Wordpress SEO: How to Optimize your WordPress Site for Organic Search

Welcome to a new edition of Crawling Mondays dedicated to a very popular topic that I have no idea how I hadn't covered yet. WordPress SEO. What does it take to really optimize your WordPress site? A lot of people still think that it's just about installing a plugin and that's definitely not. There's so much more to make your WordPress websites really, really, really optimized to make the most out of every search opportunity, right? And to talk about this, I have invited a couple of people who have a lot of experience in this topic. On one hand, John Haycho, he's lead SEO analyst at ViacomCBS streaming and founder of Echo Wolf. Hello, John. How are you?

Hey, I'm great. Good to see you.

Amazing. On the other hand, I have the one and only Jono Alderson. He's special ops, whatever that means, a little bit of MI6-related role at Yoast, the very well-known plugin. And he's also a member of AMP committee. Interesting. We are going to talk about that for sure. To start a little bit of conversation, I want to start with the biggest issues, mistakes, errors, misconceptions that we see again and again. So in my case, like the biggest mistake that I see people do is thinking that whether by implementing a plugin and configuring the basics, that will be it, right? Without necessarily taking into consideration the different areas of opportunities, for example, to implement structured data, to noindex certain areas of the websites that shouldn't be indexable in the first place, et cetera.

So I think, Aleyda, you touched on some of it, which is people at least do do some initial setup, right? They pick an SEO plugin, they do some basic configuration, and generally they do an okay job of that. I mean, we'll come on, I'm sure, to some of the more existential challenges around content strategy and things. But the thing I see them really do badly is 6 months, a year in, nobody's logged in, nobody has updated any plugins, and nobody has paid any attention to detail on any of it over time. So maybe the initial setup got some love, but then you've got taxonomy sprawl. So you've got 30 blog posts and 100 tags or 200 tags, half of which are empty, and across 50 categories, and you're generating all these empty pages. And all the posts are written by an author called admin or the name of the business. And it just takes 2 seconds to look at it and see that this, this isn't right. Or none of the plugins have been updated, or even if they have, nobody has looked through and taken advantage of all the new features and options and settings. Like they're not checking plugin changelogs and so on, which is mad considering one of the paradigms of how WordPress works is you're essentially building your website on 100 other people's pieces of code. So to not look at how those are changing over time and particularly to take advantage of the shiny new toys feels mad. So all of this just kind of degrades and becomes stagnant over time. So really, this, this, the biggest issue I see is just a lack of love and a lack of housekeeping. Because so much of this is just so easy to set up and forget, people stop thinking and they stop doing. And really, you want to be in there every day looking at every page, every URL, every option, every setting, every plugin. And of course, that's unrealistic, but more than not at all would make such a difference. And again, yeah, you really just have to look at these pages and say, does that make sense? Because WordPress obfuscates much of this makes it so easy that people don't challenge any of it. And you really want to approach it with a fresh set of eyes and say, is this as good as it can be? And often the answer is, it doesn't really make sense for us to have 500 tags, all of which return 404 errors. So yeah, a bit of love would, would make a lot of difference.

Well, thank you very much for that, because I do think that because of the type of websites that tend to use WordPress, that are like smaller and medium, right? Unlike bigger websites that have sometimes in-house specialists, in-house SEOs, or have hired an agency to consistently and proactively optimize the website and to establish a roadmap and a strategy to grow. So they are aware that they need to build at a continuous basis rather than trying to like fix or set the fundamentals, the base, and that's it. But this is certainly important to clarify, especially to the smaller players or even like high-growth startups that sometimes use WordPress as a CMS, and they are not aware that this is an ongoing type of activity.

I think that probably one of the biggest mistakes that people make is they buy a theme that says it's SEO, you know, friendly and install one of the many, let's say performance plugins, and then try to call it a day and think that somehow that now their site is in a really good place and And in reality, it typically isn't. And I see most people trying to bend the theme into how they want it to be. When really, I think that if you can afford it or you have the time or you have the technical capability, I think that you should always start with a custom theme. You should always start with a bare bones custom theme and then build from there. I think to me, at least, that's the biggest mistake. I realize it's not practical for a lot of people to be able to do something like that from scratch. But if you really care about SEO and you really want to have visibility, then— and your site is your core business, then I think you should seriously consider taking that route.

I have to say something and you're completely right. But I will even like add like an extra layer or a scenario here. That sometimes some companies actually take the care to go through different theme options and buy like a framework and to hire a web designer that personalize a little bit the framework with the branding. And if you run PageSpeed Insights validation, et cetera, it's like fast, it's good. But then they start adding plugins and plugins and additional fonts, all these extra configurations that were not there. When they bought the framework or the theme that was actually fast at the beginning and 15 plugins after, they end up having a website that takes 5 seconds to render because all of a sudden it relies on JavaScript to even show the menu, the navigation, et cetera, all this extra functionalities and features that they have added afterwards. Right? So that is even like, I will say a bigger problem because in their mind it's like, oh, I paid already for a supposedly already optimized base, right? But it's what they have been adding up after that that ends up really ruining the optimization. Also the same with internal links. Oh, this plugin will automate it all. And all the links are generated through JavaScript. And if you don't set well the criteria, it will link anywhere without any specific rules, right? So I can also See that as a problem. People doing at the beginning the right thing, but later on it's like, oof.

I think those points are spot on. And I'm, and I'm really glad you said it because it's not as much to say that good frameworks don't exist. It's the fact that when you use a framework, then you just rely on it to do everything for you. And you assume that when you add those plugins, that it's just, my performance shouldn't be bad when I add these things, because I know this framework is good. And the problem is you're going to ruin it. And, and part of doing your own theme is that if you also do your very best to include certain features in functions.php or, you know, to include it into the template so you don't need a plugin. I mean, you're essentially getting rid of all these potential performance issues if you're doing it yourself and you're keeping it, I'll say, as optimized as possible.

Absolutely, there are problems with people who install too many themes, and every piece of functionality you add is liable to come with a performance overhead because it takes milliseconds and electricity to do and run code and to change what happens in WordPress. So when you have 50 of those, it comes with inevitable costs. However, some of that stuff that your business wants and needs, and sometimes the trade-off is okay for that versus other business goals, but also putting that code into your theme and into your functions file and doing it manually or hard coding stuff. Also comes with trade-offs in that that piece of functionality is no longer maintained by a team of maybe 10, 20, or maybe just one person who would optimize it and evolve it over time as WordPress changes, as other plugins change. So what you claw back in bits of milliseconds, you might compromise on in terms of support or evolution. But then also the flip side, right? You don't necessarily want to be building a website which is reliant on 100 other people's pieces of code that they might sell or stop maintaining. Or not update as WordPress and other plugins update. So really, again, it's the same story about really looking at all of these moving parts and thinking through, is this right? Is it optimal? Am I making the right business trade-offs? Really, to echo what John said, that really comes down to needing a plan at the beginning. You don't just buy a framework and then chuck a load of bad plugins into it. You need to architect that website in the same way you would design a physical retail store. And you wouldn't then just throw a bunch of stuff in it. You would manage it and massage it over time to make sure it was as efficient as possible. And people just don't think like that.

Which are the main criteria or the building blocks to make sure that there's a correct base? What are those different areas and factors that you think that any business owner or SEO should take into consideration when starting with a new website that is WordPress-based? To make sure that can be effectively optimized in the, in the long run.

So as the technical SEO nerd, I'm gonna talk about content marketing strategy because that's the bit that people miss before they even get to which plugin should I have and how should this work. So WordPress comes out the box with some concepts around content management. It has posts and pages and tags and categories and media, and people make a real mess of this. So before you start anything, Work out what the content marketing strategy is. What differentiates you? Where do you have strong opinions? What do you do that's unique? And how do you operationalize converting that into content that helps solve audience problems? And then you start asking, okay, what's the best way to structure this? Maybe this is posts which are written by a person with a name and have a date and go back through time as that archive builds up. Or maybe they're pages which are hierarchical and structured, or they're categories of products. All of those are very different approaches. And unless you plan all that out right first and have an architecture, 6 months from now you have a Franken-site. And then yes, you start worrying about, okay, how do I define and implement the technical structures, the content structures to support this? But otherwise you just end up with services pages and a bunch of blog posts that nobody reads. And it doesn't matter how fast or pretty your site is because you can't connect with an audience. Tech stuff, it's all easy, but the what is this site and what is it for is the tricky bit, I think.

Yeah. At the end of the day, the configuration should reflect what you offer and how people search. So doing keyword research, competition research. Establishing a content roadmap and strategy and making sure that your website configuration and web structure reflects that is definitely something important. Before I forget, more and more websites I have seen that are WordPress-based, potentially because of all the big wave of JavaScript frameworks, even themes relying a lot on JavaScript rendering to show navigation, simple navigation. That could have been otherwise only use HTML and CSS. So actually one of the dos that I would highly, highly recommend is like once that you have what Jono has mentioned, like my website should look like this, should be organized this way, making sure that that theme that you already have or you're about to buy actually doesn't necessarily, let's say, over-rely on JavaScript and in certain configurations that could be much more straightforward implemented to make them crawlable and indexable, relying on simple accessible web standards. HTML and CSS. So a little bit of a validation here from a technical standpoint is fundamental before buying that theme or implementing everything into that theme.

A lot of what both of you said, you know, I'm pretty much at the same place. I will reiterate that I still recommend starting from scratch and building it with a bones theme. And the reason why I like doing that is because You can make sure you do what, Aleyda, you were just talking about, which is reduce the amount of code in particular, like JavaScript that goes into rendering the page where a lot of people rely on libraries. Even with themes that are highly optimized and, you know, they're wonderful. They still end up to me using an unnecessary amount of code to do the things that they're doing. And so if you're doing it by scratch, you can keep it really clean and really nice. The other thing. That I like about that is I'm very much a proponent of what I call disambiguation, which is I want to only communicate to Google search bot exactly what I want them to take away from that particular page. And what I mean by that is if you don't have good semantic HTML and structure on your page, if you add a bunch of crap all around to your layout, and if you don't structure Your site very well and how you're going to link to stuff and the categories and, you know, how you're going to do your posts, then you, you end up doing what I would consider to be sort of like topic dilution. And I'm really big into your articles should just be your articles.

You've got to be super brave to do that though, right? You're saying essentially have a policy in place to say, you know what, we don't pollute this page. We don't add extraneous features. We double the font size and double the width of the content. And you only get the content in which case. Yeah, the sales guys are going to complain that where's my lead gen form, and the CEO is going to complain we want a carousel. And you've really got to be committed to actually that content being really valuable, really well structured, really nice semantic code. You've not got 1,000 lines of Revolution Slider outputting who knows what distracting Google. That's a tough pitch, but if you want to compete, that's the level of sacrifice and compromise. And so much of this comes down to those trade-offs. You've got a platform that can do everything But probably shouldn't, at least not for every business and not for every user. So less is often more.

Which will be those features, tools, plugins that in your case are the ones that you always tend to use again and again, because you know that this will be handy, that you think that this should be like basics fundamentals that anybody can use, that the trade-off will tend to be always positive. I have to say that in my case, I am in love with the Cloudflare integration with WordPress for $5 per month or something like that.

Oh my God.

You already have like halfway there solved the speed issue, right? So I don't know if there's anything that you particularly love besides Yoast, of course.

I have a very short list of plugins that make it on every WordPress site that I run. And Yoast is one of them. I've used it forever and I, it's still my favorite out of All the ones that are out there. And then I really like Gravity Forms and everything has to have WP Rocket on it. That's because you were talking about Cloudflare. I think you were talking about the one where you pay $5 to have it sort of like be a static site, you know, via their workers or something like that. But WP Rocket also just integrates with Cloudflare in general. And, and so anyways, that's my favorite caching plugin, but the thing that I get the most utility out of, and I think really even relates to what we're discussing today in regards Like SEO and how do you add features to your site and that type of thing is is Genesis Custom Blocks, which used to be Block Labs. That's the one that I am in love with. That's the one where once I finally got over my issues with Gutenberg and and came over to to the the block editing world and fell in love with that, then the Genesis Custom Blocks plugin is the thing that opened up everything for me. And and so an example. Is I have a review site and on that review site, most people's options, if they want to add the right schema and they want to add visually the stars and all the rest of that stuff, is they have to use a plugin. I didn't want to use a plugin. I didn't want to add— none of the plugins did everything I wanted it to do, or they did too much. And I wanted to really customize it, only have exactly what I needed. It does all of these amazing things. It's not that difficult to set up. I don't have to use a plugin. And then what the output is, is this awesome block with the ratings and reviews and all the schema that I need that, you know, will show the stars in a search snippet and that type of thing. So, so I would say the one that applies to what we're talking about today that I get the most utility from and fulfills not having to use even more plugins is Genesis Custom Blocks.

Amazing. Indeed, Joe, you already Support many different schema types.

The schema stuff's my baby. I've spent the last 2 and a half years working on it. We output the best schema in the world, but it's not all of the schema because it wouldn't— we don't know enough about your site. It doesn't make sense to try and support every single use case. So we, we output a really robust, flexible kind of foundation layer that then other stuff can just plug into. And most of the other big schema plugins integrate beautifully. Like the big recipe schema plugins do, a whole bunch of others, a bunch of the search stuff. And then if we don't, we have APIs that those plugin developers can integrate into, or you can do it yourself. So John's stuff, for example, it would be another 5 seconds work to connect. I was enjoying you talking about the Genesis block thing. I have a very similar story for using Advanced Custom Fields, which is a similar thing. And ACF Extended, which lets you go, okay, I want to configure a new type of block, which only is only applied on this type of template with these conditions and has these dropdowns and this image. And yeah, and then you just plug and play, but I guess the thing we both said in common here is that Gutenberg is the answer, right? It's the block editor, which so many people were initially really unhappy with for many good reasons. It's still evolving. It was launched very poorly. It was marketed very poorly and it wasn't ready. And now it's much less not ready. It's still not perfect and it's still evolving as it goes, but it's the same thing I said earlier. We are competing. SEO is inherently competitive. And if you have a toolkit which allows you to do flexible publishing in a way that you otherwise would struggle to do, that's so much more powerful. And yes, there are, there are a subset of people who literally just want to put words onto a page and that is fine. Use whatever tools you want, but don't expect to do that and to compete with people who are building these rich, interactive, cutting-edge integrated systems.

The different alternative for SEO configurations besides Yoast was All-in-One SEO. There is also the Rank Math plugin too. So there are plenty of options.

There are definitely different audiences and different use cases. All-in-One is still suited to some plugin integrations better than us. For example, if you rely heavily on some types of page editors and Rank Math can be great if you wanna spend all of your time twiddling very minuscule settings on precisely how you want this particular XML sitemap entry to look and work, which there is an audience for and people think is a valuable use of time. I would defer back to Jon's argument about efficiency and suggest that you go with a plugin that just gets it right for you and employs a whole bunch of SEO specialists to do that.

100%. At the end of the day, all pros and cons and benefits and disadvantages based on your own particular use case. I also wanted to mention, because depending on the size of website and how sophisticated the different options or features and type of content you have, there are also, let's say, enterprise-oriented schema tools that also have WordPress plugin counterparts. So for example, Marta's Van Berkel Schema App, also they have— that is great. That is completely focused on that. So to start wrapping up a little bit of conversation, I wanted to ask you about a particular tip, something that we haven't covered yet that you think that is particularly useful, important, something very actionable that anybody out there looking to optimize their WordPress website should take into consideration, especially as a CMS. out there competing against other options. I see that a lot of the pros for which I used to recommend WooCommerce, for example, Shopify coming like very strong, providing all of this additional international SEO configurations to facilitate the implementation of hreflang or multi-country type of configuration. But of course this is open source.

My recommendation, it isn't solely just a WordPress recommendation. It's a general recommendation. It's, it's, it's a plea. From Lifelong SEO to the rest of the world for people who are writing content. And that is that they need to be liberally linking in their content, particularly externally. And it's funny because some people might be like, that sounds like a link builder saying that. I'm not saying this as a link builder. I'm sure link builders would love that. But I'm saying it because first and foremost, that's how the internet works. That's exactly how it always has worked. That's actually the best way to use the internet in the way it's meant to be. Use. It's called hyperlink for a reason. But the other reason is because your content will benefit from it. I've seen more often than not that if the things you write actually link out to sites, whether it's a competing site, it's just whatever, it's just another site where the content that you're linking to is relevant to what you're writing about, that can actually help your, your content, your page have better visibility in ranking in Google. And so I wish more people would get over this idea that they can't link out because I think it, it makes the user experience worse for everybody on the internet. But I also think it actually, when you do it, it benefits your site and it can perform better. And the last part, and again, link builders are going to rejoice at what I'm about to say, but I'm not saying it for them. And that is stop using nofollow for things that don't need nofollow. So in other words, if you take the advice and you link out to everything but you then nofollow it, that is counterproductive. That— why are you nofollowing something that is relevant to your site and is trustworthy enough of a site? There are situations where the nofollow hint is relevant and you should use it. For example, if you want to still link to something because it is relevant to what the reader might want to see, but you don't want to be associated with it. Sure. Use that. Or maybe you have an affiliate link. Maybe you add sponsored to that. And I know sponsored and nofollow is usually used together. Fine. But for the most part, stop using things incorrectly.

I think that in that particular context, unfortunately, again, because many people sometimes, especially with backlinks, right? There's this tendency to freak out.

It's been corrupted by our own industry.

SEO tool says, oh, your backlink profile is 45% toxic. And then you go and take a look at which are those links. And it's like, Google is likely overlooking, not taking into consideration these spammy links, and you are ranking well already. Like, and it—

I don't pay attention to any of that crap. It's all crap to me. I'm telling you from working with very large sites to working with very small sites, I don't pay attention to any of it. I just do things the right way. And in most cases than not, it works and it does what I expect it to do. And that's through testing, that's through just everything. Just do things the way they should be done, and in most cases it'll actually perform really well. Don't rely on all that stuff.

And if you want to be aware of what could be wrong, use those data sources, but use your own criteria.

Absolutely, for research.

And validate. Yes, indeed.

I suppose I should defend the Yoast SEO stuff at this point because we have our infamous traffic light system which quite frequently says You should use this keyword more, you should do X. But interestingly, one of the things it does do is say you should put some external links in, not because it's a ranking factor necessarily of any kind, but because it forces you to write better content. It forces you to think about the needs of the user, to cite external sources, to be less self-promotional. Overall, that has correlating factors with, okay, our content is better. It's more useful. It's more readable. It's really nice. But yeah, I absolutely agree. The tools are generally noisy. And what you actually want to do is use your eyes and your heart and your brain and do the good stuff.

Thank you very much for bringing that up because actually I remember like a few months ago there was a copywriter tweeting to me, sending me, Aleyda, like I have this customer or boss or whatever telling me that because the rating light in Yoast is not green, it's not optimized, so I should keep going. So indeed, unfortunately, like you need to give a reference as a tool, right? When something tends to be good, but that doesn't mean that is necessarily not optimized or well optimized in that case. Context matters. And for that, you need your own criteria and your own expertise in the field at the end of the day. So it's good that you, as part of the tool that develops it, clarifies it.

I think all those tools have really good utility, especially if you're new to the field. For example, if you write things keeping in mind entities that are related to the topic that you're writing about. You'll know to use synonyms. You'll know to mention an event, a person, a place, or whatever, because it will again disambiguate that content for the search engine. And that's what a lot of these tools do. And that's not the way that we naturally think or write. And so I think they're, they can be incredibly helpful and beneficial to what you end up doing, at least until you get to the point where that's your mindset as a writer.

Perfect. To finish, I will recommend people to test. For example, I was testing the other day the Web Stories plugin in WordPress that has developed and matured a lot. And it really surprised me, like how it already allows to add and personalize Web Stories at a much more granular basis to give a better experience. So to play around with that and not so shockingly, after I tested it with a couple of posts that I had also written extending or showcasing a little bit, highlighting the content. It brought non-trivial visibility from Google Discover. So I think that this adds a little bit of what you mentioned at the start also. Be proactive, keep testing, identifying opportunities that might align well with your traffic goals or conversion goals out there. And for that, I think that the biggest benefit of WordPress, that is one of those first platforms that will always integrate the newest type of feature from Google and Bing. Keep your eyes open, stay Keep testing and making the most out of the opportunities for you to test and leverage additional ways to reach your users. Thank you very much, John, Jono. It was amazing to talk with you. And if you want to learn more about WordPress and SEO, follow Jono, follow John. You have here the Twitter handles so you can follow them over there too where they are very active. And if you like this Crawling Mondays, remember to like Crawling Mondays. Remember to also subscribe to the channel in case you haven't yet. So thank you very much again for joining and see you in the next one. Bye. Scrawny Mondays. Bye-bye.