Why Does SEO Matter WordPress Grand Rapids

SEO for WordPress: Sep. 2013 meetup

Our September 2013 meetup topic was Why Does SEO Matter? Paul Kortman of Connex Social gave the presentation below. His speaker notes are below each slide.

King of SEO

Paul gave the following additional advice about slide 22:

  • URL: don’t use hyphens in domain name
  • Title: keyword first, then site name
  • Don’t put site description in title, because it won’t fit in titles for blog posts anyway, and pages with shorter URLs won’t rank highly anyway.
  • H1: stick with 1 per page, despite HTML5 allowing multiple H1s
  • Don’t use headings for repeated sections, such as widgets

WordPress SEO by Yoast

Here’s how Paul configures the WordPress SEO by Yoast plugin. Settings not noted are left as default. Here’s Joost’s guide.

  • Titles & Metas
    • General
      • Select Force rewrite titles
      • Select Hide RSD Links
      • Select Hide WLW Manifest Links
      • Select Hide Shortlink for posts
    • Post Types: Select Show date in snippet preview
  • Social: configure as appropriate
  • XML Sitemaps
    • Select Ping Yahoo!
    • Select Ping Ask.com
  • Permalinks
    • Select Redirect attachment URL’s to parent post URL
    • Force Transport: set to https if your site uses SSL

Paul gave the presentation Stop Selling SEO at WordCamp Grand Rapids 2012. Below is the video and slides from that talk.

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3 Comments

  1. Can you confirm if Paul said to select “Hide RSS Links”? I recall him mentioning RSS is still important and not to be discarded. Search Engines love them, and if you can inject a link to the original post (citing it as the original posting) it has the potential to acquire links from scrapers.

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