Jill Sullivan Senior Marketing Manager Infront Webworks

Agenda Introduction Why Wordpress? Basic Settings Plugins Backing up your site Q&A

Why Wordpress? Ease of use Plugins for virtually everything SEO-friendly coding Tons responsive themes available

Search Engine Visibility Basic Settings Site address Permalinks Search Engine Visibility

Site Address

Permalinks ** Changing your permalinks changes the URL of your page. If you do this on an existing site, you will need to put 301 redirects in place

Search Engine Visibility

Plugins Yoast Autoptimize 301 Redirects WP SuperCache

Yoast SEO Plugin

Yoast SEO Plugin Features (some of them): Titles/Meta Descriptions Content Analysis Open Graph XML Sitemaps

Yoast Titles/Metas

Yoast Titles/Metas

Yoast Content Analysis

Open Graph Tags

Open Graph Tags

Open Graph Tags (Facebook)

Open Graph Tags (Twitter)

Open Graph Tags (Pinterest)

Open Graph Tags (Google+)

XML Sitemaps A Sitemap is an XML file that lists the URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently.

XML Sitemaps

XML Sitemaps

Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google & Bing! XML Sitemaps Don’t forget to submit your sitemap to Google & Bing!

Autoptimize – For Site Speed

Autoptimize Features: Minimize Javascript Minimize CSS Minimize HTML

Autoptimize Settings

Site Speed Before Autoptimize

Site Speed After Autoptimize

301 Redirects

301 Redirects A 301 redirect is a permanent redirect which passes between 90-99% of link juice (ranking power) to the redirected page. You should implement 301 redirects for any pages resulting in a 404 error (you can get this information from Search Console), or pages for which the URL structure has changed. For example, if you recently did a redesign on your site and the old URL was www.xyz.com/bluewidgets and the new url is www.xyz.com/blue-widgets, you would want to implement a redirect

Simple 301 Redirects

Browser Caching

Browser Caching What is browser caching and why is it important? Every time a browser loads a webpage it has to download all the web files to properly display the page. This includes all the HTML, CSS, javascript and images. Browser caching works by marking certain pages, or parts of pages, as being needed to be updated at different intervals. Your logo on your website, for instance, is unlikely to change from day to day. By caching this logo image, we can tell the user's browser to only download this image once a week. Every visit that user makes within a week would not require another download of the logo image. The main reason why browser caching is important is because it reduces the load on your web server, which ultimately reducing the load time for your users.

WP Super Cache **Be sure to delete the cache if changes are made to your site

Site Speed Before WP Super Cache

Site Speed After WP Super Cache

Backing up your Wordpress site Why do you need to backup your website? Hackers Updates gone wrong Malware Employee errors **Backups should be done on a weekly basis

Ways to backup your site Manually – This requires making copies of all the files via FTP as well as your SQL database through PHPmyAdmin Through your hosting company With a plugin, like Updraft Plus

Things to Remember Plugins and updates can break your site. Always backup your site before adding plugins or updating existing plugins and themes Test your site after each plugin install to make sure it didn’t break anything Clear the cache after you make changes to your site Always put a 301 redirect in place for pages resulting in a 404 error

Tools & Reference Yoast SEO Guide - https://yoast.com/wordpress-seo/ Autoptimize Guide - https://www.maxcdn.com/one/tutorial/autoptimize-plugin/ WP Super Cache Guide - http://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/how-to-install-and-setup-wp-super-cache-for-beginners/ Backing Up Your Site - https://codex.wordpress.org/WordPress_Backups Checking your Page Authority/links – https://moz.com/researchtools/ose/ Get ideas for blogs – http://www.answerthepublic.com Google Site Speed Test - https://testmysite.thinkwithgoogle.com/ GTMextrix Site Speed Test – https://gtmetrix.com/

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