As WordPress Developers we know that if you keep posting great content, WordPress does a great job of search engine optimization all by itself. If you want to maximize your sites SEO, just add WordPress SEO by Yoast and the socialize plugin. When I saw this article from Search Engine Land with their Periodic Table of SEO Success Factors, it seemed like a good opportunity to see how WordPress with these 2 great plugins stacked up.
The table breaks down into 2 main categories: on the page seo, and off the page seo. There is a rating from -2 to +3 for various subcategories in each sections with +3 being best. Here is a breakdown of the best practices by category and how using WordPress with the plugins from WordPress SEO and socialize can maximize your search engine optimization results:
On Page Search Engine Optimization
- Quality – Are pages well written and have substantial quality content? While nothing can tell you if your content is really quality, WordPress SEO does rank your writing skills using the Flesch Reading Ease test. This test will tell you how easy it is to read.
- Research – Have you researched the keywords people may use to find your site? Using the Google KeyWord tool in their webmaster tools you can determine what the most optimal keywords are for your content. WordPress SEO will help you determine whether or not you are using them and appropriate amount in your content.
- Titles – Do HTML title tags contain keywords relevant to page content? WordPress SEO gives you the ability to easily place keywords in HTML in your title tags and how you are using them in your content.
- Crawl – Can search engines easily “crawl” pages on your site? WordPress is constructed with a sitemap. If you use WordPress SEO, you can make a readable sitemap that google can read and “crwal”.
Off the Page Search Engine Optimization
- Quality – are links from trusted, quality or respected websites? Consistently creating good content and using the socialize plugin to broadcast to your social media sites make it easy for people to broadcast and share.
- Authority – Do links, shares and other factors make site a trusted authority? If you are constantly linking to quality content from others and sharing quality content through your social media marketing efforts, most of the time, they will start to link back to you.
- Country – What country is someone located in? Use Google+ with the socialize plugin, this will help determine your location and the location of people consuming and sharing your content.
- Locality – What city or local area is someone located in? What works for country, works for locality.
- History – Has someone regularly visited your site or socially favored it? Be sure to respond to likes, shares and comments. Social Media is a conversation and give you the ability to create community around you. Acknowledging people paying attention to your content will encourage more comments and interaction.
Obviously you have a lot more control over on-page SEO, but if you consistently create and post quality content and use good social media marketing the off-page SEO will improve over time. Good websites take time to develop and you should not expect immediate results, but if you are consistent – over time – you will see constant growth in your search results.
If you want more help with Search Engine Optimiztion for your WordPress site, find out here or why not sign-up and attend our SEO for WordPress Workshop? We’d love to see you there.
