Advanced SEO for WordPress Websites

• by Dan Bailey

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky to be a speaker at WordCamp Atlanta 2018. I spoke on advanced SEO topics. Namely, it’s critical to remember that Google today encourages a lot more than just setting up your website for basic search engine recognition and keywords integrated into copywriting. For example, Google talks about its “mobile first” initiative, emphasizing mobile for SEO than desktop versions of websites. This comes about because search engine use and web use overall occur more on mobile today than desktop (and have for years). It’s critical, but not enough, to have a mobile-responsive website.

Mobile-first means that mobile-search keywords are important. Because users use different keyword phrases to search on mobile devices than they do on desktop – for example many mobile searches are location-based searches. For example searching for a specific store location relative to the user (which makes sense for mobile devise usage). Also many mobile searches are voice searches. And voice searches are very different than text searches. For example voice searches are often phrased as questions. So in doing mobile SEO, upfront keyword research can take these considerations into account to come up with a list of good mobile keyword phrases.

In addition to keywords, there are Google technology emphases such as AMP (accelerated mobile pages). AMP creates compressed, small, fast versions of website pages for faster Google indexing, delivery and consequent higher mobile results. AMP is above and beyond mere mobile-responsive web pages.

There are also tech functionalities in SEO such as rich snippets. Rich snippets are results in Google which display more than traditional short text results. So web page results which show reviews are a good example (not just Google My Business/Google Maps listings’ reviews). Video content can be rich snippets. The Google Knowledge Graph – the focused content in the right sidebar of the Google SERP (search engine results page) – also represents rich snippets.

Want more? See my slide deck from my WordCamp presentation.

Thanks for reading!   – Jake Aul, ZenFires Digital Marketing