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!
Are you creating categories on the go while you’re publishing posts? Do you have more than 15 categories on your blog? Are you using tags to bring some order back to your site? If you answered yes to any of those questions, you may be among many WordPress users that are confused about how to use categories and tags effectively, particularly to benefit SEO.
Categories and tags are the two main methods to organize posts in WordPress, but they also serve different purposes. Using them in the correct way will not only help you improve your SEO, but ultimately provide a much better user experience for your readers.
This article will explain the difference between the two and show you how to get the most out of each of them in the hopes of bringing some order back to your site.
What about SEO?
Categories and tags, when used correctly, could improve your SEO in three ways:
The internal links will help search engine crawlers find all your site’s content by following those links. In short, it allows search engines such as Google and Bing to access and index all of your posts and include them in search results.
Your category and tag names, which are the anchor text of the internal links, will give search engines a clue as to what your site is about. This helps you rank your content for those valuable keywords.
Popular posts that generate inbound links will use categories and tags to link to other related posts on your site, effectively boosting your website’s ranking on search engines and getting you that extra link juice.
What are Categories?
Before WordPress version 2.3, categories were the only way to organize your blog posts in WordPress, so you probably used or at least heard of them before. In fact, you can’t even publish a post without assigning a category to it. So what exactly is their purpose again?
Categories are used to group similar topics together – kind of like book chapters. The chapter titles of a book usually give you a pretty solid grasp of what the book is about and how it is structured. If the author or editor of that book were to reorganize or remove chapters, it would change the whole structure, and perhaps the whole story.
You may need to add extra subcategories in time as your site grows larger.
Let’s take an example of a health blog. If you’re running a comprehensive blog, you could select and create your categories based on the main components of health: Exercise, Nutrition, Motivation, etc. You can add sub-categories to each of those if needed (ex. Recipes under Nutrition). But there are a few rules you need to keep in mind:
Categories can only be used for posts, not pages
Every blog post should fit into one category (sometimes a post fits into two categories, but this shouldn’t occur often)
It is best to work with a single category limit for most of your posts
Categories shouldn’t be created for topics that you’re not going to discuss any further in the near future
You should place your categories into hierarchies and add subsequent subcategories as your site develops
You can create categories from the category interface (Posts > Categories). Let’s look at the Add New Category screen:
Name Speaks for itself. Give your categories easily identified, short names that visitors will instantly recognize. The category name should include a relevant keyword.
Slug This is the URL of your category name. It is found in category archives and your post URLs if you’re using custom permalinks. Use dashes to separate words and don’t stuff it with keywords.
Parent You can create a subcategory by assigning a parent to it. Leave it at “None” if it is a top-level category.
Description This is where the category description goes. It is not shown by default, but some WordPress themes may display it.
Although you are able to create as many categories as you like, the less you have the better. Typically, if you have more than a dozen blog categories, your content may not be as focused as you might think.
Google may translate a large number of blog categories to a lack of focus. This will make it much harder for your content to get the ranking which it deserves. That’s why it’s important to think very carefully about each category that you’re adding to your site.
Another reason why you should think carefully about each category you add or assign is that it can be quite challenging to change a post’s category later on, especially when it is part of a post’s URL slug. So to avoid redirecting 404 pages, choose categories wisely to save yourself some trouble in the future.
What are Tags?
Tags are used to provide specific details about your posts and also link related posts on your blog. This is why posts typically have quite a few tags to them (in comparison to categories). Think of tags like a book’s index – an extended list of more specific topics which the book covers. If a topic is in the index, it is mentioned in more than one part of the book; and adding or removing a topic from the index does not change the structure of a book.
So let’s go back to the example of a health blog. Possible tags to feature are fitness, body composition, nutrients, etc. You want to keep the names short and easily identifiable as well.
Remember that tags whilst helpful, are entirely optional. You should only include them if you are certain that they will add value to your site. Here are a few rules to keep in mind:
Try not to use more than five tags in each post. Remember: you want to make it clear and easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for
Don’t create a tag that can only be applied to one post
You shouldn’t repeat tags too often for different categories, as this may make things more complicated
Try not to capitalize your tags, as it is better to use lowercase
Tags are flat, which means that you can’t create a hierarchical structure with sub-tags
Categories and tags are quite straightforward to use once you understand the difference between them and their individual value. They are there to improve your site’s usability (categories more so than tags) and are thus a vital component of SEO. So choose your categories wisely and always link your decision back to your end user.
Hopefully you now have a better understanding of categories, tags and how to use them. For those that want to know even more about the usage of categories and tags: there’s an advanced user guide available at WordPress.org.
Please share your thoughts on the subject. How do you organize your content? Do you have any tips you’d like to share with your fellow WordPress users?
Did you know that with All in One SEO Pack Pro, you can control SEO for categories and tags?
