But how does the structure of your WordPress website affect it? How important is it?

Let’s see!

The basics of website structure

Website structure refers to how a given website is set up. Especially, the structure of a website pertains to how all pages related to that website are grouped, linked, and presented to the users and crawling bots used by search engines.

An easy-to-understand example of a site structure could be the one following:

As you can see, this website example accounts for 10 pages, including the homepage. Its structure is a map of how logically the business wants to group and present all their information in a way that makes sense to their users.

WordPress developer and Codeable expert Daniel Klose uses an interesting analogy to describe the importance of your site structure as a web:

Look at your website: you see it’s like a spider web. Basically, all the pages of a website are connected one another. And it’s quite interesting that, when people want to build a new website, they often forgot about this aspect, they underestimate this ‘spider web’ aspect and don’t see the value of investing some time structuring the website in the early days of the project.

In fact, the structure of your website has a direct impact on two interconnected aspects of any website:

1. Usability
2. SEO

Let’s have a closer look at each of these to understand them better.

1. Why website structure is important for User Experience (UX)

Your website is a business tool that has to serve a purpose. No matter if you’re selling a product, a course, providing a service, or simply use your website as a window for your brand, your website has a major goal.

By giving it a well-defined structure, one that follows a logical order of how your pages and content are presented, your target user has a better understanding of your whole message and offer.

Some key design and UX principles that should always be taken into consideration when structuring your website are:

• Easy to understand layouts
• Easy to understand navigational flows
• Easy to find and consume content/information

By following these 3 key principles, along with the help of a professional developer, your website will be able to deliver and support a smooth and easy navigational flow within your pages.

A website where pages are exactly provided and placed where they belong is a website your user will hardly abandon.

2. Why website structure is important for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

The more Internet matures, the more search engines improve their algorithms to reflect the complexity of this world. Therefore, SEO is always less a matter of short-sight tactics and keyword-placing, rather it’s becoming closer to how users engage with the content of a website. In short: SEO is becoming a more complex area of marketing, which has to do with the message and how it is consumed by a target audience, rather than being a separate field for some professional who have aces up their sleeves.

A proper-structured website, will benefit and improve your SEO on:

2.1 Indexing

The easiness through which crawlers and bots will navigate through your pages in a natural way. A bad structure could be mitigated with a sitemap, yet not providing a clear structure of your site might stop crawlers to index some of your pages.

2.2 Link structure and link juice

Remember the spider web we mentioned earlier? Having a robust internal structure of your site will pass what’s commonly called “SEO juice”, which is the SEO value each of your pages has. Without such internal linking, your SEO will strongly be affected as some pages will never be able to rank. And, for sure, your website will never be able to show Google sitelinks

Why?s Because your site structure isn’t done correctly, or in Google’s words:

We only show Sitelinks for results when we think they’ll be useful to the user. If the structure of your site doesn’t allow our algorithms to find good Sitelinks, or we don’t think that the Sitelinks for your site are relevant for the user’s query, we won’t show them.

2.3 Overall SEO

With a well-structured website, where all content and pages are shown and grouped where they belong, the SEO value will naturally improve. Crawlers will find an easier path to index your pages, which you could help even more by submitting sitemaps; your users will find what they meant to find while performing their query on a search engine (user intent). On top of this, the number of quickly abandoned pages, also known as pogo sticking, will decrease adding another good ingredient to the overall SEO pie.

Website structure development: Best practices

A well-defined website structure is extremely important in order to improve customer experience, retention, and SEO. As a result, creating these structures during website development should be given utmost priority.

But where should you start from?

Identifying & Defining User Goals and Expectations

The very first step to designing the structure of your website is about defining the Who, Why, and How behind your new website:

• Your Who: who’s your target audience?
• Your Why: why are you creating the new website? What are the goals you want to achieve?
• Your How: what are your website’s functional requirements?

Answering to these core questions will uncover the pillars on top of which your structure will be designed. If you have no clue on how to come up with the right answers at this stage (like many business owners), firing up a discovery phase before even starting to talk about design elements, mockups, etc. is strongly recommended. This will also allow you to get a clearer picture of costs and time constraints involved in the development project.

As a good alternative or little helpers in the process of finding the correct answers needed at this stage, you might want to start with questions suggested by Cody Landefel from Mode Effect:

• What pages will my website need to have?
• What is the goal for each page?
• Do each of these pages make sense in the overall scheme of my site?
• What pages are the focal point of the website?
• Which pages are the most important in terms of business growth? i.e. subscriber pages, store, products page, etc.
• Are there any pages that’ll be expanded in the future? i.e. your blog page, faq section, case studies, etc.

How many and which pages will you need? Start from the bottom and then go up

Once these 3 aspects have been laid out, then it’s a matter of understanding what type of content needs to be created and organize it accordingly. The best way to approach such task is to start from the deeper level of your site and then walk back to the top. Suggests Daniel:

If you start from the bottom, you can more easily think of and build all components you’ll need. It’s like a reverse funnel. The front page is the biggest piece of the funnel, and at the bottom – end – of it, you have a single post or page. That’s where you should start and then move up from.

Site structure has to occur with a bottom-up approach, not the other way around, otherwise, you’ll either have to re-organize your whole site navigation or simply won’t be able to position a page/content where it should be because of structural limitations.

Following a top-down approach means you’re driving into the unknown because, as Daniel points out:

Unfortunately, a lot of clients realize when we’re ahead with the development work that their new requests can’t fit the current structure. That means I have to redo the front page with delays and additional costs, which could have been prevented with a bottom-up approach at the beginning of the project.

Design your site hierarchy to accommodate your needs

Your site structure needs to reflect your goal requirements and how your users use your content. This means taking into account where users are coming from and what information expect to find on your website.

This is the concept of user flows, examples of which are shown here below:

Is your user coming from a Google search (organic)? Are they coming from a Facebook Ads or any other social media channel? Maybe a direct link?

Their entry point is crucial to help you define the best flow and organizational structure on your site.

What if I have an eCommerce store?

A simple WordPress website might have only a few components that include a homepage, an archive page (category page) and then the blog posts. WooCommerce stores are relatively more complex as they have to account for a plethora of more advanced feature and result in a much more advanced project. As a result, the precautions and structuring requirements differ on it.

You need to take into account both user and administrators UX with eCommerce sites

The bottom-up approach still remains relevant in terms of WooCommerce websites, but here the entire user experience is more complex because it also entails a complete buyer journey experience. Creating a new account, adding products to the cart, buying and processing a payment, getting email confirmations, and so on.

But that’s not just it.

With an eCommerce store, there’s also the admin/manager UX that needs to be taken into account. On an administrator level, what happens when a new user account gets created? What about a new purchase? Who gets a notification? What if a user requests a refund? All these additional elements, which aren’t usually touched by a standard website, become part of the project. Explains Daniel:

As the administrator or store manager, you have to understand your side of processing the business and, at the same time, you have to make sure that your customer is getting a good experience. What emails are they receiving? How’s the workflow for their PayPal payment? A lot of store owners, unfortunately, don’t do this and they simply set up their shop and they think they’re done with it, only to realize afterward their customers, for example, gets weird emails and notifications from their store.

Wrapping up

Structures define the path customers follow when they visit your WordPress website. It is crucial because, if not designed and implemented properly, the result will be a lost and frustrated user that just wants to hit the small red button in the top left of their browser and never come back.

That’s why focusing on the proper site structure when planning to build your new website shouldn’t be a nice-to-have additional task, yet it should be part of the project from the very start.

Daniel Klose is a Tech-Wiz, Blogger and Industry Professional. Born and raised in Germany, he quickly discovered his passion for all things digital. As a full-stack developer he now supports small and medium-sized businesses in their digital endeavors, with a focus on scalability.

The post The Underestimated Ingredient To Boosting Your WordPress Website’s SEO And User Experience: Proper Site Structure appeared first on Codeable.

SEO isn’t a one-off activity where you can call it a day once all the things are marked off your list. Instead, SEO is part of your broader acquisition strategy and should be embraced as an ongoing, recurring process.

Given how important this topic is, I shed some light on fundamental questions related to hiring developers for SEO projects, the process involved, and how to measure the results of their work.

WordPress SEO: Collecting data and information through an SEO Audit

If you want to improve something, you should always start from knowing where you’re at. And when it comes to optimizing WordPress for Search Engines that means auditing your website.

Much like a financial audit, an SEO audit’s purpose is to gather all information, URLs, published assets, categorization, content structure, analytics, data on performance, and much anything you could possibly think that has to do with your website and how both your users and search engines (Google, Bing, and Yahoo) engage with it.

As WordPress developer and Codeable expert Josh Morley explains:

Basically speaking, when performing an SEO audit a developer and SEO expert will look at your site through the eyes of Google, Bing and Yahoo, trying to find out what your website’s missing.

Once all this information is collected, it’s time to start analyzing it to highlight areas that could be improved or, if something is missing, even fixed.

One thing important to understand when it comes to SEO is its duality: on-page SEO and off-page SEO are two very different areas which SEO resolves into.

Here’s how they differ:

On-page SEO vs Off-page SEO

On-page SEO covers all the activities strictly related to and happening on a single page, which can be a blog post, a product page, your homepage, and so on. Speed optimization and having SSL certificate correctly enabled are part of on-page SEO.

Off-page SEO accounts for all activities happening off the page, which means link building via content creation, social promotion, domain authority, and many others.

The optimization process SEO experts execute on

If you’re considering to go out looking for a developer to optimize your SEO, it is important to be aware of the process that is commonly used to perform the operation.

On-page SEO: What should you expect?

As we saw, SEO is performed by taking care of two parts or more appropriately there are two halves in which developers break it. Josh elaborates:

SEO is broken up into two halves. The first one is on-page SEO. So we’ll look at the speed of the site to further improve it, tweaking all kinds of speed issues, image size, cache, and everything related to speed. Then we’ll be looking more closely at the pages, title tags, meta descriptions, and how to improve click-through rates. Moving forward, we’ll be looking at keywords: we’ll dig deeper into understanding:’Are you trying to rank for the correct keywords?’ and ‘Are you giving the right signs to rank for the keywords you want to rank for?’

When SEO experts talk about keywords they refer to what is usually called keyword strategy, which is an important area in any SEO project. A keyword strategy, roughly speaking, covers a list of keywords and combination of them for which your website should rank for and a strategy to reach those results.

This short definition is just to give a quick idea on what a keyword strategy is and, I know, it’s incomplete. For further information, please check out Brian Dean’s guide.

The Off-page SEO optimization: What should you expect?

Next is the other half of the SEO process, the part that deals with anything “off” your pages, like building authority, checking and improving social signals, and so on. Josh highlights the things that are part of this side of the coin:

So you’ve created your amazing content, you’ve now tweaked up the site, you’ve told Google what you want to rank for. Now you’ve got to show Google that you’re popular in the eyes of the community and that your website is one to trust. That means you’d want to start getting links and shares from other websites, and anywhere you can find that people would reference your work and point back to you. That’s part of the system of getting relevant eyeballs of the community that you’re part of, and also potential clients onto your content through other people’s sites and pointing them back to you.

Can you rely on plugins to perform SEO for you?

I want to give you the answer right away, as there’s so much confusion around this: no, you can’t.

Plugins can help you take care of some SEO aspects in a smoother, quicker way, yet they don’t “do” SEO on your behalf.

WordPress is particularly famous for its SEO plugins like Yoast SEO, AIOSEO, The SEO Framework and many think that, once activated, these plugins can boost your SEO (almost) immediately. Josh further comments:

I have a lot of clients who come to me and say: ‘I want my site SEO-d.’ Unfortunately, that’s not how it works. You just can’t click on an SEO plugin and expect your site to start ranking. WordPress SEO plugins can do so many things, like sorting out the horrible automatic tags, create a good sitemap, and even connect to Google Search Console and Google Analytics. Plugins will really help you improve things, but it’s not a one-step click or matter of configuring their ‘Settings’. It’s a deeper process.

How could you measure the results of hiring an SEO expert?

If you’ve hired an SEO expert to help you improve your SEO and perform such crucial tasks, it is important for you – as the website manager – to be able to analyze the results and see what your investments are buying for you.

To do so, you should be looking at a few main areas of your website: traffic, incoming links, rankings and conversions (bottom line sales or leads). Josh provides actual questions that should guide you through this evaluating phase:

I’d check for three main areas. The first one is traffic. Do you have more people on your website from the time you had started the optimization process? Are you increasing your search engine ranking positions for your preferred keywords? The second one would be incoming links. Are people engaging and linking to your content? And the third one, I think the most important one is about the type of traffic you’re building. Is it relevant? Is it producing the sales that you want?

Wrapping up

As many incorrectly think, SEO is a process that operates within your Marketing strategy, not a single, one-off task. Optimizing your website for SEO is a thorough and intense process that bundles together more tactical operations with higher-level and more strategic tasks.

That’s why it never stopped providing its core value: SEO is one of the strongest channels to acquire new leads and clients for it actually affects your bottom line, even when you’re not aware of it.

This blog post features Josh Morley who is the founder of MarketingTheChange, a small digital agency that use its profits to support charities, non-profits and unfunded startups. He’s been designing & marketing websites for the past 4 years, with a focus on WordPress webdesign, online marketing and SEO, PPC, keyword research, link-building and lead acquisition for local business.

The post The “Behind-The-Scenes” Guide To Working With An SEO Expert On Your WordPress Website appeared first on Codeable.

When you need to move your WordPress website to a new domain address, it’s not just a matter of copy-pasting some file to a new “home”. It’s a matter of making this process as smooth as possible and doing all you need to lower any loss within your SEO rankings that you gained with your old domain.

But how is this possible? What should you take into account to properly move your WordPress website to a new domain and prevent it from losing its SEO rankings?

I’ll get through all of these points, but first, let’s start with a key clarification: what’s a domain name? Roughly said: what you usually type on your browser bar is a website’s domain name.

For example, www.codeable.io is a domain name, google.com is another domain, facebook.com another one. Domain names have been introduced to help users better remember a page’s unique IP address, which is made up of numbers.

I bet you’d remember www.codeable.io way more easily than 104.131.27.111, which resolves into reaching the same page.

So, why would anyone want to move a WordPress website to a new domain?

Changing domain isn’t something that the majority of business owners have to face during their life, yet it’s still something that happens very often. The most common reasons behind this huge change are these:

1. Businesses need to rebrand themselves, where their new domain name will be part of this rebranding process
2. When a better domain becomes available which better represents your business in its niche
3. When a given domain you own has reached a penalty score that tremendously affects your rankings, i.e. search engines think your content is spam

The tips in this guide will cover examples and scenarios falling under the first two of this list. Even if the following tips would be 100% applicable to scenarios as #3 entails, dealing with penalized domains is a more critical task that must assess and treat each situation as different from the others.

Before you start transferring your website to a new domain

If you’re about to, or just thinking about moving your current website to a new domain, you need to consider the switch will involve some temporary loss both on your rankings and search traffic numbers. Please don’t freak out, and read it again: it’s a temporary loss. This happens (and has happened) to all websites that have been transferred to a new domain, and with the following tips, you’ll be able to reduce your loss to its greatest extent.

Let’s dig in, then.

Need someone who could take care of moving your website to a new domain? Post your project and have one of our 250+ vetted WordPress experts help you out immediately!

Download your database and your /wp-content/ folder

Your WordPress website is mainly a compound creature made of two types of elements: your database, which stores all your written content such as pages and posts, and static files, such as WordPress core files, your theme files, CSS stylesheets, and images.

When you want to move your current website from olddomain.com to newdomain.com, the very first thing you have to do is to make a copy of your database and static files. These would come in handy if anything went wrong during the transfer process.

There are several ways you could perform a backup of your database:

• Using a plugin – Note: there are several here worth mentioning. Keep reading for one that’s able to take care of both your database and /wp-content/ folder
• Using cPanel
• Using phpMyAdmin

Once you take care of your database, you’d want to make a copy of all your images, media files, theme, and plugins. If you haven’t changed the standard path with some custom settings, these elements are stored within the /wp-content/ folder. There are some exceptions, though: some plugins might store some elements outside of the /wp-content/ folder, usually in the root folder of your website (one level up). Have a look there and if any names of files or folders correspond to any of your plugins then take those too.

To make a copy of your /wp-content/ folder and everything in it, you could use a plugin or just connect via FTP (better SFTP) and download that folder locally to your computer.

Now that you have both elements from your olddomain.com, let’s move to newdomain.com.

Upload your database and your files to the new domain

Once you’re done with downloading your database and your /wp-content/ folder, it’s time to do the actual switch and move all of your files to your new domain. In order to do that, you might need to understand that each hosting company would provide you with different options to make the process easier, one of which is one-click installs of WordPress. So what you’d need to do right at this stage might be different from what others are specifically required to do.

Specifically, if you are using a one-click installer and you see the option “Discourage search engines from crawling your site” you should select yes for this option on the new domain, as it will prevent duplicate content while you make the switch.

Yet, no matter what your hosting provider allows you to do, you’d want to be sure to:

• Have a new and clean install of WordPress running on newdomain.com – if your hosting doesn’t provide it as a one-click install, you can download the latest WordPress version from here.
• Have your current database (the one from the old domain) restored – when moving to a new domain name, choose the database you’ll be importing data into in your phpMyAdmin then click “Import” and select your desired database.
• Have your old /wp-content/ folder uploaded to newdomain.com – you can do this via a plugin, your cPanel or manually by uploading your folder into the root of your new domain (or a specific directory).

Once the transfer is completed, you’ll need to focus on setting up your WordPress install the way you want it. This means checking your menus, widgets and all other custom settings and options that require your action.

If you selected “Discourage search engines from crawling your site” during the move, then you can now reverse this within your WordPress settings.

As an interesting plugin that could help you backing up your website and move it from one domain to another (or from your local computer to a server), I should mention Duplicator which makes things really easy.

Now it’s time to work on what might affect your SEO rankings, so let’s put on our best goggles and start by looking for broken links.

Search and replace your domain name

Since you uploaded all your files and database into your new domain name, you might encounter 404 pages and broken links. That’s why at this stage of your transitioning you should replace all your old URLs with your new URLs. The easiest (and safest for non-technical WordPress users) way is to use a plugin such as Search and Replace or Velvet Blues Update URLs.

For more advanced users, there’s a PHP based tool that could be less problematic. To use it, upload it via FTP and start working on it to replace your domain name. Just be sure to remove it from the server once you’re done, or you might expose your website to vulnerabilities.

This action will update your database so if you mess it up, you won’t be happy. So please check to have a recent backup saved somewhere, and double or even triple check your spelling when writing down your old domain and new domain names. In addition, you should also pay attention of www vs non-www when performing this step. If you don’t feel confident about doing it by yourself, you might want it to be handled by a WordPress professional.

Create 301 redirects on your old domain name

How would you tell visitors who land on your olddomain.com that you’ve moved your website to newdomain.com? To do that properly, you’d need to use 301 redirects which signal to both users and search engines that a given link has moved permanently to a new location. In Moz’ words:

A redirect is a way to send both users and search engines to a different URL from the one they originally requested.

But that’s not the only benefit of using 301 redirects. In fact, these permanent redirects are those that pass along the most SEO juice. See what Matt Cutts tells about 301 redirects and SEO:

So how can you do that?

Go to your old domain and open the .htaccess file in a text editor (quick memo: the .htaccess file is invisible). Now, if you want to redirect all of your link, i.e. not just your homepage, but every individual blog post and page too, add the following lines to it:

[code lang='plain']
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
[/code]

If you’ve changed your website structure on your newdomain.com, even just moderately, you might need to manually redirect each page to lower your chances of getting 404 pages on your olddomain.com. If that’s your case, you’d need to add each old URL that you want to be redirected and the page URL you want it to be redirected to in your .htaccess file:

[code lang='plain']
Redirect 301 /olddomain.com/page http://www.newdomain.com/page
[/code]

To be sure the redirects are properly set up and working, you could either use the Fetch as Google feature within the Google Console or just browse through them manually.

The .htaccess can break your website, so please make a copy of it before doing any edits and keep it handy.

Submit an address change of your website in Google Console

Google provides you with a nice tool when it comes to letting it know you’ve changed your website’s address. By using it, you’ll tell Google one of your sites has a new home, thus you’ll lower any possible harm to your current rankings.

To use the “Change of Address” tool, head over to Google Console, click on your website, i.e. your olddomain.com and then the gear icon in the top right area to find the “Change of Address” option:

There are going to be 4 steps involved here to correctly notify Google about the address change. Just follow them.

Create a new XML sitemap and submit it to Google

Once you’ve told Google about your website’s new home, you should then provide the search engine with a fresh list of contents and pages you want to be indexed. To do that, you might want to create a new XML sitemap for your newdomain.com. It will take you a couple of minutes only, thanks to a plugin such as Google XML Sitemaps or Yoast SEO.

As your new XML sitemap is generated, you’d get a specific URL for it. So copy it to your clipboard and get back to the Google Console, and navigate to Crawl > Sitemaps in the left sidebar. From that page, click on the top right red button to submit your new XML sitemap.

We’re almost there, so hang on a little longer 🙂

Add your newdomain.com website to Google Analytics (and paste the new tracking code in)

As you’re taking care of all the things that might have an impact on your SEO when you transfer your website to a new domain, you should take care of the last piece of the puzzle: add your website as a new property to your Google Analytics account and get a new tracking code.

The process here is pretty straightforward, so you’d want to:

• Log into Google Analytics and click the “Admin” tab
• Click on the “Create a new property” option
• Add newdomain.com in the “Web Site URL” field
• Pick your preferred settings for “Industry Category” and “Reporting Time Zone”
• Click the blue button at the bottom “Get Tracking ID”

Now with your new tracking code, it’s just a matter to add it to your website. Easy, right?

“But what does this have to do directly with SEO?”, somebody might ask.

Well, tracking visitors doesn’t have any direct effect on SEO, yet it provides lots of useful information you could leverage for SEO purposes.

What I’d like you to pay attention to here is that with Google Analytics set up on your newdomain.com website, you can minimize the number of 404 pages. Just think of a pretty common scenario: someone may have linked to a page on your olddomain.com and if the redirection is not working, you’ll find yourself sending users to an error page.

Checking your 404 pages eventually improves the UX of your website and make your visitors and crawlers’ life easier (aka big win for your SEO).

But how can you check your 404 error pages in Google Analytics?

One easy way is the following one:

• When in GA, navigate to Behavior > All pages
• Select the “Page title” tab from your reporting window
• Add “404” or “Page not found” in the search box
• Click through each page you’d get from that query

You could also dig into more details and set up alerts for 404 pages. If you’d like to do that, please check Google documentation here.

Update as many incoming links as you can

The very last step you now have left with is critical to your SEO rankings: incoming links. At this stage, where the transfer of your website has been already taken care of, redirects are in place, and you already did anything you could to let Google (and other search engines) know about the change, it’s time to focus on setting up incoming links.

So start with those you’re in control of:

• Facebook
• Twitter
• Google+
• LinkedIn
• Instagram
• … and so on

Then update all your email signatures where any link to your website might be provided and update them with the new site’s domain name.

Last but not least, you’d need to reach out to website owners that are linking to you and ask them to update their links to your new site.

Final checks

You’re almost there but there are still some things you might want to check out to be sure your new website now running on newdomain.com doesn’t bring awful situations along the way.

Check your email service settings

When migrating your website to a new home, all services you’ve connected to it need to be updated and the email service you’re relying on is no exception. So check your opt-in forms, links in your automated emails, links to your logo, etc.

Don’t ever forget that visitors browsing through broken links might affect your click-through rate, thus affect your overall SEO (because of 404 error pages and a higher bounce rate).

Check for broken links

For the same reason, you don’t just set up redirects without testing if they’re properly working (or not). So fire up a query with a tool to check your broken links and act on them accordingly. It’s way better that you’d find the problems and fix them yourself than to have someone among your visitors to find them.

Delete your cache files

Some caching plugins will modify your .htaccess, so if you have a caching plugin installed, delete your cache files and let the plugin generate new ones.

[bctt tweet=”Even if you’re using plugins for moving a website, always be 100% focused when performing such a task”]

Wrapping things up

Migrating your WordPress website to a new domain is an extremely delicate task that should always be paired with a huge “handle with care” stamp. This doesn’t mean only programmers, developers or coders would be able to do that. Don’t forget one important thing, though; the availability of plugins, which help you out (a lot), can take away your attention to perform such a critical task. And this isn’t good.

As you now have all the steps required for migrating your website to a new domain listed out, two recommendations are all that remains here: always backup your databases and, if you’re not sure about which step you should take along the way, ask for help.

Guessing and trying don’t belong here.

The post Move Your WordPress Website To A New Domain Without Losing Your SEO Rankings appeared first on Codeable.

And to do that, you need to get serious about your website’s Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

What’s SEO and why it’s crucial to your website

Many times, definitions aren’t as useful as they should be and to understand how to improve your SEO you have “to do things”, rather than learning definitions. But anyway, the core idea behind SEO is that you should make search engines’ life easier when it comes to crawling (and indexing) your website.

That means if your business relies on your website, you’re committed to creating, developing and maintaining a well-coded, well-structured website with all information related to your business in place.

On a technical level, SEO resolves into taking care of several aspects like the title of your pages, meta descriptions, headings, links, keywords, website hierarchy, and many others I’m covering in a minute.

SEO is a matter of different elements and tactics combined that all fall under two main areas within SEO: on-page SEO and off-page SEO.

On-page SEO vs Off-page SEO

As the name might suggest, on-page SEO refers to all the elements that affect ranking and are in control of the website owner. Some perfect examples are blog posts, pages and meta descriptions. On the other hand, off-page SEO covers all elements that affect ranking, but website owners can’t directly control, like inbound links, social sharings, domain authority, just to name a few.

Since off-page SEO hasn’t to do exclusively with WordPress, we’ll skip it for now, and I’ll focus on all the elements you have under your control.

So the question is: how do you improve your WordPress website’s SEO and rank up to the first page of search engines?

Structure and website information

Let’s start by looking through all the main elements that have to do with your website but aren’t required to be edited on a regular basis. Those following are more of a set it and forget it kind of things.

Website name and tagline

First things first, you have to take care of your website’s name: go to Settings > General in your dashboard and fill up the “Site Title” field with your website’s name. So, if you’re woking on your business website, put your company’s name, if you’re a freelance, go with your full name only. Don’t use keywords here because it simply doesn’t make any sense.

Then add the tagline of your website, which is nothing more than a brief description of it or your unique value proposition, if you like to call it that way. In our case, we put “#1 outsourcing service for WordPress” because it perfectly describes what we do. Both these fields are shown on the results page (SERP):

The tagline field allows you to wear the smart SEO hat because you might want to use keywords relevant to your business in it. If the description that comes out sounds natural, go all-in and use those keywords; if you’re unable to get a great result, just go with plain, clear English or your preferred language.

Permalinks structure

Permalinks are the unique addresses of your website’s elements, i.e. pages, blog posts, images and so on. They’re created with your root domain followed by a string of words separated by hyphens like wordpress-seo-tips-guide in this blog post.

What’s important here for your SEO purposes to know is that your permalink structure should be readable to let crawlers easily access your website’s content. To set your permalink to a more SEO-friendly structure, head to Settings > Permalinks and pick “Post name”:

With “Post name” all your permalinks will look like http://www.yourwebsite.com/your-slug, and that’s an interesting SEO structure because you get to choose the slug for each page, blog post and element you create.

Why should you pick the “Post name” structure over the others? Because you have the chance to put your keywords in it, while having dates would make your content look “dated”, likely lowering your click-through rate (a factor Google takes into account for your rankings).

The only other option that might work here is to use “Custom structure” and set /%category%/%postname%/ as its value. Do this only if it makes sense on your website structure, as Matt Cutt clarifies in this video:

Which one should you choose? What’s important here to understand is that it doesn’t matter that much if you have category-structured URLs or not, from an SEO perspective. It’s more of a UX issue here since your users might see your slugs as long spammy URLs containing keywords and they won’t click them through.

How to write SEO-friendly WordPress slugs

If you want to have better slugs, some tips can actually improve your SEO. Here’s the three most important:

• 3 to 5 words it’s the ideal length of your slugs
• Make your slugs relevant to your content while trying to use your SEO keywords
• Use hyphens to separate words

Pay attention not to change the slug once the page or blog posts go live since you’re making that content unreachable for your users.

Code, XML sitemaps, and breadcrumbs

Are all WordPress themes SEO-friendly? No, they’re not. And it all comes down to 2 main aspects: how clean is your code and how well-structured is your website. The more useless lines of code, and poor architecture your website runs, the more difficult it’ll be for search engines to crawl and index it.

Before looking at the code and work to make it better (we can help you with that), you should immediately be sure to have an XML sitemap created. XML sitemaps are the standard file format to let search engines know about new, updated, or removed content on a website. Google XML sitemap is a great help for this; also, All in One SEO plugin and WordPress SEO by Yoast provide a way to create an XML sitemap.

Another important thing to take care of is to have your website featuring structured data, such as Schema.org for example, so it can provide search engines with even more detailed information and data relevant to your content or pages. The results would be rich snippets within the SERPs, and likely an improved click-through rate.

Both the two most adopted WordPress SEO plugin automatically implement structured data for you. You can use the rich snippets testing tool from Google to see the results.

If you’d want to go the extra mile, try enabling breadcrumbs on your website, even just on some pages or sections where they make sense. They don’t count from an SEO perspective, yet breadcrumbs are a smart way to have an internal linking structure in place while providing a better UX to your users.

Now that we’ve covered how your website’s main parts should be let’s move on to the “juicy” elements that can positively (or negatively) change your website’s SEO score: blog posts and pages.

How blog posts (and pages) affect your WordPress SEO

Blog posts and pages are powerful content types that you create, for example, to update your users about a new product release, inform them about a new offer or just share your take on a topic of interest.

There’s a widespread misconception about writing and SEO: many have the wrong idea that “if you want to rank for a keyword, you need to use it throughout a blog post”. That’d be true only if we were still in the ’90s.

Today Google and search engines are smart and can’t be tricked so easily, and with their ever going algorithmic changes, they’re penalizing websites that use such tactics. Still, you can do plenty of things to gaining the first page.

In a minute, I’ll tell you how to write better blog posts and pages. But right now let’s clear the air on some misconceptions: is the title of a blog post the same as the title of the page containing that blog post? Which one is more important for SEO? Let’s see.

Title of your post vs Title of the page (h1 vs title tag)

Let’s clear up what many still misunderstand: the title of a blog post is an H1 HTML element, and it’ll be created within the <body> tag of the page. On an SEO perspective, you should always use just one H1 on every single page and post you create to let clearly crawlers understand the core topic of that page.

This is how the title of your blog post resolves as HTML code. A different story is the title of the page, also known as SEO title:

The title of the page is what you can easily create and manage via a plugin such as WordPress SEO by Yoast and that it’ll be part of the meta information as a <title>tag. This how it resolves as HTML code:

Now that you know the difference between the two, you might want to consider that search engines give more importance to title tags rather than any other element in a given page. That’s why you should try to use your keyword in it if you want to increase your chance to better ranking for that query. Also, don’t forget that the closer a word is to the beginning of the title tag, the more weight Google will give it.

How about the title of your blog post (the H1 element) then? Well, it’s still important as part of an on-page SEO activity, but it’s more about content consistency and preventing users who’ve clicked your linked to leave immediately the page (behavior know as pogo-sticking). As Rand Fishkin of Moz perfectly explains:

it’s almost certainly the case that a searcher who’s just clicked on a result expects to see a matching headline on the page they visit. Failure to do so may increase the odds of pogo-sticking..

Pogo-sticking doesn’t have to be confused with high bounce rate since the latter could also be something positive as to show that your page perfectly addresses your users’ intents (think of Wikipedia pages). On the contrary, pogo-sticking is always a bad thing, and it occurs when users immediately leave your page, just after seconds they landed on it.

This aspect (quickly leaving a single page) is pretty important to Google because it shows that a given page doesn’t satisfy the users’ needs, which they “translated” into a query, and will likely be interpreted as a poor resource for that query.

I know there are a lot of things to take into account when talking about SEO, and here’s the important ones to remember until now:

• Use just one H1 and title tag on each of your pages
• Title tags appear in search results pages (SERPs)
• Search engines give more weight to title tags than H1 headings
• First words get higher SEO value rather than all those following
• Use around 55 characters to be sure your title gets displayed correctly

Meta descriptions

Meta descriptions are tags paired with your content that should inform search engines about the topic on a given page. Even if they aren’t among ranking factors, they’re crucial to getting better click-through rate within SERPs:

When writing meta descriptions, your primary goal is to create a compelling description that informs searchers about what your page is about. Since they don’t affect rankings, using keywords in meta descriptions is a plus that might tickle searchers’ interest clicking through your page. As always, don’t try to use them unless they naturally read in that short paragraph.

How to write your blog posts and pages

As you should already know, placing the same keyword all over a blog post or page doesn’t work when it comes to improving a website’s SEO. Start from this straightforward tip from Moz and keep it in your mind as your mantra:

All good content has two attributes. Good content must supply a demand and must be linkable.

Supplying a demand is an elegant way to tell you your content has to be addressed to a specific kind of user (aka your visitor) and have a purpose while being linkable is pretty self-explanatory. The more your content satisfies those requests, the better rankings you’d end up with.

How long should your blog posts and pages need to be? As researches have shown, long-form blog posts and pages rank higher in SERPs:

Content with ~2000 words ranks for the first positions on page results. Why? Easy said: there’s more to index, thus more words to be ranked for. Besides, long-form content usually collect more social sharings, giving more visibility to that specific content. This doesn’t mean all of your blog posts and pages have to be that long, but it gives you a better idea of how search engines evaluate content and which types they rank best.

So creating more in-depth blog posts and pages should be on your to-do list from now on. With that in mind, it could sound tough not to keep using the same keyword throughout a single blog post or page. But if you start thinking smarter and leverage synonyms and close variants, always without letting them sound unnatural, it’d bring you great results. Look at these sentences:

• How to rank on the first page of Google
• Rank on Google’s first page
• Get on the first page of Google

Those 3 are perfect examples of sentences you could perfectly use within a blog post entitled “How do I get on the first page of Google?” because they semantically relate one other. So, when writing your next blog post, don’t over-optimize your keyword and go with natural synonyms and semantically close expressions.

5 features that make your blog posts and pages SEO-friendly

With all that said, a pretty good blog post or page should satisfy all the following criteria:

1. Have one title tag only with your primary keyword
2. Have a short, and readable slug with a couple of your keywords maximum
3. Have a compelling, and informative meta description
4. Have links both to internal pages (like other blog posts) and external to topic-related resources
5. Have your reader’s need as its unique goal: structure your content with paragraphs, headings, lists and any formatting and type of content that provides information at its best

[bctt tweet=”Wanna be great at SEO? Realize your ultimate goal is creating content for real people, not algorithms”]

Wrapping things up

I kept the most powerful tip for the very end. If you really want to get better with WordPress SEO just don’t think too much about search engines, think about how you search for information online.

There are no rules in SEO, just guidelines that work for an undefined time span. Focusing on your visitors’ needs, getting to know what they’re looking for, what they’re researching and what words they use it’s crucial here. That’s why you should always prefer the natural wording to spammy content, which is another way to say: think of your readers first.

If you’re in doubt about “going SEO” with a new blog post or write an informative chunk of copy, always go with the latter. You’re creating content for real human beings, not algorithms.

How about you: what SEO tactics did you put in place on your WordPress website? Which ones proved to be the most effective for your rankings?

The post WordPress SEO explained: starter guide on how to get on the first page of search engines appeared first on Codeable.

You can’t.

Now before you get all angry with me for the click-baity title let me explain; You can’t, because you’re asking the wrong question. The real question is how can you get on the first page of Google for specific keywords. Makes more sense, doesn’t it?

Why are keywords relevant? Simple, because you don’t want to rank high in search results when someone is searching for terms completely unrelated to the business you’re in. For example, you have an online store selling shoes and someone is looking to buy a refrigerator – not a person you’d want to attract right?

So how do I get on the first page of Google for specific keywords?

I’ve got good news for you! You don’t need a big marketing budget, you don’t need to hire expensive agencies (which are often selling bullshit), you don’t even need a lot of knowledge about online marketing. The only thing you need to do is…

Write.

Yes, you need to write, and you need to write a lot. And not just anything, you need to write about your business, or more importantly, about the topics your prospective customers are most interested in.

One of the excuses I get most often is that people don’t have a lot of material to write about, and I always prove them wrong. You know that one prospective customer who is always asking a ton of questions, wanting to know everything about your product or service? Time to make her a source of inspiration, not frustration.

Now for the most important part: Make sure that what you write delivers value to your prospective (or existing) customers, not Google. Google can tell when you’re writing just for the sake of writing. Instead, start a discussion on an important topic, answer and clarify a complex question, point readers in the right direction. Value is the key!. And you can’t outsmart Google, so don’t even try.

Benefits

Let’s look at a typical brick-and-mortar business’s website; They usually have (apart from the main landing page):

• an about us page (listing employees, their vision and mission)
• a contact/location page (Google map + a contact form)
• a news page (often with the last news being published years ago)
• a gallery page(s), with some pictures of their products

All in all, they usually have 5-10 different pages which only get updated once a year – if even. Now just by publishing one article per week you can double the amount of unique URLs of your site in a month or two. That’s 10x the pages in a year. Or more, if you decide to publish more than once a week.

Because your website will be constantly updated, Google’s crawler will notice, thus return more often and your chances of ranking higher will increase. Provided you are writing about topics, relevant to your visitors. If so, then your keyword density will automatically be high enough to boost your rankings.

One word of warning though: It doesn’t happen overnight!. You’ll have to patiently stick to your writing schedule for quite some time (a couple of months at least), before you see the positive effects of your labor. And once you do, do not, under any circumstance, stop – doing so will eventually decrease your rankings due to outdated content and you’ll be back to square one.

Don’t cheat

As a website owner, you’ve likely been approached by quasi-marketing agencies that promise you’ll get on the first page of Google in no time! Don’t fall for it – there is no such thing! Not unless their practices are shady;

Those can produce short term benefits, yes, but Google is constantly improving their indexing algorithm and sooner or later, you will be penalised for malpractice. And getting off that blacklist is hard if not impossible.

Same goes for for inbound links (see the note below); Some webmasters try to spam their website address on various discussion boards and link farms in order to increase their rankings. In order for that to be effective you’d have to create a huge number of accounts all over the web and bring zero value to those communities – don’t do it, it will kick back in a negative way!

Note: There are two major components of content marketing: writing and inbound links (links that point to your website) from sites that already rank high with Google.

Positive side-effects

Apart from ranking higher on Google search result pages (SERPs) you will also have plenty of material to share on social media – and eventually your writing will become so good and valuable that people will share it on their own, promoting your business for you.

Once that starts to happen, other people in the industry will start to follow you on social media and link to your articles.

With that, you’ll slowly become an authority (one of the six principles of persuasion, which I’ll write about in one of the future articles). Being an authority has nothing to do with importance, though – it’s about being perceived as a professional. This, in turn, increases trust of your clients towards you and brings more business in.

Don’t overlook the technical aspects

Apart from the content on your website, it’s also important that your website checks-out in technically: It should load fast (use PageSpeed Insights to check how you rank, anything below 85 is worth looking at), the HTML output should be valid, images should be named properly, have captions and proper attributes, and so on.

At the end of the day, it’s more important to have awesome content, but if you make it difficult for Google (and visitors) to properly interpret it, then you’re not leveraging the full potential of your effort.

To further boost your writing effort also make sure:

• that visitors have an easy way of sharing your content. This is most commonly done with a social sharing plugin
• you use WordPress SEO by Yoast which makes it childishly simple to set up the meta information about your article. This makes it easier for Google to understand your content and present it efficiently in search results.

(We can help with that, by the way.)

How do I get started?

[bctt tweet=”How do I get on the first page of Google? By writing. Frequently.”]

Easy! The next time you visit one of your customers, pay close attention to what they ask you – and write it down. No detail is to small to ignore! And probably (hopefully?) you love what you do so it shouldn’t be hard to enthusiastically explain things you’re the expert in. Now all you have to do is put that explanation in writing.

It’s easy to get carried away though, and explain everything in one go. Instead, break things down and in every article present one angle of what you’re writing about. Leave the rest for later articles.

Even if the nature of your business doesn’t put you in direct contact with your customers – do it anyway. It’s an awesome learning experience, not only about how your customers perceive your business but what their pain points and concerns are. They might as well give you an idea for a new product! Ask, and listen – don’t pitch! Pitching puts you in a selling mode – it’s learning mode you want to be in!

One more great source of topics are conferences – regardless what kind of business you’re in, I’m sure there are some you can attend to connect with your peers/competitors and get plenty of inspiration. And exposure, which is always a plus.

Once you’re equipped with a ton of topics to write about – set a schedule and don’t publish everything at once! Instead, write one article a week and increase the frequency once you’re comfortable with your new position of content marketer! 🙂

Remember, consistency is way more important than onslaught of relevant keywords every now and then.

Want to improve your website rankings? Check out our starter guide on WordPress SEO.

Now it’s up to you

But I’m not good at writing? So what, neither am I and that doesn’t mean I’m unable to explain things here on this blog. Practice makes perfect and we all had to start from scratch at some point.

When you’re just starting out, give your articles to someone who’s good with grammar (doesn’t need to be a professional) to point out or fix the most obvious mistakes and that should be good enough. Remember what I said earlier – value matters the most and if you provide it, visitors won’t even notice (or resemble) a spelling mistake here and there.

You’re now equipped with enough knowledge to push your website on the first page of Google for relevant keywords completely on your own. Live long and prosper.

The post How do I get on the first page of Google? appeared first on Codeable.