Wordpress Sydney Meetup

April 28th, 2014

SEO, The New Google

and Wordpress

Feature presentation

• Wordpress

• The ‘New’ Google

• SEO

• 5 Common SEO Mistakes (with fixes)/, and 5

things to do to go above and beyond

WordPress

WordPress is great for SEO because:

• Its easy to find help and tutorials, especially on SEO

• HEAPS of plugins to enhance functionality

• Most SEO specific problems have a solution

someone has documented

Coding won’t make a site, but it can BREAK IT

The New

• The new Google in one word: Semantic.

• No longer one, single algorithm, but a “Mix’n’match” of results from

different algorithms (commercial vs informational) and DBs (Videos,

News, Images etc)

• No longer a single race (e.g. 100m) but more like a whole Olympic

track meet, where the gold medallists in different events get a spot,

and “great times” that come second do as well

The Crissotunity • SEO rankings change a LOT

• Different searches, different mixes of information vs commercial

• Personalisation changes the game

• Regionalisation as well

• A drop in 1 place in Algo X may mean a drop from 2 to 10 on SERP Y, and

the inverse is true as well

• More variety == more ways to compete

• Content is King!!! And position of content in rendered DOM

Queen

• Try to maximise the likelihood keywords are visible above the fold

How to compete in the new Google 5 mistakes to avoid

Mistakes

1. Google cannot find you because there

are no traces of your site online (get

links).

2. Google is not crawling your site

properly (fix internal site structure).

3. Google does not trust you because it

does not know who you are (links).

4. Your site uses the wrong words (Career

vs job).

5. Don’t use exact match anchor text (seo

sydney in all my links)

Things To Do

1. Create an XML sitemap

2. Use Google+

a. Set up authorship.

b. Google Places for local businesses

3. Create good, engaging content – most

of which is visible above the fold.

4. Get (good) links to your site

5. Focus on making your site:

a. Faster

b. Clearer

c. Broader

Useful Links • https://yoast.com/wordpress/plugins/seo/ - SEO Plugin of choice

• http://www.google.com/webmasters/tools - how Google communicates with you

• http://googlewebmastercentral.blogspot.com.au/ - WMT Blog

• http://www.google.com/analytics/ - Analytics is a MUST

• http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/110025 - Copy/Paste annotations. PLEASE,

PLEASE, PRETTY PLEASE, use annotations as much as possible (July 12th,

installed plugin X is INVALUABLE information).

• http://moz.com/google-algorithm-change - Dates of Google algorithm changes

• http://insidesearch.blogspot.com.au/ - Search Blog (heavy on propaganda)

• http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/ - Matt Cutts, original GoogleGuy (Less Propaganda)

• http://moz.com/blog/category/whiteboard-friday - Whiteboard Friday a Nice read

• http://inbound.org/ - Reddit for SEOs

SEO Is Dead, Long Live SEO • SEO is not dead. The bad SEO practices are dying.

• SEO goals and developer/designer goals overlap to

a degree:

• BUT: SEO is usually measured on a more brutal,

but easy to judge, scale

• Make your website “better in all the ways” is now

SEO 101

• The areas where good design and SEO overlap is

increasing all the time, and Great SEO is now more

strategic (what content to build, what links to get

etc)

Lined Media Solutions

Search Engine

Optimisation

Pay per Click Inbound marketing

Lined Media Suite 6, 174 Pacific Highway

North Sydney, NSW 02 8021 3384

Thanks for your time. Let’s keep talking