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I just got back from WordCamp where I went to see Kori Ashton of webtegrity.com talk about getting “Google to Love Your WordPress Website”
with Cami Shields Macnamara (webcami.com) and David Innes (realbasics.com).
“Google will love you if…
… it understands you.
… users love you.” – Kori Ashton
It was a great presentation, what I liked most was how she approached SEO from a web designers perspective, so it was a really good beginners course of SEO and helps you understand the basics of on-page SEO factors like titles, headers, alt tags, user experience and much more.
The WiFi password is “WPSeattle.org” for network “WordCamp2017”, if that’s all your looking for.
She summarized SEO as:
- great user experience (easy to use website)
- fast website (fix penalties)
- fresh content
- clear call to actions
- engagement / social media tools (sharing buttons)
- no broken links (fix penalties)
I agree with her, and I would prioritize these tasks as such:
- broken links (fix penalties)
- fast website (fix penalties)
- user experience (easy to use website)
- clear call to actions (easy to use website)
- fresh content
- engagement / social media tools (sharing buttons)
Some of the other SEO takeaways for me were:
- Google has to understand you
- Understand who your audience is
- Understand how they search
- Understand what they search for
- Get active on YouTube (we couldn’t agree more)
- Transcribe your YouTube videos
- Optimize your contact form follow up response (my favorite thing I learned):
- Optimize your footer with repeat call to actions
- For local SEO, use landing pages for the different areas you want to target
- Not everyone understands industry jargon…
- How do you know which keywords to use?
- “Ask Geoff” – David Innes
- Or you can do keyword research with:
- Google Keyword Planner (here is a webinar we did where we explain the basics of keyword research, including how to use Google’s keyword planner)
- Moz
- Google Trends
- Yoast (we are working on a tutorial with examples, sign up for our newsletter to get an update when it’s available)
- SEM Rush
Some of the other tools that Kori recommended are:
- Amara.org (for transcribing videos, free to use)
- MozLocal (for local SEO / online directories) (I highly recommend this, and you can use it for FREE)
- Hotjar.com (for heatmaps, user experience tracking)
- if you are looking a free alternative I recommend Sumo.com
To see Kori’s full presentation click here.
I will be following up this blog post with examples of how I used what I learned at this WordCamp Seattle 2017 in my own SEO and website, so stay tuned.
Also anyone that is going to Sunday of WordCamp please connect with me on Facebook or email, I would be happy to meet up with any local professionals that are also going!
