PTS SEO Roundup Nov 2015

PTS SEO Roundup Nov 2015

Here’s our November SEO post roundup. We’ve missed a month or two because we’ve been flat out with customer work, so here’s a bumper crop of the most interesting and useful SEO posts of the past few months. Hit “read more” to read the full article.

Search Engine Land gives some good general information about WordPress SEO in this article.  The gist of it is WordPress is a great platform that makes SEO possible, but that WordPress isn’t SEO optimized by default and an SEO plugin doesn’t do it for you automatically. With a bit of work a WordPress website can have great SEO.

Higher Visibility say that Google is going to stop showing Google+ pages in search engine result pages (SERPS). This is probably a good thing – your website should rank when people search for you, rather than the Google+ page about your business.

Search Engine Watch talk about internal linking and it’s importance to SEO. Some SEO experts have found that the anchor text (ie the link you click) used on internal links can rank in search engines, so it can definitely help your ranking. Screaming Frog is a good tool to help do this kind of assessment.

Search Engine Land talks about 5 common SEO mistakes. The big ones to me are 1) Making all links to your website to the home page, which isn’t optimal, link directly to useful content, and 3) Not blogging regularly (we’re guilty of this).

On the topic of common mistake Search Engine Journal has 7 low hanging SEO fixes. There are real basics about titles and headings, providing valuable content, image alt tags, internal linking (that’s the second article about that, makes you think it could be important), and a couple more nice to haves. We also have another 7 tips from SEJ for SEO audits. Yet another “7” article from them is “7 ways you could be losing out on search rankings“, which is worth a read.

Google constantly updates its search algorithm, Search Engine Land has a good article about remaining penalty free. This is a fairly important article for SEO people and anyone concerned with SEO of their website.

Mobile is big these days, as more than 50% of searches are done from mobile devices. SEW has an article about which ranking factors are important for mobile – passing the Google/Bing mobile friendly tests are a pretty good start, these test both usability and performance. Talking about mobiles, MarketingLand has an article about a WordPress plugin to support Googles accelerated mobile pages, which aims to make websites super fast on mobile devices. This will move to the WordPress core at some point, so unless you’re an early adopter you can probably not worry too much about it. There more information about accelerated mobile pages here.

Finally, for this month, an article to remind you to make sure Google can read your Javascript and CSS files, as Google uses them for various things – such as to ensure mobile friendliness. I doubt many people have blocked this though.

Check back late December or early January for another bumper crop of recommended SEO articles!

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