffey
Find Marcia on Google+
Call Marcia at 561.906.3436