Last month, the team from All in One SEO Pack were in attendance at WordCamp Raleigh 2017. We were not only there are organizers of the event but also as sponsors and speakers.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend WordCamp Raleigh then here’s a recap of the event.
WordCamp Raleigh is a conference all about WordPress. The event has been held each year since 2010. This year was the best attended yet, with over 300 attendees. This year we had four tracks – Beginner, Business, Power User and Developer. We also added workshops in addition to the tracks. There were three workshops – Beginners Guide to WordPress, WordPress REST API and Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO. All three were extremely popular.
Local SEO presentation by Steve Mortiboy
I spoke on the topic of Local SEO – How to get your business listed on Google’s local search results. Here are my slides from this presentation:
Here is the video from my presentation on WordPress.tv:
Social Meta Optimization by Tony Zeoli
In addition to my session, Tony Zeoli also gave a presentation on Social Meta Optimization where he used All in One SEO Pack to demonstrate how you can improve you social media presence. You can find more about Tony’s presentation on his website. The video from his presentation is also on WordPress.tv here:
Beginners Guide to SEO by Tony Zeoli
Finally, Tony Zeoli also presented the Beginners Guide to WordPress SEO workshop which was held on the Sunday at WordCamp Raleigh. This workshop was not recorded on video but you can find a write by Tony and links to his slides on his website.
If you didn’t get a chance to attend WordCamp Raleigh this year, keep a watch on the website for announcements regarding WordCamp Raleigh 2018. Or you can find a WordCamp in your city or country by checking out the central WordCamp schedule.
Social media has evolved quite rapidly in the years it has been around. From BBS (Bulletin Board) to Friendster, Diaspora, Myspace and onto Facebook. But when we think of social media today, we arguably only have 3 or 4 large networks in mind: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and LinkedIn.
Nowadays, those four platforms have become essential to every marketer’s strategy and are used to effectively get your brand in front of your target audience; but do they directly impact your SEO and search ranking? No, they currently do not.
However, that doesn’t mean that social media marketing and SEO do not affect each other in a variety of different ways. They are both inbound strategies that aim to attract your audience or customers to your brand. They are also both organic ways to attract your audience with unique quality content.
Perhaps the best way to describe the relationship between SEO and social media is to say that they are co-dependent. Effective social media campaigns will help improve your site ranking, and good SEO will inevitably boost your social clout. This is what we refer to as social SEO: the use of social media to boost your search engine rankings.
This post will demystify the relationship between social media and SEO; and show you how you can make social SEO work for your WordPress site.
How Important is Social SEO?
You can certainly rank your website well without focusing much on social SEO. You can’t, however, rank your website by focusing solely on social SEO. But that shouldn’t make you dismiss the whole idea too soon.
An active and strong social media presence makes it easier and faster to rank your site as search engines attribute authority based on tweets, shares, likes and Google +1s. Your social media presence also puts your content in front of a larger audience, some of whom will link your content on their own sites, creating valuable organic backlinks which contribute to your PageRank.
According to a recent study, Social Media Marketing even surpassed the impact of regular SEO in 2016, considering that market is already rather saturated. Time to hop on the bandwagon! Source: smartinsights.com/managing-digital-marketing/marketing-innovation/marketing-trends-2016/
That is not to say that social SEO will eventually replace regular SEO, but we cannot ignore the fact that social signals are slowly becoming an integral part of search engine algorithms. Even though they have nothing on backlinks – and probably won’t, at least not in the near future – social links are still quite important. But how much effect or weight do they have on your rankings, particularly your ranking for target keywords?
Well, search engines have not yet made that information public. We just have to work with the definitive information that social signals do (indirectly) impact your site rankings and will continue to do so.
When Should I Focus on Social SEO?
If you are in an industry where your competitors are heavily focusing on both SEO and social SEO, and you want to rank well for your industry keywords, you have no other option but to do the same. Backlinks coupled with social signals will boost your rankings much more than backlinks alone, so you will lag behind your competition if you are only focused on building the latter. And if they aren’t focused on social SEO, you should jump on the opportunity to get one step ahead of your competitors.
Although social media does not directly impact your site rankings on Google, social networks are dominating the internet and will arguably dictate the future of the internet. You should invest properly in social media as it could soon directly impact your site’s rankings on search engines.
How to Effectively Implement Social SEO
How can you increase your site rankings with good social SEO? Here are a few summarized tips:
Create a business page on the “main” social networks: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Pinterest, Instagram, etc.
Be active on those channels and engage your followers and subscribers
Create shareable, engaging and unique content
Make it as easy as possible for people to share your content
Share your content, and that of other influencers in your field on your social channels
The more active you are on social media, the more awareness you are bringing to your brand, the more your social following grows, and the higher the chance that your content is being shared across a broader network. It’s a snowball effect: the more followers you have, the more engagement you’ll get and the easier it will become to grow your community.
A bigger community means that more people are viewing your content and the higher the chance that the content will be shared. This increases the number of backlinks to your site which will impact your search rankings for the better.
Also, the more engagement you have on your social channels, the higher the chance that people will look for your brand on Google or other search engines via branded searches – which help your site rank for non-branded keywords that are relevant to your brand.
You do have to consider that the above scenarios are based on the assumption that you are producing quality and unique content. If you are creating bad content, you won’t get anywhere. Users will not interact with your brand if you’re not offering them value or good entertainment. If you want your content shared and widely distributed, you need to put in the time to create quality and valuable content your audience will enjoy.
In summary, the following social signals will increase your search engine rankings for the keywords you’re targeting:
Your social network followers
The likes, shares, retweets, Google +1s your website gets
Mentions by other authority or influencers in your field
Positive reviews on your business’ Google+ page
Using All in One SEO Pack for Social Meta
Our All in One SEO Pack plugin comes with a Social Meta module to help you get going with social marketing. This feature allows you to add Open Graph meta tags to enrich your posts by creating a rich snippet. Let’s briefly go over how Open Graph meta tags work and how they specifically help you with social SEO.
Basically, every web page on any site can be shared on social media channels. However, the way that shared page is displayed on social media may be very different. Websites that aren’t optimized with Open Graph meta tags won’t be as easily interpreted by Facebook, Twitter and the like and will, most of the time, show up as a blank link with a small description underneath.
Would you be more inclined to click on a blank link or on a rich snippet such as this?
However, adding Open Graph meta tags to a page on your site enriches the snippet and enables Facebook and other social media networks to display your content in the way you want to present it when it is shared. This is where All in One SEO Pack comes into action. For a full overview of all Open Graph and social meta features, please visit our documentation section.
There is no concrete evidence that Open Graph meta tags are important for search engines, but they do enable you to create presentable good looking posts on social media (instead of a bland-looking post). This significantly increases your organic traffic from social media to your WordPress site. Studies have shown that traffic increases 100%-200% if a post looks great vs. a blank link that doesn’t really mean much to social media users.
Wrapping It Up
Overall, a solid social media strategy, in conjunction with good SEO practices, will increase organic traffic to your site. Solely focusing on SEO may not cut it any longer if you want to be a step ahead of your competition. Revising your strategy to incorporate social SEO will inevitably boost your organic traffic and could very well increase your search engine rankings in the near future.
Do you currently have a social SEO strategy that’s working for you? Have you been using the social SEO module of our All in One SEO Pack plugin? Let us know in the comments below!
If you haven’t noticed, SEO has changed over the past months. Search engines constantly update their algorithms which often makes it difficult to keep track of the latest best practices. We’ll help you get started on implementing an effective strategy and getting your site to the top.
Whether you’re setting up a new site or optimizing a current one, this checklist contains everything you need to know.
Let’s start with three vital changes that have dramatically affected SEO in 2016.
Mobile Dominates
Mobile has become more important than desktop: over 50 percent of all Google searches queries are now performed on mobile devices. This means that we’ll have to prioritize mobile from now on when it comes to SEO and web development. It’s of the utmost importance that your website is responsive –scaling content and built with mobile users in mind.
Social Matters More
Social media content is becoming an equal to website content at a fast rate. Search engines are now indexing and ranking social media pages, so it is inevitable that website content and social content will hold the similar weight in rankings in the near future. This means that businesses should claim their social pages, become more active on their relevant social networks and engage their audience.
Video Conquers The Web
Video is now key to any branding or marketing strategy; perhaps because it is more engaging and immersive than any other form of content. This is the time to start taking advantage of video and reach your audience in creative ways.
Now let’s look at our SEO checklist.
SEO 101: The Basics
Design a Responsive Site
As I mentioned earlier, mobile dominates. More than half of all Google searches are now performer on mobile. Your site not only needs to be mobile-friendly, but responsive on all devices. Ideally you create your site with mobile users in mind first and desktop users second.
Go with Google Analytics
Statistics are at the core of SEO. They provide important insights into your audience and traffic: site visitor behavior, where your prospects are coming from, how they’re finding your site, etc. – metrics that enable you to hone and optimize your efforts accurately.
Setting up Google Analytics is fairly straightforward with All in One SEO Pack: just sign up and add a tracking code to your website. You’ll find all detailed instructions on how to get started right here.
Check Your Page Speed
It’s important that you’re website’s pages load fast. The ideal load time is less than 2 seconds, because most users tend to leave your page if it takes any longer than 4 seconds to load.
Checking your site’s speed can easily be done using Pingdom or Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool. These tools analyze your site within seconds, telling you what’s wrong and what you can do to fix or improve it. A score above 80 (out of 100) is considered great for both mobile and desktop.
Within seconds, PageSpeed Insight tells you what to do to improve your site’s speed.
Install a WordPress SEO Plugin
An SEO plugin will help you with on-page SEO like titles, meta descriptions, XML sitemap, social meta, etc.
Our All in One SEO Pack is one of the most popular plugins with over 30 million downloads and over 5 million users. You can find documentation and beginners guides to help you get the most from this powerful SEO tool over in our Documentation section.
Add Your Website to Google Search Console & Bing Webmaster Tools
Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools help you analyze and monitor various search traffic factors like security concerns, search queries, broken links and many more. In conjunction with setting up those accounts, you should also create and submit an XML sitemap to Google and Bing.
Sitemaps provide search engines with a list of pages that are accessible to them. High-value or high-performance pages should be at the top. Luckily for you, All in One SEO Pack makes sure you don’t have to do this yourself.
It’s highly recommended – in fact, necessary – to do a full site audit after setting up Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools. Go through every section to ensure that nothing is broken or needs to be fine-tuned.
Run an SEO Audit
Last but not least, get an SEO audit performed on your website by a professional. We provide such a service and details can be found on our website.
On-Page SEO
A lot of people ask us if keywords are still relevant.
They are, but not as you might think of keywords. Google has switched their emphasis from looking at basic “keywords” in your content to long tail terms. Their analysis of the way we use search engines showed that we don’t search by entering a string of keywords, we search by asking Google a question (entering a search term). Google realized back in 2013 that they had to change the way they return search results, so now, they don’t look at keywords in content, but instead they read and understand your content.
Depending on your niche, it can be quite hard to figure out which long tail terms you should actually focus on. Luckily, there are a few effective methods you can use and combine to get a list of relevant terms for your site. Keep in mind that writing quality informative content is much more important than paragraphs of poorly written text stuffed with keywords nobody bothers to read.
Develop Your Buyer Personas
Buyer personas will help you accurately define your audience; and consequently create a marketing strategy that targets them. To build one, think about the problems your ideal customer is facing; their needs; and their online and offline behavior.
Generate a list of trending topics and keywords. It also has a tool that compares keywords and checks the performance of keywords in different locations.
You can also just browse related searches and suggestions in Google – they can be found towards the bottom of the search results page.
Titles, Descriptions, Headings, Permalink Structures and Images
Create Unique Title Tags
You should write unique title tags for your posts and pages. Here are a few essential tips when writing title tags:
Limit the title tag length to 60-65 characters. Search engines like Google won’t display more characters in the snippet and will cut your phrase off
Add your company name at the end of every title tag to raise brand awareness
Place the relevant keyword at the beginning of the title tag as this could increase your SEO score
Our All in One SEO Pack plugin will help you with your titles.
Write Engaging and Succinct Meta Descriptions
Write a succinct and engaging meta description for every page or post. You should:
Limit the meta description to a maximum of 160 characters
Include a call-to-action, i.e. “read more” or “call [phone number]”
Make sure each description is unique
Meta descriptions do not affect the score of a certain webpage, so you shouldn’t focus on stuffing them with relevant keywords. Engaging, well written meta descriptions however have been proven to increase the click through rate and are key to attracting visitors to your site.
This is how an ideal Google Snippet should look like.
In fact, combined with title tags, meta descriptions are the billboard for your site. Google’s final word on meta descriptions has always been to use quality descriptions. As with title tags, All in One SEO Pack will help you with you descriptions.
Make Use of Heading Tags
Heading tags give search engines an idea of what your page is about. There should be one H1 heading which should be your page or post title. Headings should be used (H2, H3, H4…) appropriately across your content to break up content. Headings also allow you to define the structure of your text and add more detail to the appearance and layout of your content.
Use Keywords in Your Permalink Structure
It is highly recommended to use your keywords, particularly high value ones, in your page URLs. Try to use them whenever possible as they are a ranking factor for search engines. Where possible, your URLs should closely match your page structure and page titles.
Alt Tag Your Images
Always include your keywords in image Alt tags and titles; and use at least one (featured) image in every post. Alt tags are displayed when the image cannot be loaded on the user’s device and are very much appreciated by Google and the like.
Always Create Qualitative Content
You should never create content for the sake of creating content. All your content should serve a specific purpose, usually to help answer a prospect’s questions or address their concerns. Here are a few rules to creating quality content:
Content should be over 500 words (it can be lower if necessary)
Speak directly to the reader – use a conversational tone of voice
Do not overstuff your content with keywords, Google may penalize you
Provide accurate titles and descriptions
Use images and videos to increase visitor engagement
Use Internal and External Links
Direct readers to other relevant content through internal and external links. They will not only be appreciated by your visitors, but also add some extra SEO juice to your page and help search engines crawl and index related content on your site.
Keep Your Site Structure Simple
KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid) applies to everything that deals with SEO and user experience on your site. In fact, SEO is all about user experience. In that vein, KISS also applies to your site’s structure.
Make sure that all key content is easily accessible in as few clicks as possible, preferably under three clicks from your homepage. If that’s not possible, you may want to rethink your site’s navigation.
Off-Page SEO
Quality, relevant backlinks tell search engines that your site is reputable and shows you are an expert in your field. Below we’ll describe some creative methods to get some quality backlinks.
Analyze Your Competitor’s Backlinks
It’s important to know where your competitors are getting their links from, so you can acquire links from those places as well. You can find competitor backlinks via SEMrush or Moz.
Next, create a list of your competitor’s most valuable links. This list will help you organize and develop an effective link acquisition strategy.
Finally, reach out to the owners or editors of those sites and ask them for backlinks if it could be beneficial for the both of you. There’s no point in requesting backlinks from, for example, a site on American history if your site is about great hamburger restaurants. Website owners need to be able to offer their users value as well.
Find Key Influencers in Your Niche
Influencers have contributed to the success of many big brands. Google Search and social media (particularly Twitter and Instagram) can identify relevant key influencers in your niche. Engage them and aim to cultivate valuable relationships.
These, for example, are top 5 influencers for SEO.
Consider using Klout – it’s a great platform to identify and engage with key influencers in your industry.
Find Non-Linked Content About Your Business
You write great content and have great products or services. So chances are someone has written content about your business. Search for it, then contact the site owners or publishers and kindly ask them to link the content back to your site. Chances are they will be more than happy to comply.
Review Existing Backlinks
Go through your existing backlinks to see if they are relevant and link to the right pages and content. If they’re not linked correctly, you can reach out to the author and have them update the link or use a redirection plugin if they are linking to a non-existent page. Also check to see if they are using the appropriate anchor text. If not, kindly request that they change it to something more suitable.
Believe it or not, you can remove backlinks that are irrelevant and harmful to your site. Simply ask Google to remove it from your SEO search assessment. That essentially means that you’re asking Google to not include it when calculating your PageRank. Here’s how to go about disavowing backlinks.
Join the Conversation
Participate in relevant forums and discussion boards to develop your authority. Provide useful and informed responses to relevant questions (on topics in your niche). You can always direct users to your site to find more comprehensive and thorough answers.
Quora is a great forum for the above. You can answer questions and link back to your site.
Finally, use social media and enable your visitors to share your content easily on their social networks. Respond to people who contact you via social media.
Social SEO
Go Where Your Customers Are
Where are your prospects socializing online? Identify those networks, create profiles and build strong followings on those channels.
Nowadays it’s essential to claim your social business pages on social media networks like Facebook and Twitter as it is expected that social content will become as valuable as regular site content.
Monitor the Social Conversation
Keep your ears tuned to the social conversation. You should know when people are looking up or discussing your company, products, services or anything else that pertains to your business. There are several social media monitoring tools you can use, such as Hootsuite, Buffer and many more. Hootsuite and Buffer also help with scheduling and managing social media posts.
As mentioned earlier, identify your key influencers on social networks. Engage with them and cultivate mutually beneficial relationships. You’d be surprised at the power of a direct message (to the right influencer) in getting your content distributed over a wider network and to new audiences.
Conclusion
This checklist should help you to greatly improve your SEO if your site performance is below expectations. Although this list mostly covers the technical aspects of SEO, always keep in mind that delivering quality content to your customers is key to excellent SEO. And spamming links to generate backlinks isn’t the way to go.
Stay tuned to our blog for more helpful tips to help you with your SEO and social media marketing.
In conjunction with many other plugin developers, we have released an update to All in One SEO Pack Pro today which patches a security vulnerability within our plugin. This vulnerability affects only users who have activated the File Editor module in All in One SEO Pack Pro. Our standard guidance is to leave this module deactivated and only activate it as and when you need to make changes to your .htaccess and robots.txt files.
You can read more information regarding this Cross-site Scripting (XSS) and the plugins affected on the Sucuri blog here.
In addition to patching this vulnerability, this release also includes changes the plugin for Taxonomy Term Splitting so that the plugin is compatible with WordPress version 4.2 which is due out very soon.
We strongly urge all users to update to the latest version of All in One SEO Pack Pro (version 2.3.6.2). Make sure you update ALL other affected plugins.
Our thanks go to Joost de Valk for identifying this vulnerability.
This week we reached another big milestone with All in One SEO Pack – the plugin reached 20 Million downloads. We’re in a very exclusive club given that we’re only one of three plugins out of 33,000 plugins in the WordPress plugin repository to reach this milestone.
To give you an idea of how quickly we reached this milestone I read back through our archives and found a blog post from January 2009 where we announced that we’d hit One Million downloads. I then found a post from February 2012 where we announced that we had hit 10 Million downloads.
Not bad when you think that All in One SEO Pack was first released in 2007, within 2 years we’d hit One Million, 3 years later we hit 10 Million and 2 years after that we hit 20 Million. Looking at the statistics we’re averaging around One Million downloads every 3 months.
So what have you done lately…
As is traditional when you reach a major milestone, I thought I’d reflect on what has happened in the last 2 years. So here’s a list of some of the things we’ve achieved whilst on our way from 10 Million to 20 Million:
We completely redesigned the user interface making it easier to use and better looking on any screen size
We’ve added feature modules so that we could easily extend the functionality of the plugin and give you total control over what features you want to activate
We added an XML Sitemap Generator and a Video XML Sitemap Generator
We added complete control over Open Graph social meta
We’ve updated the plugin 21 times and increased our release cycle, with new functionality and features in every new release
We’ve improved our support with much faster response times and we’ve reaffirmed our commitment to provide support to users of the free plugin via the WordPress.org support forums
We’ve released 6 new feature modules and we’ve got 6 more in development
We now provide full documentation both inline within the plugin and on this website and we’ve added video screencasts available to users of All in One SEO Pack Pro
We’ve increased the turnaround time for bug fixes to a matter of a day or two and in some cases hours
With just a few exceptions, all of this is still available for FREE to anyone with a WordPress site and we are fully committed to continuing to develop the best SEO plugin available, for free, with great support, and full documentation.
I look forward to reviewing what we’ve achieved when we hit 30 Million downloads!
