WordCamp US 2019 – Technical SEO Checklist: How to Optimize a WordPress Site for Search Engine Crawlers – Pam Aungst

Why SEO is Important

For search engines

Why Technical SEO is Super Important

Search Engines: Crawl / Index / Rank

If technical SEO isn’t working search engines can’t crawl/index/rank. Visitors wont’ find your site.

The Ultimate SEO Checklist

Basic/Traditional Items

• Domain & CMS
  • Run by a well designed platform
• Meta Robots
  • Search Engine Visibility checkbox
  • Cross-Check Plugin
• Robots.txt
  • Exclude Irrelevant Content – Yoast SEO
  • Implement Cross-Check’s Search Engine Visibility Monitoring
• XML Sitemap
  • Dynamic XML Sitemap from Yoast SEO
  • Submit XML index to Google Search Console and check for errors
    • Search Console monitors for crawling errors
  • Should be dynamically generated and updated
• Design
  • Do not use “one page” designs, they don’t work well for SEO
• Breadcrumbs
  • Schema markup can be added for search crawlers to follow breadcrumbs (Yoast SEO can do this)
• Social
  • Make it very easy for visitors to find and follow you presence on social media sites
  • Make it very easy for visitors to share your content on social medai
• Dates
  • Blog articles should have dates on the byline
  • Add a last modified date, don’t change the original date. (WP Last Modified Info Plugin)
  • Author Date for resources
• SEO Friendly URLS
  • Set Permalinks properly
• Title Tags
  • Should contain carefully chosen/search keywords
  • Don’t include site title & company name appended
    • Remove Site Title from Yoast Search Appearance settings
• Images
  • Alt Text
• Meta Descriptions
  • Meta description doesn’t affect page rank but is return in search engine previews
  • Encourages people to click through the result
• Broken Links
  • They are not a ranking factor
  • It affects SEO from the standpoint of there being a “dead end” for users
  • Monitor for broken links and setup 301 redirects
  • External links are a huge value to your site that you don’t want to lose
  • Have a custom 404 Not Found Page that is visitor, and SEO, friendly
• Security
  • Search engines will block search results that are found to have security issues
  • Force the use of SSL

Recent/Advanced

• Mobile Responsive
  • One site that responds to user and search engine mobile navigation
  • Google will rank your site on mobile first
• Mobile – AMP
  • AMP is not simply mobile first responsive, it’s actually a stripped down version of the site
  • Supports fast loading on mobile
  • Easy for blog content / hard for heavily designed pages (AMP for WP – Advance Mobile Pages Plugin)
  • AMP sites don’t carry over Google Analytics tracking, it needs it’s own tracking setup
  • Check that your AMP pages are valid, use Google’s AMP testing tool
• Duplicate Content
  • Media attachment redirects should be a yes
• Authority
  • Author names on content (blogs/resources)
  • Authors should have short bios presented on pages
  • Authors should have a full bio page