It's been a while since I dabbled with the complexities of Wordpress, the popular website blogging platform that is now the content management system (CMS) behind so many sites.
Note: We've moved onto typically using Drupal for most decent sized sites these days, mainly because it is more of an enterprise CMS and far more stable when you have multiple users all entering and editing content at the same time.
However I had the chance to dive back into the area of Wordpress SEO very recently. This was when a new client was already in the process of having their site developed by anther agency and needed some help to ensure they got the most from their content. Luckily the web developers had used the popular Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin. This was a tool I hadn't used in at least a few years, so it was interesting to see if the popular Wordpress plugin had evolved much.
Luckily the important features are still there, primarily the ability to edit the Meta Description and Meta Title for each post and every page.
Note: Most search engines apparently no longer take any notice of Meta Keywords, which were once the first set of changes for everyone in the search engine optimisation industry. Also older site accessibility standards included some meta data a basic acceptance criteria, however Meta Keywords were not explicitly stated back then and the more recent WCAG2.0 doesn't mention the need to include any specific meta fields... phew!
Luckily the product has improved since I last use it. I really like the Snippet Preview, which gives you some indication of how your page will be displayed in search engines such as Google (however, from experience, search engines don't always take the on-page data you provide and use other sources - e.g. Alexa or http://www.dmoz.org/). Apparently Yoast has been using Linkdex for it's advanced page analysis tools for the last year or so, although this breakdown of: word count, keyword usage and relevance isn't something I've seen in my stand-alone version of Linkdex.
Overall, it's been a rewarding experience going back to something I used to do and re-learning an updated version of a popular SEO tool.
I'll try and blog about the results of my efforts when the site goes live...
Note: We've moved onto typically using Drupal for most decent sized sites these days, mainly because it is more of an enterprise CMS and far more stable when you have multiple users all entering and editing content at the same time.
However I had the chance to dive back into the area of Wordpress SEO very recently. This was when a new client was already in the process of having their site developed by anther agency and needed some help to ensure they got the most from their content. Luckily the web developers had used the popular Yoast Wordpress SEO plugin. This was a tool I hadn't used in at least a few years, so it was interesting to see if the popular Wordpress plugin had evolved much.
Luckily the important features are still there, primarily the ability to edit the Meta Description and Meta Title for each post and every page.
Note: Most search engines apparently no longer take any notice of Meta Keywords, which were once the first set of changes for everyone in the search engine optimisation industry. Also older site accessibility standards included some meta data a basic acceptance criteria, however Meta Keywords were not explicitly stated back then and the more recent WCAG2.0 doesn't mention the need to include any specific meta fields... phew!
Luckily the product has improved since I last use it. I really like the Snippet Preview, which gives you some indication of how your page will be displayed in search engines such as Google (however, from experience, search engines don't always take the on-page data you provide and use other sources - e.g. Alexa or http://www.dmoz.org/). Apparently Yoast has been using Linkdex for it's advanced page analysis tools for the last year or so, although this breakdown of: word count, keyword usage and relevance isn't something I've seen in my stand-alone version of Linkdex.
Overall, it's been a rewarding experience going back to something I used to do and re-learning an updated version of a popular SEO tool.
I'll try and blog about the results of my efforts when the site goes live...
