WordPress is much more than just another blogging platform.
In fact, popular websites like TechCrunch and BBC America use WordPress to attract and
host millions of search visitors every single month.
But using WordPress out of the box won't cut it if you want to reach that kind of scale.
You need to make sure that your site speed is lightning fast and that your technical
SEO is structurally sound.
And in this video, you're about to learn exactly how to do that from the ground up.
Stay tuned.
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What's up SEOs, Sam Oh here with Ahrefs, the SEO tool that helps you grow your search traffic,
research your competitors, and dominate your niche.
Now this is the second part in our WordPress SEO series.
And we've already covered a lot of the basic setup and how to create SEO-friendly posts and pages.
In this tutorial, we're going to cover a lot of the technical SEO aspects, particularly
with page speed, duplicate content, and internal linking, all within WordPress.
Let's get to it.
Before we begin, I'm going to run a full site audit on my website using Ahrefs Site Audit tool.
And I'll occasionally make reference back to some of the reports, which will help us
identify which pages to fix.
The first thing we're going to do is configure our WordPress site for optimal speed and performance.
And this is important because Google has officially stated that page speed is a ranking factor
in their algorithm for both desktop and mobile.
So for site speed, we're setting up the framework, which would include things like caching, compression,
CDNs, and minification.
And there are 3 plugins that I use specifically to boost my site speed.
The first one is W3 Total Cache.
With WordPress caching, you're essentially creating static versions of your posts and
pages so it can be rendered quickly by browsers.
And since you're probably not updating these every day, it should result in faster load
times, and a better user experience.
After you've installed the plugin, you'll see a new menu in the left sidebar called "Performance."
If you go to the general settings, you'll see the main settings I have enabled are:
Page Cache, Minify, Browser Cache, and CDN.
And you can see short descriptions of what each one does under the checkbox.
To customize each of these options, you can go to the corresponding submenu in the sidebar.
Now, it's important to note that what works for my site's speed won't necessarily work
for yours.
And there are way too many variables to consider like your server set up - i.e.
Apache vs NGINX vs Engintron,
i.e. your hosting plan - i.e. shared vs VPS vs dedicated and more.
So rather than going through every single setting for this site, I'll leave a link to the
screenshots of my W3 Total Cache settings in the description.
The second plugin I use is called ShortPixel.
And this one automatically compresses and optimizes images when you upload them to your server.
So if you look at my media library, you'll see that there were some images uploaded,
and ShortPixel automatically compressed these by quite a lot without compromising image quality.
And the final plugin I use is called Speed Booster Pack.
After you've installed it, you can access it by hovering over settings, then choosing
the plugin name in the submenu.
The one that I want to touch on here is lazy load images.
Now by enabling this option, it only loads images as it's needed.
For example, when you load this page, images that are further down in the page will only
load as you scroll to its location.
Play around with these settings, and as you update them, you should see your home page
load stats beside it.
You can also use a tool like Pingdom's Full Page Test, which will show you the page load
times and performance optimization tips.
Just make sure to ping your page from the same location to get more accurate representations
of page speed.
Site Audit tool also tracks page speed over time, so let's go to our report in Site Audit
in Ahrefs and see if there are any pages that load particularly slow.
So I'll head on over to the Performance report.
And here, you can see that there are 5 pages that have a loading time of greater than 2 seconds.
So I'll click on that, which will show us the results in Data Explorer.
The first result is one that gets organic traffic, and it looks like the time to first
byte as well as the file size seem higher than I'd like.
So I'll copy the URL and paste it into Google Page Speed Insights.
And the results seem pretty good for the most part.
Now scrolling down, you'll see some suggestions to optimize images.
If your pages have issues with images, CSS, or JavaScript, then you should see a link
at the bottom of the page to download optimized versions for this page.
So I would just download the optimized versions of these images, and replace them in the post.
Now, doing this for all of your pages may take some time, so start with pages that get
organic traffic, and move down the list from there if you're really obsessed with speed.
Alright, so our site is nice and speedy which is great for Google and for the user experience.
Next is to add internal links to pass link equity to pages you want to rank.
Using this custom filter in Data Explorer, I'm able to identify URLs that aren't a part
of the page archive, have less than 3 internal links pointing at them, and return a 200 response code.
And it looks like there are 131 URLs on this website.
Looking through the list, the vast majority are ones that I planned to delete, but I'm
sure there are others that we plan to keep and rank higher.
Now, let's order the pages by organic traffic in descending order.
And this one on borax vs. boric acid seems like a good one.
So I'll go to the "All Posts" page and use the search box here and search for the keyword
"borax", to see if there are any posts I can link from to my "borax vs. boric acid" post.
And it looks like this one on cleaning with essential oils includes that keyword in the post.
Alternatively, you can do this in Google by searching for site:yourdomain.com and then
adding your keyword or multiple keywords by using the "OR" search operator.
And you'll see that we now have 15 pages that match your search query since Google is searching
through all indexed pages, which includes both posts and pages.
Another very cool yet effective way to use internal links in WordPress is to add a "Popular
Articles" widget.
Now, these might be pages that you've found to convert particularly well or pages that you
want to rank higher in Google.
Looking at Backlinko's blog, you'll see that he's done that here with some of his bigger guides.
You can also take this tactic a step farther and install a plugin called "Custom Sidebars."
This lets you insert a custom sidebar configuration on any post or page.
For example, you may want to include a custom sidebar with links to other articles or product
pages that are relevant to the content in the post.
Now, these kinds of tips aren't something that you have to do.
In fact, Ahrefs blog and a lot of other popular blogs don't do this.
But from my experience, I've found it to work well.
The last thing I want to go through deals with duplicate content issues.
Now, in the first video, I briefly touched on installing the Yoast SEO plugin and setting
up your sitemap.
And everything else works pretty good out of the box, but there are a few advanced features
that deal with indexation and it will help you avoid creating unwanted duplicate pages.
So first, hover over the Yoast settings and choose Titles/Metas and we'll make sure that a few
settings are in place.
Go to the "Post Types" settings and make sure that your meta robots settings for both pages
and posts are unchecked, which will ensure that all of your blog posts and pages are
set to get indexed by default.
Personally, I set the Media settings as "noindex, follow," because WordPress will often create
separate media pages, like this, that have nothing more than just the image.
And this would certainly be classified as thin content.
Next, head on over to the "Taxonomies" tab.
In most cases, you'll want to noindex the tags and formats option.
Tags on WordPress have essentially no SEO value.
It's more of a way to categorize your posts, which I don't see too many sites doing now.
For example, if you look at this tag page, it just lists a couple blog posts that can
be accessed on their blog archive page.
And there's no real value in telling Google to index the tag page too.
The other one is Сategories.
Now, this one is debatable.
Some people prefer not to index these pages, while others will try to rank them.
And in my opinion, if you're using breadcrumbs like these, or use your categories as navigation
items like many large publications do, then I would recommend leaving them as indexable
in most cases.
Or if you think that people will find value in discovering them in Google, then leave
them as is.
I wouldn't stress too much about this unless you're creating thousands of pages that can
potentially lead to issues with crawl budget, faceted navigation, or devaluing the link equity.
Next is the "Archives" tab.
Here, you'll actually find a section on avoiding duplicate content.
Since this site is a single author blog, I've chosen to noindex both the author archives
and date-based archives.
And the reason being, if you leave this to be indexed by Google, your blog homepage or
list of posts will be identical to the author archive.
Finally is the "Other" tab.
Here, I recommend noindexing your archive subpages.
And you can see in the example, that this would be on an archive page with a URL like /page/2.
In fact, Google made a video on the best practices regarding pagination, and they recommended
a few different options.
The best one in my opinion, was to create a "view-all" function and for all archive
pages, to include a canonical tag to the "view-all" page.
There were certain conditions that should be met like the amount of time it takes to
render the page, but I'll let you watch that full video if this is a concern that you have.
The last thing you should know regarding WordPress indexation is that you can noindex
specific pages or posts.
Just scroll down to the Yoast SEO settings on the page that you want to noindex, click
on the gear icon, and then select "noindex" from the dropdown.
This may be advisable for pages that you don't want to be in Google's index like a
landing page that you're split testing or a page within your email or sales funnel.
If you want to dig deeper into duplicate content issues, then go to the "Content Quality" report
within Ahrefs' Site Audit tool, and for this website, you'll see that there are only green
clusters of duplicate pages, which means that the canonical is matching.
Something that you'll want to be on the lookout for are bad duplicates or where a canonical
is not set, as you can see for this WordPress website.
Now, there's a lot more to technical SEO than what I've shown you here.
But by combining WordPress with some of these plugins and techniques, you should be able
to speed up your website and prevent a lot of easily avoidable duplicate content issues.
Now if you've found this video helpful, make sure to like, share, and subscribe. And let me know if
there's anything I missed in the comments specific to doing search engine optimization
with WordPress.
So keep grinding away and I'll see you in the next tutorial.