Digital Strategy Works founder, Tony Zeoli, presentation on WordPress and SEO at WordCamp Hampton Roads on October 17, 2015.

1. WINNING SEO STRATEGIES
WITH WORDPRESS
BY TONY ZEOLI
FOUNDER

2. / vg
Launched first startup in 1995
20-years of Digital Media
Management experience
Startups, Corporations, Small
Business, Non Profits
Founded Digital Strategy Works in
2009
Community Manager
House Music DJ @avlhms, @djtonyz
Father @ 49 = my next startup

3. What is SEO?

4. What is Page Rank?
Matt Cutts: “The number of people (sites) that link to you and
how important they are.”
Chelsea Adams: “…a link analysis algorithm used by
Google…determine the relative importance of a website.
“Every website is given a Google PageRank score between 0
and 10 on an exponential scale.
PageRank 10 domains:
USA.gov, Twitter.com and Adobe Reader Download, have
the highest volume of inbound links of any sites on the web.”
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55LffWzGtvw
Source: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/what-is-pagerank/

5. What is Link Juice?
When a website links to your site, or when you link
internally from one of your pages to another, the link
passes PageRank points. This passing of
PageRank points is also commonly called “link
juice” transfer.
The amount of link juice passed depends on two
things: the number of PageRank points of the web
page housing the link, and the total number of links
on the web page that are passing PageRank.
Source: http://www.bruceclay.com/blog/what-is-pagerank/

6. Who sets SEO standards?
Google
Google Webmaster Central Blog
bit.ly/gwcblog
Google Webmaster Help Forum Office Hours
http://bit.ly/wcofficehrs
Then everyone else…
Bing/Yaho, Duck Duck Go, Baidu (China)

7. Is WordPress Optimized
Yes, by default in free theme frameworks (i.e. Twenty-Twelve, Twenty-Thirteen, Twenty-
Fourteen, etc.)
Page(s)/Post(s) Titles
Excerpts
Post Categories
Post Tags
Headings (H1 to H6)
Paragraphs
Bullets and Numbering
Post Date/Time
Post Author

8. Reading Setting
Search Engine Visibility
If checked, updates
.htaccess file to hide site
from search bots. Should
work with all search engines
and prevent bot crawlers.
If try to limit bot crawlers
using Robots.txt, bots can
ignore those rules.

9. Permalinks
All posts numeric by default
http://netmix.co/?p=123
Number is ID number of post in MySQL
relational database
Change to alpha characters for crawlers to
read
Variations, but since posts can have dates
assigned, use plain Post Name
Use Custom Structure to add Category
/%category%/%postname%/
https://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Per
malinks

10. Post Permalink

11. What do I do next?
Google now has over 200* ranking signals
It’s not just about “keywords” anymore
meta keyword out many years ago
SEO has gotten far more complex
Start with “technical optimization”
*Source: http://backlinko.com/google-ranking-factors

12. Technical Optimization
SSL Encryption
DNS with CloudFlare
Mobile Responsive Theme
Page Speed Optimization
Hosting
Object Caching
CDN
Image Optimization
Redirection

13. SSL Encryption
HTTPS as a ranking signal
August 2014
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/
08/https-as-ranking-signal.html
WP Engine, GoDaddy, etc. all offer SSL certs and
will install them for you

14. SSL Encryption
Decide the kind of certificate you need: single, multi-domain, or wildcard
certificate
Use 2048-bit key certificates
Use relative URLs for resources that reside on the same secure domain
Use protocol relative URLs for all other domains
Check out our Site move article for more guidelines on how to change
your website’s address
Don’t block your HTTPS site from crawling using robots.txt
Allow indexing of your pages by search engines where possible. Avoid
the noindex robots meta tag.
Source: http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2014/08/https-as-ranking-signal.html

15. WhyNoPadlock.com
Analysis
Report
Recommended Fixes

16. DNS with CloudFlare
A Record
C Name
TXT for Google Webmaster
Verification

17. Mobile Responsive Pages
April 2015
http://googlewebmastercentr
al.blogspot.com/2015/04/rolli
ng-out-mobile-friendly-
update.html
“boosting the ranking of
mobile-friendly pages on
mobile search results”

18. Mobile Search Results
Displays “mobile friendly” in
organic search results

19. Page Speed Optimization
2010
http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com/2010/
04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
“While site speed is a new signal, it doesn't carry as
much weight as the relevance of a page.”

20. Page Speed Tools
Google Page Speed Insights
https://developers.google.c
om/speed/pagespeed/insig
hts/
GTMetrix
tools.Pingdom.com

21. Page Speed Optimization
Minification of HTML, CSS, JavaScript
BWP Minify
Autoptimize
Enqueuing of scripts in functions.php to remove from loading in head
Included in Total Cache and other caching plugins
Enabled using CloudFlare
Leverage Browser Caching / Expire headers
Leverage Browser Caching Ninjas

22. Hosting
Managed Hosting
WP Engine, Flywheel, MediaTemple,
page.ly & other
http://wpdevshed.com/managed-
wordpress-hosting/
Includes:
Caching, CDN, SSL, Site Backups w/
one click restore, Git connectivity,
Technical Support, Site migrations
All caching and CDN super cede
CloudFlare, so pause CloudFlare
services except DNS.

23. Caching and CDN
Caching if not using Managed Hosting
W3 Total Cache
WP Super Cache
WP Rocket
Reviews: https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-wordpress-caching-plugins/
Content Delivery Network (CDN) distributes your site globally and then serve cached pages/posts/images
from the nearest location to the requestor.
Amazon AWS
Max CDN
CloudFlare has a CDN by design
Photon by JetPack for Images, but has some downsides. You can’t dump the cache. Must rename images.
Reviews: https://premium.wpmudev.org/blog/top-cdn-services-to-make-your-wordpress-site-blazingly-fast/

24. Image Optimization
Always name your images for search
Good: my-image-name.jpg
Bad: IMG 003.jpg
Compress Images to manageable size
Bad: 3MB images
Good 300KB images
Bad: 3000+ pixels wide
Good 1600 or less pixels wide
Can resize in WordPress Media Library
editor
Plugins
WP Smush (WPMU Dev)
EWW Image Optimizer

25. Google Data Highlighter
https://developers.google.com/st
ructured-data/
Helpful for Local Search
Deals with open/closing times,
addresses, phone numbers,
events, and other data intensive
information that appear in local
results
Plugins are responsible for
content type: events, recipes,
menus, etc…

26. Semantic Search
Keywords density is the
past
Semantic Search is the
future
Phrases over keywords
People type or speak to
text a phrase over a
keyword

27. On-Site SEO
If you want to rank, produce/write long-form, authoritative, relevant, detailed posts.
Example: https://moz.com/blog/visual-guide-to-keyword-targeting-onpage-optimization
MOZ and other SEO experts are seeing 1,000 word posts rank better than short form posts that are
“fluff”
Don’t duplicate content across min-sites.
First, it’s too difficult to maintain.
Second, you should always be updating your posts.
Third, duplicate content on the same IP address is easy for Google to uncover and penalize.
High Quality Backlinks - not from link farms, but from the blogger that reviewed your content or a
company that is a partners and mentions you on their site or blog.
Links between pages on your site - write a blog post and then link to a landing page that gives more
details about that subject
Use longtail search terms in your post content - semantic search

28. Optimize Site/Pages/Posts
All in One SEO
Creates a sitemap.xml file to register with Google & Bing
Connects to Google Analytics
Robots.txt editor
Site default, Page or Post level editor
Social Meta for Open Graph
Support for schema.org
Pro level customer support with Video XML sitemap and support for
custom taxonomies.

29. Redirection
When removing URLs,
removing old content, broken
pages, or performing site
migrations.
301 permanent or temporary
depending on requirements
Redirection plugin

30. Changing Domain Address
Google Change of Address
Tool
https://support.google.com/w
ebmasters/answer/83106?hl
=en
Let’s Google know you’re
changing domains