Wordpress SEO Expert

Peter Warwick-Mahoney

Homepage FAQ structured data to improve your SEO rank

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Using FAQs on your site to get extra traffic from search results

Google loves a good Q&A, and they’re great for your search engine optimisation.

This is an excellent technique that Google has been responding to very positively recently. It involves a fairly interesting type of structured data.

Structured data is a series of tags and what’s known as microdata that Google, Bing and Yahoo all use to work out what content on your site matches specific, common types of information like phone numbers. It primarily sits in your pages’ code – it’s not something the user sees directly. Although in the case of FAQs you do want them to be able to see them as well – that way your front-end information matches what’s happening behind the scenes. Google definitely wants to see that the information you’re supplying them is also what you’re giving to your users.

You may have noticed little ‘People also ask’ click-to-open sections like this on Google results pages before:

Those questions and answers are being pulled from web pages with ‘FAQ’ structured data on their homepages.

This technique involves adding an FAQ section to your own homepage, and then having the appropriate code added to those so Google can pick them up correctly.

I’ve tried this with a handful of clients and most have seen a 3-4 ranking place increase as a result! Even if Google doesn’t end up using your FAQs on their results page, the effect is the same; they just like to see the code in place.

So this is well worth implementing as part of your SEO strategy.

When writing FAQs for this purpose though it’s best to make them somewhat generic – they should be about your industry generally rather than about your specific offering. (If you take a look at the ones I wrote on my own homepage, you’ll see they’re predominantly about SEO and it’s advantages rather than being about the services I offer myself.)

If you’d like me to implement this for you please just get in touch – and of course I can do it all for you as part of an ongoing SEO campaign too.

There are still plenty of SEO cowboys out there

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I’m regularly amazed at the poor quality of SEO work I come across daily.

And the attitude of the cowboys that do it is just shocking.

I recently had an exchange with a potential SEO client. At least they thought they were a potential client.

Before I begin I should point out about 70% of my work is for digital marketing agencies who on-sell my work to their clients. I’m more than happy to do that – but it’s incredible how many people try to take the piss.

Perhaps every other week I have an order come through for a marketing agency that sells SEO work – who want me to SEO their own site but not their clients’! They don’t have enough knowledge, experience or confidence to SEO their own site – but they’ll happily charge people to do shoddy work for them.

This recent exchange I had wasn’t even that honest about the intent though – it was from someone who said they were just an ordinary client, but betrayed themselves with a few key phrases I’ve become very au fait with:
I don’t have time for this one = “I charge people for SEO myself but for one reason or another can’t do this one. Probably because I don’t know how to deliver quality search engine optimisation.”
If I order now, can you do it this afternoon (asked at 3pm) = “Not only do I have no idea how long decent WordPress SEO takes, but I’m kinda of pushy and rude too.”

Towards the end of the exchange I had the question that guarantees I’m talking to a cowboy:
I need 500+ backlinks too.

Also, presumably, by 5pm that day. 🙂

It’s no secret I strongly dislike the industry that’s cropped up around the automatic creation of backlinks. I blog about it a lot – but the short version is Google says it’s against their rules and they actively try to find and penalise sites that do it.

I replied with a link to one of my posts on the subject, thinking there was still a chance I was talking with someone genuinely interested in proper white-hat SEO. Then I got this reply.

All SEOs use techniques that google ideally would not want you to use because they work, right? At the end of the day, google’s ranking process is just an algorithm. The recent planned Google updates for Links coming in march 2020 may help clean up link building but SEOs will still find holes in the algorithm.

The clients you work with surly (sic) care more about results than a multi-billionaire business algorithm and how well you follow these guidelines?

That’s just a small part of it. There were 20+ other questions demanding I prove all manner of things about SEO and the correct approach to it. In and of itself that’s not a problem (I like to respond to questions to help people wherever I can) but it was all just so aggressively defensive.

I replied as honestly and directly as I could.

I don’t think we’re going to be a good fit together.

The whole idea that
All SEOs use techniques that google ideally would not want you to use because they work, right?

isn’t in line with my or Google’s ethos. Or what’s considered best practice in the industry.

Grey and blackhat techniques might work for a while, but never in the long term. And my clients are interested in long term success, not quick wins that end up hurting them when Google adjusts their systems accordingly. When you do SEO properly you’ll find Google algorithm updates actually IMPROVE ranking.

To be really honest you seem to be defending what could best be described as a cowboy approach. And that sort of SEO tends to lead to algorithm changes harming ranking rather than helping.

So while I do genuinely wish you all the best for the future, I hope you’ll understand that I’m not interested in working with you. We clearly have very different ideas of what good SEO is.

It’s certainly not the most diplomatic response I’ve ever sent. But if someone is going to suggest my clients want short-lived gains that come at the cost of massive penalties later I feel like they’re being insulted. Good SEO (like good business) looks for long-term solutions.

The bit where I did try to be diplomatic was that last line.

We clearly have very different ideas of what good SEO is.

Because search engine optimisation is not about a personal belief or idea about what you want it to be. It is based on an algorithm – a predictable one. There’s evidence to show what works and what doesn’t. Why would you ever do anything except the very best approach?

Search Engine OptimiSation or Search Engine OptimiZation

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SEO is SEO, but when you’re advertising the different forms of English can get in the way.

I work with people all around the world, but there’s quite a bit more to achieving that than you might think.

Being able to sell services around the world from the comfort of your own office is fantastic. But for those of us with geographically ambiguous spellings it raises a few issues.

I speak (and write) British English – or as we like to call it, just English. So naturally I list my services using that spelling; in this case Search Engine Optimisation. But a large proportion of people around the world will be spelling that last word with a Z rather than an S.

Google’s John Mueller has tried to say it doesn’t make a difference but I rather think he’s over-simplifying the issue.

We can see in Google Search Console variants based on language are reported as different stats. I simply don’t believe Google’s system is allowing different spellings of words interchangeably. Searching for “Search Engine Optimisation” is much more likely to find my site than the American spelling precisely because I use it more often in my text.

There are ways I try to work around this. When I sell my services on specific service marketplaces (like PeoplePerHour) they have the option to include ‘tags’ behind the scenes – users don’t see those but they help support the sites’ fairly rudimentary search functions. So that’s a nice way of making sure I’m found for both spellings there.

But the second part of John Mueller’s reply is the most interesting. Let’s imagine Google did have some magic way of knowing everything all language variations were referring to and would show results regardless of those differences. The meta information displayed isn’t going to change. I could be found for Optimization but the information in front of the user will still say Optimisation.

That slight language difference could put a potential client off.

The better approach would be to allow different meta settings for different languages. But even that is fraught with technical and other issues – really there is just no simple fix for this.

I’ll continue to sell my SEO services around the world, but predominantly to the UK, Australia and New Zealand. Purely for technical reasons – because when it comes to delivering awesome SEO I can do that for anyone, anywhere.

Backlinks are great for SEO but only if they’re legitimate

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All off-site SEO basically comes down to is creating backlinks.

Directory listings, local citations, they’re all much the same when it comes to it.

Backlinks help if they’re legitimate – which means someone likes your site and has a proper reason to link to it. Any attempt to manipulate your own link profile goes against Google’s guidelines – and they’re adept at catching people and penalising them for it.

I’ve blogged about this a number of times – you can read some of those if you’d like more information.

My approach to SEO is entirely Google friendly; I very much believe the best approach is to match the search engines’ approach and fulfill their guidelines and recommendations.

This is sort of a catch-22, because while you shouldn’t fake links you do want them. My usual advice is to make use of your real life contacts to get some – ask suppliers or related sites to link to you, that sort of thing.

I should add too when people DO get links without properly asking people they really know for them – they tend to get extremely low quality ones. Too many low quality links hurts rather than helps. For example, every single person I’ve ever seen selling a BBC, Apple or Huffington Post link are actually just creating user profiles on those systems and sticking URLs in the bio section of those profiles.

That’s not really a proper link on the BBC! People think they’re going to get something in a news article, but more often than not they’re on pages Google doesn’t even index. The effect is people buy a back link on a ‘high quality domain’ but don’t get any SEO authority for it at all.

The people selling these links aren’t even doing it manually. There are automated tools they use to create hundreds of links in a few minutes. Google is smarter than this.

Because Google says explicitly that trying to manipulate your own link profile is against their terms there is no such thing as paying for Google safe links. It’s an oxymoron.

Trust the WordPress SEO Expert to advise on your WordPress SEO

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No one should be surprised to hear blogging is good for SEO.

I had an unexpected email interchange with a client a few minutes ago.

I’d been recommending blogging to him for months. He keeps making excuses why he can’t; lack of time, what would be write about – the usual string of things. But I kept pushing because as we all know unique, topical, regular content is great for SEO.

It’s important to point out that while I call it blogging really it can be news, updates – whatever – just as long as you get well written topical content on your site regularly.

Here’s what you want from a blog post:

  1. Unique
    • It needs to be original content to avoid any possibility of a duplicate content issue.
  2. Topical
    • The copy needs to be related to your business. You can’t just write about your recent holiday if you’re trying to sell greeting cards. Having said that if you went exploring a variety of greeting card shops while abroad – that might be enough to make it on topic. (It wouldn’t be easy to do well though.)
    • Included in this is it needs to be interesting information, authoritative and useful.
  3. Regular
    • Posting something every week, or even better twice a week, is ideal. Search engines learn to come back and rescan your site for new content often, and it’s great if there’s something new for them to index every time. What’s no good is if you post just a few times a year at fairly random intervals; it’s better than nothing, but not by much.

This client thought he really had me on the issue today when we said he’d checked with his developer (not another SEO expert, just the person that pieced together his site) and he said not to bother. Because if you search for anything online you’ll very rarely see a blog post on page one.

He’s half right. You do rarely see blog posts on page one. But everything else there is wrong.

Just because a blog page might not rank highly on its own merit doesn’t mean it’s not adding to your overall domain authority. In fact it’s definitely adding to it. There’s a reason sites with lots of well written content tend to have homepage’s that rank more highly than other sites.

If everything in SEO was purely on a page-by-page basis it would be enough to have a single page website that ticked all the boxes and expect it to rank in the top spot. But we all know in industries with any competition that’s simply not going to happen.

Good content on your site all adds up towards the overall SEO authority of the domain. Those weekly blogs might not be found a lot, but they’re a large part of the reason your homepage is.

A few ‘key words’ about keywords

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A lot of SEO professionals are still selling their services based on a very outdated idea of how SEO works.

Anyone telling you they target a set number of keywords really isn’t doing SEO right.

Firstly, an important terminology definition. The term keywords has meant a few different things over the past 20+ years in the Search Engine Optimisation industry. As such I prefer not to use it and try to use other words that do a better job of explaining what I mean. So when it comes to describing the concept of ‘phrases you want to rank highly with in search results’ I use the term search queries. That does a much better job of conveying what we mean – the words people search for that your website gets found for.

Years ago SEO services would be sold based around (in part) a concept of how many search queries your site would be optimised for. But search doesn’t work like that anymore (and hasn’t for a number of years). It’s not as simple as having a list of a few terms we target – since Google brought their Rankbrain (artificial intelligence system) online for website indexing, everything is far more nuanced.

Technically a site can rank and be found for ANY of the words and terms on it.

I’ve blogged about a few of these issues before, so these articles might help give useful background:
https://peterwm.com/googles-rankbrain-and-seo/
https://peterwm.com/does-google-use-meta-keyword-tags/

SEO work is all about reinforcing your key content so it stand out for search engines. But anything within the content can (and often is) indexed by them. As an example if you ever get a chance to see the Google Search Console performance report you’ll often see hundreds of things a site is found for.

For example my site is clearly about being a WordPress SEO expert, and services around that. But in search results it comes up for over 1000 different searches, and a lot of those aren’t related to my core offerings. But they’re all related to words, brands or nouns I’ve used in the past. Googles does a great job of working out the context of your site, but with good SEO you can be found for just about anything.

Mobile speed is very important for SEO

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We’ve known for a long time that how fast your site loads is important for SEO.

Google have increased the importance of your website’s mobile speed when working out where to rank it.

It’s been true for a while that there’s been some small impact on your ranking based on mobile speed (desktop speed has been important for years) but now that’s been ramped up.

The most important metrics they use remain the sort of SEO work I do in the code and the quality of your content – but when those things are being looked after mobile speed is where you should turn your attention.

Unfortunately the automated tests out there tend to be a bit alarmist (I blogged about that recently) but they can still serve as a reminder that there’s nearly always room for improvement.

WordPress certainly has its issues with speed. And most themes are still being built for desktop-first (meaning how it looks on a desktop computer is the primary concern, and then it’s cut down and limited for mobile) when in fact current standards are clear that mobile-first should be the designers focus.

Be aware that although the testing systems are imperfect, and WordPress is very hard to score upwards of 80% with on most systems – the faster your site is the better.

In fact, mobile speed is now more important than desktop speed as a ranking metric for Google.

As a general piece of advice, my favourite tool for testing a site’s overall speed (not mobile specific) is Pingdom.

They give you a list of different servers to choose from; so it’s easier to get a real-world figure for your loading time in seconds – just like your target market will see it. Choose the nearest server to your primary audience, et voila.

(Although none of the online speed testing tools are perfect, Pingdom has a lot of useful features.)

Google Search Console & average position explained

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There are times your SEO results will look like the opposite of what you’re after.

Average Position is a bit of a weird metric. Here’s why.

Consider that graph for a moment. Taken directly from Google Search Console (Google’s official stats package for organic search – and my recommendation for the tool you should use to get your ranking and other organic search results) they show two highlighted metrics;

  • Total impressions (in teal) and
  • Average position (in purple).

Impressions is the number of times a site was seen in search results. Average position is the average rank it was seen in.

(Google averages your rank across all impressions as a useful workaround to their personalisation they do when people are searching. Location, how often a user has searched for something before – there are myriad ways Google skews results. Averaging them out is the best approach to find the most useful ranking to report.)

If you look at the lines on the graph though you’ll see a number of places where the position appears to get worse right when the impressions become more successful. You’d think stats should improve hand-in-hand, not get worse as one improves. Right?

In reality, when impressions spikes it’s normal for the average position to drop. If a site suddenly has a lot more visibility, it usually means it’s being found for a bunch of terms and searches it wasn’t previously. A lot of those new terms are likely to be things sort of around the periphery of what the site is about, not just it’s core purpose. So it’s being found for a bunch of extra search terms.

The result of that is those new terms probably aren’t ranking terribly highly. They’re not the site’s main purpose, so won’t be ranking as highly as the normal terms the site has been successful for.

Which drags the average rank DOWN.

Not only is this good to know when interpreting your own results, but it serves as a reminder that stats aren’t simply the end of the story, it’s important to understand how they come about, and what their effect on each other is.

 

Using WordPress as a static site generator

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My WordPress site is so fast, I’m not even sure I can call it WordPress anymore.

Static site generators are awesome.

They create blindingly fast sites, with very few drawbacks (more on those later).

But I’ve been using WordPress since it was a small blogging platform call b2. I’m used to it, I like it, and already have a swag of sites built on it for myself; not just my clients.

Because I work in SEO speed is really crucial to what I do. I do a lot of caching and optimisation work for people, but wanted to see what would happen if I really pushed the envelope out.

Initially I was keen to make a front-end that pulled data out of a basic WordPress install using JSON. I set up a proof-of-concept successfully, but wasn’t so keen on remaking all my layouts and front-end design from scratch for it. Besides, basic things like the WordPress menu editor, text widgets etc. are something I very much enjoy using.

I did some research, and came across a plugin called WP2Static. It’s a slick plugin that basically does just what I wanted – it packages up WordPress sites as static sites you can deploy anywhere. With a bit of configuring you can actually use it to output to a folder on the same server, and use some basic .htaccess rules so that becomes the public facing side of things.

Which is cool, but I wanted to go for MAXIMUM SPEED. My end goal was to get the site hosted on GitHub Pages, and then use Cloudflare to CDN it around the world.

(WP2Static does actually have a system to deploy to GitHub Pages built-in, but I found the deployment process just too slow.)

So when I considered everything I was trying to achieve, which included keeping the live site on the same URL it was already on, I opted to do the following:

  • move the WordPress install of my site off its current server, onto my localhost machine (it’s fast and I back it up regularly)
  • use WP2Static to output the site to a local folder
  • use git via the terminal to publish the site

In theory, for a nerd, it seems fairly straightforward. And on the whole it worked much more easily than I anticipated. The main glitches to overcome were that a number of font files weren’t being picked up by the plugin for inclusion in the static site. But it has a configuration option to force it to include certain file paths, so that was easily overcome.

I did need to create a manual 404.html page (GitHub Pages looks for that in the top directory of a site) but that’s neither here nor there.

There were a few other tiny things that were really specific to my own WordPress setup – like realising my sitemap.xml file needed to be a flat XML file rather than an index linking to other XML files – because they weren’t going to be wrapped up by the plugin.

The thing you really lose with any static site system though is (logically) user interaction. In my case that was just forms, but I was happy to replace my contact form with a simple email address – anything else I might need in the future I can do by embedding forms directly from another system like Google Forms.

I used to sell a couple of SEO packages directly through my site, but Woocommerce was always overkill for that anyway. In the future I’ll just use a combination of Paypal buttons to replicate the same functionality – and in fact it’ll be simpler for the end user because I don’t need to know all their billing address information to start an SEO job with them.

The really big day-to-day drawback is that clicking ‘Publish’ in WordPress doesn’t publish anything anymore. The process to run a new export with WP2Static and then send it to GitHub Pages takes about two minutes. But considering how often I blog or change anything on the site that’s not a major issue. Like with anything, you need to weigh up the processes, pros and cons against how you actually use something to determine if it’s right for you.

The site I did all this too, fyi, is the one you’re on right now. This is a static site, hosted for free on GitHub Pages and replicated on servers around the world using Cloudflare.

Google PageSpeed Insights gives a 99% speed rating for Desktop. And the missing 1% is simply because I include an external file that I can’t set an expiration header for – ironically that file is the script for Google Analytics.

Pingdom (my preferred speed testing system, because you can choose a server location for the real-world load-time to be tested against – so if your clients are predominantly in London then choose that server to get an idea of the speed as they’ll see it) gives the homepage a 0.212 second loading time. For something ultimately based on WordPress as a content management system, that’s impressive.

How best to tag your images for SEO on WordPress

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The correct approach to image tags may surprise you.

Here’s a reminder about why they are best optimised using a plugin.

Because of the way WordPress evolved over time from a simple blogging tool to an advanced content management system, traditionally people have set alt & title tags per image, using the media manager.

But that’s not best for SEO. Images should reinforce what the page is about, not just what the image is of.

To give an example, if you have one image that’s used on two pages, you might not want them to both have the same alt tags. So the systems I set up does an excellent job of setting those tags in the live code whenever a page is visited. It mixes the page title with the name of your site to make sure both your branding and (most importantly) what the page is actually about is being reinforced.

It’s the best approach for image tags and search engines.

(My favourite plugin for this is PB SEO Friendly Images.)

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