The main two aspects of SEO you want to worry about is your meta data and your site speed. I use the below plugins to help me achieve all of the meta data and optimize the site for speed,
- Schema
- Yoast SEO Plugin
- Asset Clean Up
- TinyPNG
- Cloudflare CDN
- LightSpeed Cache
But there are a number of other tips and tricks I use as well which I describe in other posts on this website which are linked below.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization) has two main factors including speed and meta data and while that short list sounds simple there are many factors which go into each of them. In this post I’ll show you which plugins to use in order to optimize your site for SEO with respect to speed and Meta Data.
Speed and meta data are great for SEO from a technical point of view but we also need to create great content for the site by ‘qualified’ authors on top of this so that we are also ticking that box which is more important than the plugins you use but they will definitely give you the winning combination on top of your speed and meta data improvements.
Plugins for improved SEO
Meta Data:
Meta Data is on page HTML or sometimes other scripts which tells search engines about your site in useful and relevant ways to help them understand what your site is about and therefore how and when to show it to people who are searching various things.
Meta data can come in various types, let’s look at a few.
Schema:
Schema is actually JSON which you add to your site which is standardized across all websites. It’s a standardized way to categorize websites more easily. You can use the plugin WP Schema in order to add this info to your site.
Once installed and activated it will take you through the process of filling in info for your site which will then be added to each of your pages. This will not be visible to users when browsing your site but search engines (which are bots) will be able to see it.
Page title and other meta tags:
Yoast SEO Plugin will take care of this for you but it’s also not 100% necessary if your theme takes care of it but I use Yoast as its also useful for the page description as I talk about below.
Yoast will add, by default, the below tags but can be set up to add more also, for eg the Social Media tags.
<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v19.7.1 - https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ -->
<title><BetterDeveloperDocs> - Shining a useful light on web development</title>
<meta name="description" content="Shining a useful light on web development" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<link rel="canonical" href="https://betterdeveloperdocs.com/" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<link rel="next" href="https://betterdeveloperdocs.com/page/2/" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:locale" content="en_US" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:type" content="website" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:title" content="<BetterDeveloperDocs> - Shining a useful light on web development" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:description" content="Shining a useful light on web development" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:url" content="https://betterdeveloperdocs.com/" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="<BetterDeveloperDocs>" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image" class="yoast-seo-meta-tag" />
<!-- / Yoast SEO plugin. -->Social Media Meta Data:
Yoast SEO Plugin will also allow you to add meta data specific to each social media. This is useful for when people share your links because when the link is shared having this meta data each social media will know which image to show in the display of the link and also be able to use it categorize your site in its own search results.
Page description:
Yoast SEO Plugin will add a field to each of your pages which allows you to add this piece of meta data.
Speed Improvements:
Improving your site speed in term of how fast your site loads is very important in relation to SEO. If your site loads longer than a 2-3 seconds on mobile, laptop or desktop then people are likely to leave for another site. Search Engines, like Google, are monitoring this (it’s known as ‘bounce rate’) behaviour for their own algorithm. The higher the bounce rate then the less likely you are to be shown higher in the results.
NOTE: There are many factor which contribute to search engine’s algorithms but speed is a large one. Especially at mobile.
I wrote a longer piece here on how you can significantly increase your page speed with several plugins. I won’t repeat that info here so please see the link above for the full process.
Content for improved SEO
Creating content for you site is more important than the on page meta stuff but really you want both in combination. I’ll point you in the direction of where to learn about these aspects from the best.
Becoming a qualified author:
Search Engines like to know that you are a serious contributor to the internet before they will show your sites as readily as you may like. They have outlined a set of guidelines to allow people to understand how this can be achieved according to them which includes being active in various social media communities and being known as an author of similar content on other peoples site (guest contributor).
This is a large field but it’s best to watch this video from my content mentors Income School who are professional video and text creators who are masters at optimizing your content for search engines.
Writing great content for SEO:
Income School also will show you how to create excellent content even down to the structure of the blog post itself. I’ll share with you two videos one about the wider content strategy but also on how to write specific blog posts.
