WordPress SEO on WordCamp Finland 2016. In this quite long session we looked at how Google works, what SEO is, basic keyword analyse, good site structure for SEO, and how to make WordPress sites in a SEO-friendly way. In the end we looked a little at what happens off page and some tools and examples of SEO done by some websites. http://genero.fi http://generodigital.se

2. WordPress SEO

3. Jonathan Björkskog
Co-founder, Head of SEO & web tactics
at Genero
WordPress since 2010
SEO since 2009
Had 147 WordPress sites in my worst
domain-addiction period

4. Founded 2009
Strategy, Design, Development, Internet
Marketing
~25 employees, 1,3 m turnover, owned
by employees.

5. This
Workshop
The Setup
1. Good Guy Google
2. SEO what?
3. The 4 elements of SEO
4. Site structure for SEO
5. SEO plugins
6. Questions & practical work

6. What do you
want to do?

7. What do you think of
when you hear “SEO”

8. Good Guy Google
Never let you buy first positions

9. Google actually works
Pre Google (1990’s)
● SE looked at how many times a
keyword were used.
● You could buy first positions
● You could spam keywords to get
first positions
→ Search results totally sucked
With Google
● Google looked at relevance and
links (Page Rank Algorithm)
→ Google’s search results did not suck as
much

10. Google ranking factors today
1. Relevance (Content, links)
2. Trust / Power (links)
3. Brand (Brand signals, links)
4. Personal (User behaviour, history)
5. Other factors might or might not be: CTR, time on site,
bounce rate, conversion rate, interaction, user-relations,
social, etc

11. Search something in Google
With Google you do not actually search through internet.
You search through their index.
As well as 53 233 other people this second.
The order of the search result is based on relevance and trust (gained through links)

12. 7 domain links,
0 url links
320 domain links,
0 url links
7 domain links,
0 url links
5350 domain links,
4683 url links
3 domain links,
3 url links

13. The 4 elements of SEO
Keyword research &
mapping
Competition
Available resources
Opportunities
Do not make it hard
for Google
Make proper site
structure
Make everything
possible
Plugins
Tech
What do Google see?
Content structure
Plugins
Content
Power & Trust
Get as much benefits
as possible
Offpage

14. Opportunities
Find topics for your site:
Google Keyword
Planner, Keywordtool.
io, Übersuggest.
Choose keywords that
you think will convert
visitors into business.
Start tracking positions:
SEMRush, wincher.com,
rankly.io, etc
Choose keywords that
you have a realistic
possibility to rank on.
Look up competition in
Majestic SEO or Ahrefs
1. 2. 3.

15. Competition
Do a Google search for the keywords.
Are there only big players? Are there
“bad” sites?
Check competitors site’s strength in
Majestic or Ahrefs (or Moz).
What are your available resources?
(Budget or manpower)

16. Keyword choosing strategy
A. Broad, competitive, high
volume keywords
B. Long tail keywords with less
searches and less
competition
A: “Running shoes” or
B: “Yellow Adidas barefoot running
shoes”

17. Make a url mapping document
This means that you list all
keywords. Then you list all
page types and pages, in
levels.
This may also be referred to
as “site structure” or
“sitemap”
Example doc:
https://docs.google.
com/spreadsheets/d/1MRVlEx_QJF4RaYmMj6R9LH
pMq7NFuLov8C6b7eevaQA/edit#gid=544333043

18. Trust / Power -flow through site
Referred to as “internal links”. In 90 % of cases your front page will be the strongest page.
1. We assume that front page have 100 “power”.
2. We have 25 internal links on front page.
3. Pages linked from the front page will then get 4 in “power” (100/25).
(Link placement on page affects the flow, but we ignore that here)
4. Same principle goes for all other pages on your site.
→ Best linked to pages becomes “strongest” and have the best chance to rank.
→ Pages in navigation will get strong.
→ Links from pages with same topic are more valuable.
→ Anchor text pass topic to receiving page.

19. Plan structure for topic hubs
For more competitive keywords you will need a
lot of related content.
Group similar content together with a clear
hierarchy.
All “subcontent” should automatically link back
to “main content”.
Pages/subpages or category/post
App development
iOS app development
ios app development for dummies
ios app development tools
ios app development training
ios app development language
Android app development
Android app development tools
Android app development training
etc...
Examples:

20. Technical
WordPress SEO

21. General
settings
✓ Right country-domain or generic
domain/language.
✓ Permalink structure setting using %
postname%
✓ Allow Google-indexing.
✓ Show excerpt instead of full content on
categories & blog.
✓ Do not noindex taxonomies, instead make
them unique.
✓ Get fast hosting.
✓ Noindex filter-parameter-urls or use #
✓ Think about Canonical if you need the
same content published on several places.

22. Basics for a well-optimized theme
1. Allows content on categories. H1 and text (and picture).
2. No one-page bs.
→ If you are into that, make it the right way with real urls and content in source.
3. All important content visible in source (Keep the angular and ajax fancy things on
top of the content, not instead of it)
4. Use proper markup (only one H1, with post/page title in it, alt-tags are printed for
pictures, widget-titles not as h2 or h3, etc)
5. Use real urls for content (not popover, not #-urls)
6. Use breadcrumbs (For example Yoast)

23. Unique content on taxonomies
A lot of themes does not let you add any content or pictures to taxonomy-pages.
It is easy to fix though:
<h1><?php wp_title(); ?></h1>
<div>
<?php echo category_description(); ?>
</div>

24. Make taxonomies even more rich
Examples:
✓ Enable category-pictures
✓ Print extra fields with extra info
✓ Edit post summaries manually

25. Domain structure and languages
For finnish content:
site.fi = Great
site.com/fi/ = Great
fi.site.com = OK
site.fi/sv/ = Not so good (Finnish content will rank well in Google.fi, but swedish content
will have a hard time ranking in Google.se with this setup)
For languages in subfolder: WPML or Polylang.
For languages on multiple domains: WPML, Polylang or multisite

26. Linking languages together
● Link languages together page to page if possible.
● Use hreflang meta to tell Google that this post is available on another language
too.
<link rel="alternate" hreflang="nl" href="http://nl.example.com/" />
● Use hreflang meta to tell Google the language of this post
● At least WPML and Polylang takes care of this.

27. Plugins
1. SEO-plugin for the essentials, meta & sitemaps (Yoast, all-in-one, etc)
2. Redirection plugin (We want to get rid of duplicate content)
3. Related content-plugin (internal linking)
4. Images for categories (taxonomy-images)
5. Cache plugin for a fast site.
6. Plugin for custom post types & custom fields.
7. Yoast analytics (for easy ecommerce tracking)
8. WPML / Polylang / Woocommerce when needed

28. Set up Yoast SEO
1. Set content you cannot make unique as noindex, follow. (author archives, media
attachment pages, format archives, date-based archives, tags).
2. Make default titles for everything you want to index:
Buy %%term_title%% running shoes online %%sep%% %%page%% %%sep%% %%sitename%%
3. Enable the sitemaps for the content that is unique. Disable the rest.

29. Example setup

30. Yoast SEO box

31. Use Yoast SEO box
1. The keyword does not affect anything, it is just a base for all checkup (and can be
changed to test the content against several keywords)
2. Keyword MUST be in title
(main heading is generating title if you do not fill it in = OK).
Make the title click-friendly. You have about 54 characters to use.
3. Make a description in proper length including the keyword.
(Not important for SEO, but for CTR)
4. Save draft for box to be updated.
5. The box is actually most a tool for teaching yourself.

32. Yoast page analysis

33. Single content structure
1. Main keyword in title and heading
2. Picture on site, main keyword in alt-tag
3. Main keyword in url
4. Main keyword somewhere in content & sub-heading.
5. Make the content rich. Is this the best content online for this keyword?
6. Text-content long enough
This goes for all types of content on your site

34. Get rid of 404
Redirection plugin

35. Anyone can do
all of this

36. If 50 sites
are perfect,
which will
rank?

37. The one that
is most
trusted

38. Let’s go off
page

39. Getting external links
● First have the best possible page & site for a keyword.
● Then, get strong, branded links to your site’s all important pages.

40. Link Acquisition Techniques
● Being a brand
● PR
● Being a resource in your niche
● Link baits (create stuff that go viral)
● Asking for links (from company partners,
relatives, subcontractors, etc)
● Blog cooperation
● Exchanging links
● Guest blogging
● Advertorials
● Buying old domains
● Buying links
● Link networks
← Good praxis if you ask Google
← Still quite okay if you ask Google
← Things that work, but are against
Google guidelines
← Things that sometimes work, but
are against Google guidelines

41. Tools that we looked at
Google keyword planner (Google’s own tool for finding keywords)
Keywordtool.io (Gives you a list of all Google suggested keyphrases for a keyword)
Ubersuggest.org (Gives you a list of all Google suggested keyphrases for a keyword)
SEMRush (Tracking positions in Google from a neutral location/profile)
Majestic SEO (Check link data for websites)
Ahrefs (Check link data for websites)

42. Thank you!
Follow: https://twitter.com/JonathanBJ
Get help with marketing: http://genero.
fi/
http://generodigital.se/
Contact:
Jonathan Björkskog
Founding partner
Head of SEO & Web tactics
+358 (0)50 539 4288
jonathan@genero.fi