- Wouldn't it be great,
if you could optimize your WordPress site for SEO
without having to be an SEO expert.
Well, there's a way.
Hey everyone, I'm Neil Patel.
And today, I'm going to break down
WordPress SEO tutorial for beginners.
(gentle music)
Now, before we get started,
make sure you subscribe to this channel.
And if you're on YouTube, click the alert notification.
Look, there are four areas that you need to focus on.
Normally, we're going to go over each of them in detail,
but I'll also tell you which plugins to use.
So you don't have to worry about the details
and you don't have to learn any coding.
Factor number one,
site speed and performance optimization.
Now, before I dive into the main points on this,
here's why it's important.
If your site loads slower,
what you'll find is your conversion rates drop.
Just imagine, you're on your phone,
you're doing a search on Google,
you land on a site and you're like,
man, this site is taking forever to load.
If that's the case, what do you do?
You're going to sit there to wait for the site to load,
of course not.
You're going to click the back button
and go to a different page.
So you want to make sure that your site loads fast.
You know, Amazon themselves, if their website loads slow,
there's an article that a vast company that broke down
had to lose billions of dollars.
Now that's Amazon,
of course, you're not going to lose as much as them
because none of us make as much as Jeff Bezos.
But percentage-wise, we're going to lose way more than them
because we don't have as well as established brand.
Now there's a few things that affect your site load time.
Cache, that's where people don't have to keep
loading up your images.
And they know that you're saving the same ones
over and over again, so they cache them.
CDN stands for content delivery network.
That's taking your content and putting it all over the web,
you know, servers in India and Brazil and United States.
So that way,
whenever someone's visiting your site from the UK,
you don't have to, you know,
crawl through the broadband,
pipes underneath the sea to visit your site.
What they'll do is they'll just ping a server in the UK
so that way just loads faster.
There's minification of images,
not necessarily changing the size of the images,
but it does change the file size.
Then there's lazy load.
You know when you go to a site and you scroll down,
there's no need for them to load up all the images at once.
Instead, they should load them as you scroll
so that way you can improve the experience.
JavaScript, sometimes if you have too much JavaScript
on your site, it can slow things down.
And of course, image compression.
Now, some plugins that are worth checking out,
they'll just do all this for you
so you don't do it manually.
Is WP rocket, NitroPack,
WP Fastest Cache.
I love these names.
W3 Total Cash and WP Smush,
for image compression.
Now the second factor that you need to pay attention
to is technical SEO.
Look, if Google can't crawl your page
and understand what's on your page
or able to read the content on your site.
How are you going to rank for anything?
And that's why technical SEO is super important.
Everyone talks about link building,
and you need all these links, new content,
and they're right.
You do need links.
You do need content.
But if Google still can't crawl your website,
understand the content on the page, and read the code.
Then it doesn't really matter how many links you have.
You're not going to really rank for much.
So let's go over some of the technical SEO elements.
There's a site map.
That's a page or a file and you can do another XML.
That just lists all your pages on your site
or all your articles.
Then you've got your titles and meta descriptions.
You know, whenever you do a Google search,
you see a title and a text underneath that, a description,
that's your title tag and meta description.
Then you got your robots.txt file.
This is a file that you can block Google
from calling certain pages.
Let's say, if you have a login page
or checkout page with credit card information,
you don't want people just scraping that kind of stuff.
You also need to check for broken links.
You don't want Google to crawl a link and be like,
this link doesn't go anywhere, it's dead.
That makes you look bad.
Then you got AMP pages.
More people use Google from their mobile device
than desktop devices.
The AMP framework just makes it
so that way your pages load faster on mobile devices
specifically for text-based articles.
You also want to check your redirects.
There's 301 redirects, 302 redirects.
One's permanent, one's temporary,
but that can because the bots to go around in circles
if they're doing, if you've done your redirects wrong.
You also have schema markup.
You know whenever you go on Google
and you're searching for a product or a restaurant,
you're seeing those star ratings,
that's example of schema markup.
Websites are passing that information to Google,
so that helps.
These days we're also worried about security
so SSL certificates.
You see that lock symbol next to your URL.
And you know what?
That just makes people feel more secure.
And Google's looking for that,
when they're ranking websites as well.
So some plugins that can help.
There's a All In One SEO.
There's a Yoast SEO plugin.
There's SEOPress, there's Schema Pro for schema markup.
There's Rank Math.
There's really Simple SSL.
And there's AMP for WordPress.
So check them out.
You don't have to use all of them.
But when I'm going through the list of plugins
for each section, keep in mind,
it's up to you to pick whatever ones you like.
And there's no really wrong or right way.
All plugins are getting better.
Third point, content marketing.
Look, if you write content, no matter how amazing it is,
if no one reads it, no one sees it.
You're not going to do well.
So you got to really focus on the marketing of that content
and making sure that your content is buttoned up as well.
So a few factors.
Push notifications, you know, in your browser,
whenever you're on, searching on the web,
especially if you're a Facebook user.
It will be like, oh, it's Neil's birthday.
And they'll show you this little notification box
that comes up.
Clicking on that is a push notification.
And you can actually send that out on your website.
So that way you can get more visitors.
Then there's grammar.
No one wants to read content that's just poorly written.
So make sure you check your grammar and fix it.
Because Google's like at the source in a dictionary,
they know what's good spelling, bad spelling,
great grammar, bad grammar.
If you're writing, I love using Grammarly.
That helps me a lot because I have terrible grammar.
Then you got your social sharing.
You know, even though Facebook reach isn't that great
compared to what it was years ago,
still better than nothing.
You know, you still want to share that content on Facebook
and Twitter and LinkedIn and any other social site
that's applicable to your website.
And of course, you want to collect emails.
They always say, the money's in the list.
So that way, whenever you create a new blog article,
you can just boom,
send out an email blast and get that traffic rolling in.
So here's some plugins to checkout.
Subscribers helps you with push notification.
Hello Bar helps you with email collection
and call to actions.
And then you have Grammarly,
which helps you with your grammar.
And then Shared Counts,
which helps you getting more social shares.
The next factor, security.
These days we're all worried about privacy and security.
You don't want hackers to inject malicious code
into your website or publish fake content on your website.
And it happens.
So that's super important for you to avoid.
So with security, you know, we did mention SSL earlier,
but there's also a few other plugins that can help like,
Sucuri and Wordfence.
Those are two check out.
Now look, if you want to do it all manually, you can.
But if you use these plugins,
it'll give you a kickstart without having to learn
all the nitty-gritty details of SEO.
And if you just want my team to do it for you,
check out my ad agency, NP Digital.
And if you have any questions, leave a comment below.
I'm here to help.
If you enjoyed the video, like it, share it,
tell people about it.
Thank you for watching.