SEOPress Advent Calendar 2022

When you plan a new website, imagine how you will add new pages to it regularly over time. This could be a blog, for example. As a general rule, fresh content ranks better than old content and sites with more pages rank better than sites with few pages.

If you can, use a professional photographer. They’ll know how to light and frame products to show them at their best. They will also produce consistent photos in terms of color and lighting so that they will look good in product listing pages.

If your company has many business addresses, create a unique page per address. On each page, make sure to indicate business name, postal address and the phone number associated with that address.

Use keyword tracking results to help prioritize the keywords you need to optimize first. Order by rank and choose the keywords that are ranking between the third and 20th position in Google and have a high search volume.

Before writing a new post, make sure you know which keyword you want to target and include it in the post’s title. By starting with a good title, you will automatically optimize some important elements of SEO such as the H1 title, the Meta Title and the permalink. See our article Optimize WordPress posts for a keyword to learn more.

Track keyword ranking over time. See our article on How To Track Keywords manually, with Google Search Console or SEO tools like SEOPress Insights.

Write at least 300 words for any page or post you want to be indexed by Google. Bear in mind that some questions can be answered quickly, but some may need more detailed content. It is not unusual to see posts of over 1000 words.

Use Google’s autosuggest feature to explore popular search queries. Type one word into Google, then a space and see what Google suggests as the next word. Type the letter “a” and see what words starting with the letter “a” Google suggests. Continue with the letter “b” and so on.

Provide an optimized Contact page. Indicate your business address and phone number in the main content of your contact page, even if you also added it to the footer. Also give information about opening times here as well as directions and transport options. Do not just publish a contact form on your contact page.

As with pages, posts and other custom post types, WordPress lets you modify the permalink of a product page. Include your keywords in the permalink, ideally at the beginning. Be careful not to create URLs which repeat keywords and keep URLs short. Long URLs or keyword-stuffing can be considered as SPAM by search engines.

Some say an image can be worth a thousand words. A photo or infographic may be the best response you can give to a query. Try and provide at least one unique image (i.e., it does not already exist on the web) for every page you publish.

When pages are shared on social networks like Facebook or Pinterest the posts generated automatically can contain price information if the related Open Graph tags are provided. You can add product:price:amount and product:price:currency Open Graph tags to WooCommerce product pages using SEOPress.

Use structured data (schemas) to describe content where possible. See Which Schemas for Which Rich Snippets to see which schema are appropriate for your content and How to add schema markup to WordPress using the SEOPress plugin to see how you can implement them easily.

Make sur that robot tags are set to “index” and “follow”. With SEOPress you can set this per post in the SEO metabox. In the WordPress settings Settings > Reading you can choose to “Discourage search engines from indexing this site.” Make sure that this option is not ticked.

When you use the same keyword on several pages of your site, link to the target page at least once from every page. Create the link by selecting the keyword when it appears in a text paragraph.

Positive customer reviews will help increase conversions for your products. They also add text to your product pages and help SEO. It is recommended that you show stars for customer reviews. Providing an average customer rating recommended by Google for the Product Schema.

We are never going to repeat this enough: update WordPress regularly. By doing this you are sure to correct bugs, remove security risks, add new features and improve page speed. This same advice applies to themes, plugins and even translations.

To reduce the number pages search engines have to crawl to find all your products, it is recommended displaying more products per page. This should not be a problem for your users. Using mobile, we prefer to scroll down rather than clicking on next page links. If you can do it, try adding an infinite scroll to your product listings.

Google recognizes structured data from Schema.org. The LocalBusiness schema is supported by SEOPress and you can add it to any page. It will help Google and other search engines localize your business.

Test your website with different browsers and on different devices (desktops, smart-phones, tablets).

For any images that contain text, use the ALT attribute to provide that text in a readable format for search engines.

If you are member of a local business club, chamber of commerce or trade organization check out whether their website provides business listings for members and make sure that you are listed with the correct address and website.

Don’t use machine-generated or machine-translated content for pages that you want to rank. Google currently says that it may consider machine-generated content as low quality.

Not being consistent in the business name, address and phone number used across the web can be deadly to your ranking in Google Maps and local search results. This includes the name and address that your business was registered at.