There’s an unfortunate tendency amongst marketers to zero in on Google and only concern ourselves with what Google says and does.

To an extent, it makes sense. After all, Google has been holding steady at around 85-87% of the global search market share. The vast majority of your value from search and search engine optimization will come from Google, so paying attention to what Google says is critical.

Bing search engine, Microsoft’s Google competitor, accounts for around 7% of global search traffic. If you can get your website listed on Bing, you can take advantage of that traffic. Plus, relatively few marketers take the effort to do anything to optimize for Bing, so you’ll be working with a distinct advantage.

Yahoo.com is also powered by Bing now, which isn’t considered in the market share report linked above. That’s a decent chunk of search volume between the two sites.

That said, what if you could get a 7% traffic increase from a simple action? Would you take that action?

That’s not to say you’re going to see a sudden surge of traffic, that Bing has no idea about your website already, or that you’ll be completely uncontested. After all, Bing operates very similarly to Google, and even if it’s not a dominant force, plenty of marketers do still at least do the bare minimum.

So, what can you do to submit your site and start taking advantage of Bing?

Why Use Bing?

In addition to Bing.com being the #2 search engine globally, it’s not entirely identical to Google. They have plenty of variance in how their algorithms work and what their users prefer. These differences mean that your actions to optimize for Google may or may not optimize for Bing. You can usually take a few additional steps to optimize for Bing as well.

Using Bing Webmaster Tools, you get insights into your site and SEO reports from Bing’s perspective. You can see your site performance on their search engine, you can see the keywords you rank for, you can submit new sites or new pages to be crawled, and you can handle spam and disavowal issues that you may have already addressed on Google.

The most significant benefit, frankly, is the keywords. Bing’s algorithm is just different enough from Google’s that you may have a slightly different set of keywords, but they’ll still be broadly relevant. Sometimes, Bing’s keyword research tool data can give you ideas on what to produce for Google for more search performance.

The other main reason to configure your site on Bing’s Webmaster Tools is to ensure timely indexing. You’ve probably taken all of the standard steps with Google, like using the URL inspector or submitting a sitemap, but those don’t help with Bing. You’re just leaving Bing to crawl the web on its own and hoping they find you.

You may even see a slight performance increase on Bing for the SEO theorists out there. It wouldn’t surprise me, and Bing says it themselves that it “improves your search presence.” This notice may be language borrowed from Google, or perhaps there’s a chance that it will give you a slight edge.

Are you convinced? I thought so. Here’s how to get started.

Step 1: Register

The first thing you need to do is sign up with Bing Webmaster Tools. Just click this link to go to the homepage for their tools. Click “Get Started,” and a box will pop up asking you to choose a service to use an existing account to log in. Your options are Microsoft, Google, and Facebook.

Since most of you will have a dedicated Google account for your business, you can use that. If you have a Microsoft or Facebook account dedicated to your business, you can choose whichever one you like best. It doesn’t matter; it’s just a way for Microsoft to manage accounts without having its own Bing Account system.

Step 2: Add Your Site

Once the account creation process finishes (it’s all automatic), you’ll be asked which option you want to use to add your site. If you authenticate via Google, you’re allowed to import data directly from the Google Search Console. Otherwise, you’ll need to add your website manually.

If you choose to import data from Google, Bing will need read-only permissions. They check immediately to import data, and then they check every so often afterward to update, verify, and ensure data is accurate. If you don’t want Microsoft to access your Google information or want them linked, you probably shouldn’t use the import process; do it manually instead.

Bing will take up to 48 hours to explore, scrape, and generally analyze your site to populate your dashboards. However, that doesn’t mean you can sit back and wait for two days; we have some other tasks to perform as well.

Step 3: Add a Sitemap

Submitting a sitemap to Google allows Google to scrape and analyze your site and monitor a single file that tells them when a webpage is updated. Submitting a sitemap to Bing does the same thing. Here’s how to do it.

On your dashboard, in the left-hand column, is a Sitemaps entry. Click it. If you imported data and Bing could copy a sitemap, you might see your sitemap already. In my case, even though Google has my sitemap, Bing didn’t scrape it, so I had to enter my site’s XML sitemap manually.

Luckily, it’s easy to do. Bing has a button that says “submit a sitemap” that, when you click it, pops up a window asking for a URL. Type in your sitemap URL (something like https://example.com/sitemap/xml) and hit submit.

Click submit, and you’re good to go. Once again, it will take Bing a bit of time to process the sitemap before you see results.

Step 4: Verify Your Site

You know how, when you add your site to Google Webmaster Tools or install Google Analytics, you need to add a bit of code to your site to verify site ownership? Well, you have to do the same thing with Bing.

If you used the Google Search Console import feature, you don’t need to verify; they import verification from Google. Go ahead and skip this step. Otherwise, keep reading.

There are several different ways to verify your site if you didn’t import:

• Upload an XML file via FTP
• Add a HTML meta tag to your homepage <head> section
• Add a C-Name record to your DNS

All of them start the same way:

• Click on your site name and the three stacked dots next to it.
• Click on the Verification button that appears.

Now, your options.

1. XML File

The XML file option requires downloading a file from Bing containing a verification code called BingSiteAuth.xml. It should be accessible at https://example.com/BingSiteAuth.xml. Once that file is in hand, upload it to your site’s root directory via FTP.

Once uploaded, go back to Bing Webmaster Tools and click the Verify button. They’ll look for the file and, once found, verify your site.

2. Meta Tag

If you don’t want to upload a file, but you’re able to edit your site’s HTML, use this option. Bing will provide you with a code block that looks something like this:

<meta name="msvalidate.01" content="[a unique string here]" />

Copy this code and paste it into your homepage’s <head> tags. It should be up there along with the meta title and meta description, though it doesn’t matter where in the header it is or what order.

Once pasted and saved, go back to Bing and click to verify. They’ll go out and check and verify your account.

3. CNAME Record

If you don’t want to mess around with code or upload files but feel comfortable toying with DNS records, you can add a CNAME record. This one’s more for the technical users out there, to be honest. Don’t bother with this one if you have no idea what CNAME is or how DNS works.

If you do, well, you already know what to do. Either way, Bing gives you the information and instructions you need to do it on their verification page.

4. WordPress Verification

If you’re using WordPress, chances are you have an SEO plugin installed. Most SEO plugins have a field where you can add a code string from Bing to verify without manually interacting with your code.

• Yoast SEO provides it under their Webmaster Tools section, directly beneath the Google verification box.
• All In One SEO gives it under Webmaster Verification and other tools like Pinterest.
• Rank Math provides it under Webmaster Tools in SEO Settings and other verification options.

Type in your Bing authentication string, save it, and go back to Bing and verify using the Meta Tag option. Bing should verify your website with no issue.

Other Things to Do

What else could/should you do now that you’re setting up Bing? There are a few things you can consider.

1. Fill out your profile.

Your profile, for Bing, is a few data points they can use to categorize you and your site.

They ask you for:

• First and last names.
• Country.
• Phone number.
• Company Name.
• Job Role.
• Industry.

This data is all about you, not your business, and it’s pretty generic. Frankly, I’m not sure what Bing uses it for, but it can’t hurt to fill it out.

2. Test your robots.txt file.

Bing Webmaster Tools has a built-in robots.txt tester, which you can use to troubleshoot Bing-based issues. Most people have empty or near-empty robots.txt files, so there won’t be much to test.

If you have one created by a security suite or that you’ve added and removed records to over some time, you might want to scan it to verify there are no issues with Bing’s access. Bing even allows you to edit it in place.

3. Perform a site scan.

The site scan feature is available at the bottom of the Bing Webmaster Tools dashboard homepage. It will scan and audit your site looking for SEO and usability issues. Bing’s idea of what makes a good site is slightly different from Google’s, but if you’re in Google’s good graces, you’re probably close enough to Bing’s.

4. Spot-check URLs.

Two tools Bing offers – URL Submission and URL Inspection – allow you to submit a URL to Bing and see what they say about it.

This step can verify that specific pages are visible (or aren’t, if you don’t want them to be, like attachment pages) and allow you to see issues. I recommend testing a few pages to make sure they work the way they should.

5. Consider Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is Bing’s version of Google Analytics, more or less. It’s an advanced, optional analytics platform that can do things like record sessions for playback, monitor site activity via heatmaps, and provide you with deeper insights into how users are using your site.

You can read more about Clarity here and decide if you want to use it or not. It’s helpful if you don’t already have heatmaps and other analytics in place, but Clarity will probably be redundant if you’re already using a heatmap and user session tracking app.

6. Consider Installing the Bing Webmaster Tools plugin

WordPress users have the option of installing the official Bing Webmaster Tools plugin to automate submissions and let Bing know when pages have been updated.

This process can speed up indexing and, as Microsoft puts it, “improves your search presence.” To get started, you need to install the plugin and then generate an API key in your Bing Webmaster Tools account. After configuring and verifying your website, click the gear icon in the upper right to open the dropdown, then click “API access.” Once you have your key, copy it into your WordPress plugin, and the rest is automatic.

Start Using Bing

At this point, you’re all set, and you need to wait the requisite 48 hours for Bingbot to finish crawling and indexing your site. Once its crawler is finished, you can go back and start digging into their analytics.

Be sure to check out:

• Bing’s backlinks. This section shows you the backlinks that Bing crawls, which might differ from what Google reports. You can review anchor text, referring URLs, and disavow links on the Bing index.
• Keyword Research. Bing provides keyword information and tracking, which can be very useful if you want to see your performance on Bing itself.
• Copyright Notices. Some of you might have the occasional copyright issue. Bing gives you notice of pages that need to be removed due to copyright issues, with the option to file a counter-claim if necessary.
• Submit URLs. Bing lets you paste in large lists so you can add groups of pages in bulk.
• Block URLs. This area lets you remove sensitive pages from Bing’s search index. You can add individual pages or entire directories.

Ultimately, Bing Webmaster Tools will provide similar information as Google’s version. Just use it the same way; monitor data, use it to inform future marketing and take advantage of greater awareness of how Bing works.

Has submitting your website to Bing been helpful to your SEO strategy? Do you have any tips that I left out or any questions for me? Please let me know in the comments section!

The post Step by Step Guide to Submit a Site to Bing Webmaster Tools appeared first on Content Powered.

Google’s indexing is a mysterious process. It used to be that they had a legion of software “spiders,” small bots that they sent out throughout the internet at large to travel from page to page and site to site, copying what they saw. In the years since their tech had gotten more sophisticated, and at this point, they use a variety of data sources (including Chrome users) to index the internet.

Being indexed by Google is the first step in growing a website. I can foresee three groups of people likely concerned with Google’s indexing process.

1. Newcomers who have set up a new site and want Google to list their new webpages will be more anxious to get full index coverage.
2. Site owners who have decided to shift gears will want Google to see those changes as soon as possible, notably if they changed large swaths of content and need a new indexing pass.
3. Owners of older sites full of spam, black hat SEO, thin content, and other problems will want a rapid reindexing. After cleaning up that spam, they’ll wish to receive a new review so that they can be indexed again.

Luckily, no matter the reason, the method is always the same.

So, how can you achieve Google reindexing and get the search giant algorithm to recrawl your site once again?

Recognize the Limitations

The first thing to do is recognize the limitations of crawlers. As Google says,

“Indexing can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks.”

It doesn’t matter if you’re a brand new website or a more significant site; Google is Google. We’re all ants to them.

A website rarely gains so much attention that it quickly “jumps the queue.” At the same time, while there are various methods to get Google’s attention and get them indexing your content, they all have more or less the exact response times. You can try different approaches, but they’ll all work about the same. Your mileage may vary, of course, but on average across all site owners, it evens out.

Google also doesn’t necessarily make it clear to a site owner whether or not their site has been indexed. Or, instead, they do, but you need to know where to look. And no, “site:example.com” searches are not the only way to check.

Google provides webmasters with a tool called the Index Coverage Report. If you know how indexing works and how search works as a whole, it’s a handy tool.

If you don’t have much idea beyond “is/isn’t in the Google search results I see,” you’ll want to do a bit of further reading first. It will let you know when Google crawls your page, which pages they indexed, and which pages haven’t been indexed yet.

The Index Coverage Report is a full-site indexation health check. If you want to check if a single page is indexed, you can use the URL Inspection Tool instead.

Troubleshoot Indexation Problems

The first thing you’ll want to do is check if there’s anything on your site that would prevent Google from indexing your site. Generally, there are only a handful of such roadblocks.

1. Check for a Robots.txt block.

The most common indexation error you’re likely to encounter is a problem with your robots.txt file. Robots.txt is a text file on your server, usually in your site’s root directory, that gives instructions to specific bots that might crawl your site. You can use it to tell the bots which pages you don’t want them to see; this includes Google’s bots, among others.

Why would you want to use this? Well:

• Maybe you’re split-testing variations of landing pages and don’t want the near-duplicate content indexed.
• Perhaps you’re hiding the site temporarily while you revamp it or build it from scratch.
• If you’re trying to hide WordPress system pages or thin content, like attachment pages, you can use noindex to exclude those in your HTML.

Usually, it’s that second one that gets people—that, or just a malformed file that accidentally hides more directories than it should.

Either way, you can check your robots.txt manually (by opening the file and reading what’s inside) or using Google’s tools. They have a robots.txt tester, found here.

2. Check for page-level noindex commands.

Noindex is a directive, primarily for Google, that website owners can apply at the page level or the domain name level. You can use it on WordPress attachment pages to ensure that they don’t appear as thin content and disrupt your SEO value.

Unfortunately, it’s easy to apply them to the wrong pages accidentally and drop your whole site from search. Here’s a rundown of the problem and how to check for and fix it.

3. Check for sporadic downtime and other server errors.

One of the other reasons your site may have indexation issues is, well, coincidence. If your web host keeps dropping service, and they happen to be down when Google’s spider comes by, all Google is going to see is a missing website. They can’t crawl what, to them, doesn’t exist.

This downtime can be tricky to diagnose and optimize because if your site is up when you check, how can you tell when it’s down? The solution is to sign up for an uptime monitor. Luckily, Google’s site inspection tool can tell you if server errors are responsible for your indexation issues.

4. Check for canonicalization issues.

Another issue, if you’re specifically looking at an individual page to see if it’s indexed, is that it’s not, but another version of it is. Suppose you have two copies of a page (for minor split testing, URL-parameter variations, or site search results). In that case, you’ll want only the main version of the page to be indexed to avoid duplicate content penalties.

The official way to do this is to use the rel=” canonical” attribute to tell Google which version is the “official” page. If you’re checking a page that should be official and isn’t, you may have implemented the canonical tags incorrectly, and they’ll be identifying a different page as the canonical version.

There are many other related issues as well, so check Google’s indexation report and see what it says. Their resource page also has a complete list of the errors they can report and what they mean.

The Official Means of Indexing Content

There are two “official” ways to get Google to index your site. If you’ve been following along and clicking the internal links I’ve added, you probably already know what they are; if not, well, here you go.

The two options are for individual links and bulk sites. So, if most of your site is indexed, but a few essential, new, or important pages seem to be missing, use the first option. If you’ve renovated most of your site, if your site is new, or if you want a complete indexation pass, use the second option.

1. Use the URL inspection tool in Google Search Console.

The URL inspection tool is part of the Google Search Console (formerly Google Webmaster Tools), and you can find it here.

It’s a tool that gives Google a URL and says, “Hey, check this out and tell me what you see, okay?” They will, and they’ll generate a report about the URL that includes things like the server status, indexation status, robots.txt and URL directives, and more.

Once you select the inspection tool from the search bar and request an inspection of a URL, you have a button that says “Request indexing.” This step is how you “submit” a single page to Google. Since there’s no other official URL submission process, this is mostly the best you get for a single page.

You can use this tool for more than one URL, but there’s a cap on how many you can inspect before Google cuts you off for the day. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t state what that number is. If you reach it, you’ll only know because the inspector will throw an error that you’ve exceeded your daily quota.

The URL inspection lets you fetch as Google’s crawler, and when Google does that, they do an indexation pass while they’re there. Unless, of course, a robots.txt, server error, or other directive tells them not to.

2. Submit a sitemap.

If you want to tell Google to index more pages than the URL inspector quota, or you want to ask them to index your whole site, submitting a sitemap is the best way to go. A sitemap is just an XML spreadsheet that says, “here’s a list of all the pages on my site, check them out,” and Google will, eventually, oblige. As mentioned above, it can take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks for them to get around to it.

Google supports Text, Atom, RSS, and XML sitemaps, but XML is by far the best. It has the most data, is the easiest to generate, and is often made by CMSs automatically. A sitemap can be up to 50Mb and 50,000 links, so all but the most extensive websites can submit them. Even then, those massive sites can often generate section-specific sitemaps and offer those individually (with a sitemap index, which is a collection of sitemaps.) If you have an SEO plugin on a WordPress site, such as Yoast SEO, then your sitemap will be generated automatically.

There are technically three different ways to submit your sitemap to Google.

• Add it to robots.txt. All you need is a line that says “Sitemap: http://example.com/sitemap.xml,” and the next time Google looks at your robots.txt, they’ll find the sitemap.
• Ping it. Google accepts some limited ping requests using the GET request. Just visit https://www.google.com/ping?sitemap=FULL_URL_OF_SITEMAP, and they’ll take it.
• The sitemaps report allows you to submit your sitemap directly. Submit it via the Google Search Console.

The third one, via the search console, is generally the best. Every process takes about the same time to process anyway, so you might as well use the one that has a history and feedback built into it, right?

As always, the Search Console is full of every tool you could want as a site owner. It also lets you monitor the website traffic that you’re generating from Google’s SERPs, monitor the performance of your new pages, and dig into the impressions, click-through rate, and organic traffic for specific pages.

Those are the two “official” ways to submit a sitemap to Google. What about unofficial ways?

Unofficial Means to Google Reindexing

As with anything as fundamental to SEO and as poorly documented as indexation is/used to be, there are dozens of “hacks” available online from SEO pros to help you speed up or force indexation by circumventing the usual process. Here are the ones that work the best.

1. Use a ping service.

The first option is to use a third-party ping service. A service like Ping-O-Matic, for example, uses the ping process from a handful of different services (such as Blo.gs, Feed Burner, and Superfeedr) to get your content picked up by these services.

Under their existing indexation and clout, these services get your content picked up as a side-effect of indexation.

2. Try guest posting and link-building outreach.

The theory behind a ping service is to get your site linked on higher-profile domains. When Google indexes those domains and finds links to your site, they will automatically follow and crawl those links and the pages they point to. Then, they’ll go ahead and crawl your site.

You can do the same thing with added SEO value by performing link outreach and guest posting. These serve to get Google to look at your site, but they also build content, thought leadership, and citations, as well as backlinks your domain can use.

3. Use social media.

In particular, Google pays attention to both Facebook and Twitter. They don’t use a direct “firehose” integration anymore, but they still crawl and index as many sites as possible. So, if your content gets posted and shared a lot on social media, Google has a higher chance of picking it up.

Twitter is the easiest to use for this purpose.

4. Maintain an active blog.

Blogging is one of the best things you can do for a site, and I’m not just saying that because I’m biased as a blog content marketer. The simple fact is that Google gives preferential treatment to sites that keep themselves updated with content. If you can produce decent quality content regularly, you give Google a reason to keep checking your site for updates. If they know you publish a new post every Monday, they’ll check every Monday or Tuesday for that new post and update it right away.

The trick is, while this can help you keep your site up to date, it isn’t going to help Google index you from scratch. They don’t know they need to check you regularly until you’ve been publishing content regularly for a while, after all.

Sometimes it can take a while, and in some cases, it can take weeks or even months – especially if your site is brand new or you don’t update it very often. Regularly creating new content will train search engines to crawl them more frequently, so this will be less of an issue for you in the future.

So, there you have it; the best ways to get Google to reindex your website, no matter why you need them to do it. I recommend the sitemap and URL inspection methods, combined with regular blogging, to establish both need and consistency in indexation. Once those steps are crossed off your list, you shouldn’t have to worry about indexation again. If your content is high quality, your website structure is solid, and your sitemap is submitted to Google, the only thing left to do is wait.

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These days, when you see people talking about content marketing, you’ll see a lot of jargon and buzzwords are thrown around. I’m no stranger to it myself; I used a lot that I either gloss over, assume you already know, or link to a reference for. It’s just part of writing to a target audience.

One that I use a lot is thin content. Usually, it’s about duplicate/thin/low-value content, as something Google penalizes.

What is it, though? It turns out there’s more nuance to it than perhaps even I thought.

A Simple Definition

The straightforward definition of thin content is content with little or no inherent value. Consider:

• A “blog post” is 300 words long and does little more than introducing a fundamental topic.
• A 1,000-word or longer post that is almost entirely fluff and says nothing.
• An entire website focused around a single keyword, with no more than a handful of pages or posts.

All of these can be considered thin content in their unique ways:

1. “Traditional” thin content, which most of us think of when discussing thin content.
2. The kind of thing AI text generators write.
3. More of a “thin affiliate” site, the kind of thing that exists as little more than a destination for links from PBNs and other sources, just meant to make money and not provide value.

There is difficulty and nuance to judging a thin content site. Some of your content may be perfectly adequate, and some of your pages could either use some work or may need to be removed.

There are plenty of sites out there with pages at 300 words or less that rank fine. There are sites with hundreds of posts longer than I consistently produce that don’t rank well. There are single-page websites that rank well and would never be considered thin. A lot of it, unfortunately, is subjective.

“In SEO, thin content is broadly defined as website content that does not provide value to visitors. Such can be short, shallow, non-original, scraped, duplicate, doorway, or low-quality content from affiliates. As a general rule, thin content doesn’t rank well in Google Search, as Google dislikes it.” – Morningscore.

Google has a page in their webmaster guidelines dedicated to a brief description of thin content. Ironically, if you think you have “valuable content” solely on word count, this page itself could be regarded as “thin.” However, that’s why the definition of “thin” content considers more than just the length of the content; it also considers the page’s substance.

Identifying Thin Content

There’s no easy way to identify thin content issues, at least not algorithmically. It’s one of those things that is reasonably subjective. The only way Google can do it as part of their algorithm updates is because they’ve invested pretty heavily into natural language processing and parsing technology. It’s a technology that isn’t broadly available for most of us.

The rollout of the algorithm Google uses for this kind of processing initially happened ten years ago, in 2011. It was called Google Panda, and while it primarily focused on duplicate content, it also focused on thin original content. It changed the internet drastically and fundamentally. Since then, many of Google’s algorithms have been adjusted and improved to make their content analysis more nuanced.

Penalties these days are not likely to appear in Search Console as a “manual action.” Instead, you’ll see your traffic dropping over time, which is a sort of soft penalty. These are much more difficult to fix, as you’ll have to find the root of the problem yourself. A content audit can take quite some time on websites with thousands of pages. Some scraping tools such as Screaming Frog can make this a bit easier, though.

I wrote a separate article on how to perform a content audit here:

How can you tell if a piece of content is thin? Well, a lot of it comes down to looking for specific warning signs. Such signs include:

• Short length. While a low word count post with fewer than 500 words isn’t guaranteed to be thin, it’s a lot more likely than a longer post.
• The density of information. Long blog posts can still be thin if they lack nuggets of information or high-quality content like expert insights or case studies. Thin posts are full of fluff and lack tangible value. Think of it this way: how many sentences in an article could you tweet out of context and have them still hold value?
• Additional content attributes. Does the post include images or just text? Are there formatting and internal or external backlinks? All of the extra signs of effort being put into content are hints as to whether or not it’s thin.
• Is it scraped, stolen, or duplicated? Duplicate content issues are another topic entirely, but scraped and spun content are common forms of thin content used by spammers to make a site look more legitimate. This type of content can be harder to spot, though, unless you can find the source of a piece of content and know which one came first.
• Is it auto-generated? You can read more about this in-depth from my post on the subject, but suffice it to say that no AI is capable of creating content that is both original and valuable today. Both blogs and eCommerce stores are famous for generating hundreds of web pages automatically, such as search result pages, tags, attachments, category pages, author pages, and more. Many of these pages have little to no content of added value.

At a macro site level, you also have:

• Does the domain exist solely to funnel people to another domain?
• Does the site try to replicate another so closely to be difficult to distinguish?
• Does the site have pages that look more like search results than readable content?
• Does the site lack signs of trust and authority, such as a logo, unique design, SSL, trust seals, or contact information?
• Does the site have pages that use keyword stuffing, spammy affiliate pages, indexed landing pages, or other thin content pages?

Thin affiliates, doorway pages, and PBN sites all fall into these sorts of categories. If you have to keep these pages, it may be best to noindex them or move them to a subdomain where they won’t affect your new content.

You should also take the time to read your content and see if it leaves you learning something with tangible takeaways, instructions, or other value.

How to Fix Thin Content

Fixing thin content is done at two levels: the site level and the page level. So, I’m going to cover tips for both.

Fixing Thin Sites

At the site level, you want to buff up your site and add signs of trust, as well as indications that you’re investing in understanding SEO, how a site works, and how it provides value to users. There’s a lot here, so I’ll essentially be glossing over individual tips.

 Add system pages. By system pages, I mean things like an About Us, a Privacy Policy, Locations/Services pages, Contact pages, and other pages. One thing spammers and thin content sites don’t do is make unnecessary pages like that. It’s a sign of authority and trust, as well as additional content and value that can make your site look more legitimate to Google.

 Add trust elements. Trust elements include contact information, internal and external links, social media links, trust badges, SSL security, and other tangible signs that people trust you. Again, these are the things that thin or spammy sites don’t put effort or money into because it costs resources, and every resource they spend damages their profit margins.

 Add a blog if you don’t have one. Content marketing is the most helpful way to build a site into something people can use and enjoy. Regular blogging will take a while to buff up your website, but it’s more or less required today. I’m a little biased about the value of a blog, but I’m far from the only person saying you should have one.

That said, plenty of sites can grow and build value without blogs. They have to do it in precise ways, and while I can give you tips for those, this isn’t the venue for it. Let me know if that’s something you want, though, and I’ll consider producing a post about it.

 Add an FAQ page. FAQs are great for giving users a resource, showing that you care about what they have to say and what they want to know, and adding content to a site. They’re also evergreen, meaning they stick around with value indefinitely, and they’re living documents. You can continually add, edit, and improve information until they become incredible resources.

 Add testimonials. User testimonials are among the most potent signs of trust you can build for a site. You might only need a few of them for each page you put them on, but it can help to have a more extensive rotating list of them or several different testimonials for different pages. A product page might have product-focused testimonials, while your homepage has business-focused testimonials, and so on. Overall, this isn’t as hard as it seems, but you need to solicit those testimonials from your users. Well, that, or you can fake them, but that won’t work as well.

 Remove unnecessary pagination. A common cause of thin content is paginated content. Back in the day, websites might take a single long piece of content and break it up, occasionally every single paragraph. They would then layer the page with ads so that if you wanted the whole story, you had to click through every single page, viewing dozens of advertisements along the way. It wasn’t fun for everyone involved.

These days, pagination is generally not good usability, particularly for mobile users. Remove it whenever you can. By accumulating the content from each page into one central post, you have a single more extensive and non-thin article instead of a dozen thin pages.

Now, if you have a vast resource where every page is valuable in itself, you can keep the pagination. This example is a strategy designed primarily for pages with relatively little content.

 Remove accidental duplication and add canonicalization. This situation is another Panda-relevant tip that swings more towards duplicate content than thin content. Still, these penalties are part of the same group of ensuring low-value pages aren’t ranking highly in search results. That is the “not useful to users” penalty. There are many reasons why your site might be generating duplicate content, like HTTP vs. HTTPS pages or www and non-www pages, so fixing those issues and adding canonicalization to the “real” page is just a great thing to do.

 Check Google Search Console. Click “Coverage,” then “Excluded.” Start looking at each category and see if any of your pages are being excluded from Google search. Are these new pages that haven’t been indexed yet, or older pages that should have been indexed already? Are there any readability issues? You can also check Google Analytics. How did the historical SERPs and organic traffic metrics look for those pages? Have they always performed poorly, or did they used to get traffic? How does the bounce rate and time on site look? What is the word count of those pages?

Fixing Thin Pages

As for thin content at the page level, there are plenty of options for things to do here as well.

 Add more images. Thin content means content, not just words. I always recommend adding blog images as often as you can swing it. Something like one image every 100-300 words is what I typically aim for, though it can change a lot depending on the format and style of the post. Content without images is boring and hard to read, and it can be poor for user experience and conversions.

 Increase word counts organically. Add more words, but don’t add fluffy or unrelated content. Take a topic you mention in passing and expand upon it instead, for instance. Using this post as an example, I could add more words by adding new bullet points to the lists, but I shouldn’t just add another sentence to every bullet point unless I have real relevant information to add to it.

 Increase density of information. Bulleted lists are great for improving thin content because they give you some very dense, helpful information that is easy to display. You don’t need to use lists, but adding more information in relatively few words increases the information density if your post is often a good idea. Too-dense content isn’t ideal, but if you’re worried about thin content, you’re not going to overdo it accidentally.

 Add formatting to highlight key points. Usability is a big part of non-thin content, and with longer content, your design and formatting adds value to your content and make it easier to digest. Bolding important sections and adding quotations, lists, italics, underlines, colored highlights, and icons can help add and enhance your information.

 Add metadata. Two forms of metadata, to be precise. First, make sure your title and description are optimized. Second, look into schema.org metadata and add anything relevant to your pages.

 Align content with user intent. User intent is a big one, and it’s one of the most overlooked aspects of making content valuable. Users, when they search for a topic, have a goal. Maybe they want to learn; perhaps they want instructions. Maybe they’re looking for trivia; it doesn’t matter what it is. What matters is that you interpret what they’re looking for and give it to them. It’s called aligning your content with user intent, and I wrote a whole post about it. It’s just that important.

 Activate and encourage comments. Blog comments are one of the most underrated SEO signals, in my opinion. They show both users and search engines that somebody is there to answer questions, and it’s a great sign of engagement. It adds free content to your pages – users ask great questions, and your answers to those questions are valuable to other users and add to your total word count. It also gives people a chance to point out inaccuracies or outdated information so that you can update them, which improves your content.

It also shows Google that the lights are on and that somebody is actually behind the website responding to users. They’re great – if you have them disabled, strongly consider enabling them. Before you do, it would help if you turned on a good spam blocker like Akismet. Blog comments can generate an obscene amount of spam.

While there are other things you can do, these are most of the low-hanging fruit. Get rid of those thin content penalties!

Do everything I’ve listed above, where applicable, and you’ll be well on your way to a healthy and usable page.

The post What’s the Definition of a Thin Content Site? (And How to Fix It) appeared first on Content Powered.

Sometimes, you’ve been running your site for a while, and you just aren’t ranking for your own brand name. No matter what you do, you can’t seem to get on that first page of Google.

You’ve already checked all the obvious. (If you haven’t checked these, do so first, then come back here.)

• Your site has been around for at least a year or two, so you aren’t hitting sandbox or new site issues.
• You haven’t violated any big SEO or marketing rules, so no manual actions or significant penalties hold you back.
• You know more or less what you’re doing, so you have no duplicate content issues, link issues, and so on.
• Your page loads quickly, there are no broken scripts, your images are optimized and being served in next-gen formats, and so on.
• You have a mobile site, so you aren’t suffering under those sorts of penalties either.

In other words, you’ve already read most of those “why aren’t I ranking?” articles, you’ve already checked each of the items on those lists, and you’re still having trouble finding a concrete reason why you’re having issues ranking on Google for your brand name.

So, what is the problem? Is it your marketing strategy, your links, or your content?

The Domain Problem

Very frequently, when I see a website struggling with this issue, and they aren’t ranking, the problem is their domain name.

Back in the years of the distant past, before 2012, the internet was full of websites with keyword domains. You’d have sites like “AtlantaPlumber” and “RentCars” and the like, everywhere.

See, back then, Google was nowhere near as sophisticated as it is today. If you had a keyword on your website, Google might have been more likely to rank your website for that keyword. The more similar keywords you used and the more prominent the positions, the more rank you’d get out of them. They tried to stop this by penalizing keyword stuffing, but that led people to use target keywords in more important places, including the domain name.

People would register hundreds or even thousands of domains with valuable terms, upload a quick website template, and start to rank a new website with minimal optimization effort. I’ve been a webmaster and SEO for nearly 15 years, and I was one of those people at one point. And guess what? Those websites ranked for my search terms – for a while. Some site rankings were more impressive than others, which is why this strategy was more effective in bulk. These websites proliferated the front page of Google and annoyed searchers.

In 2012, Google released the EMD update and impacted the large majority of those sites. EMD, or “Exact Match Domain,” means a website with a keyword as the URL. It mainly hit a lot of sites using bad TLDs (RentCars.xyz, for example, rather than RentCars.com), but it did still hit a lot of .com domains as well.

This update was only a year on the heels of a significant Panda update, so Google had already implemented a powerful new way to penalize sites with thin and copied content.

Unfortunately, many of those websites were legitimate brands that just got sorted into the wrong bucket, and their website suddenly was nowhere to be found when searching for their business name.

A Two-Tiered System

Even back in 2012, Google was trying to add nuance to the sites they penalized. There’s nothing inherently wrong with using an exact match keyword as a domain name, if and only if you build a brand around it. Sites like Hotels.com still exist and thrive despite their keyword domains.

When Google detects a site with an exact match domain, they apply a bunch of tests to it to see if it’s worth ranking or not. These tests look for signs that the site isn’t doing much in the way of legitimate marketing. Instead, they look for websites that rely on the power of their domain to carry the day.

They sort the site into one of two “buckets.” On the one hand, you have the sites like Hotels.com, which put a lot of work into building a brand and a web presence. In the other bucket are the thin sites, low-effort cash-in attempts using SEO advice that hasn’t been relevant in a decade. (The second bucket is more like a trash bin.)

Those second sites, in my experience, typically fall into one of three categories.

• Websites well over 10+ years old have been using a mixture of old and new SEO advice and need a little housekeeping to get on the right track.
• Websites run by well-intentioned individuals who may not know what they’re doing or have outdated ideas for what good SEO looks like. Often, an SEO specifies certain things for the website based on some advice they got ages ago and refuses to research more.
• The sites that are intentionally quick cash-ins. See, EMDs can work well for a short while, and there’s usually a few months where the site owner can play off Google’s benefit of the doubt to make a bit of quick cash before disappearing and starting over with a different keyword (or selling the website).

The third kind of site here isn’t really what I’m talking about today. Those people know what they’re doing and are intentionally exploiting loopholes and delays in Google, and they don’t want the advice I’m going to give. The other two sites, though, can be improved and moved from one bucket to the other. That’s the end goal.

The question is, how can you do it?

Moving from Thin Website to Legitimate Brand

There’s a lot you can do to help pull away from the pack of thin sites and into the world of legitimate brands. Some of these tips may be strategies that you’re already familiar with, but some of them could be new to you, so I’m going to go over as many tips as I can think up.

Expand your site architecture.

A big problem with many sites I see is architecture and navigation that don’t make sense or help users find their way around. Some websites decide to lump all of their content into one or two big categories. Others insist on splitting their site into dozens of subcategories, even if a bunch of them have overlap. I’ve even seen websites where the main drop-down menu has multiple entries that all point to the same page!

It can be worthwhile to do a full website chart and reorganization. Think about the logic of your site; top-level pages like store pages, blog pages, About pages, etc.; then any pages that logically go into subcategories of those, like blog categories, or different kinds of About content like a Company History/Timeline, a Privacy Policy, and so on.

Reorganize your site structure to have a more logical, consistent, and easily navigated flow.

A business page without these important pages can look too thin and suspect, which brings us to the next step:

Build up a more extensive library of good content.

I might be a little biased, but I’ve always found that the single best way to build authority and clout in terms of Google search ranking is to blog. Every blog post you publish is a new chance for your site to rank, build authority, trustworthiness, and thought leadership. Google’s E-A-T algorithms estimate how much authority and trust your site is worth, so the more quality content you have about topics in your niche, the more likely you are to rank highly.

Are there counter-examples? Sure. Heck, the primary example I’ve been using, Hotels.com, doesn’t even have a blog. The trick is, many of these sites go all-in on providing a comprehensive tool and service to users. On top of that, they’ve been around for decades. Hotels.com has been around since 1991! It’s practically a dinosaur in internet terms.

For those of you who haven’t spent the last 30+ years building authority as a brand, you need to use modern techniques to do it. It’s pretty rare today that a site can build a tool and rank because of it unless it is instrumental and gets a lot of links and traffic from many high authority sites.

Audit existing content and nuke the bad stuff.

I strongly urge anyone with a site older than a few years to perform a full content audit. If you aren’t keeping up with modern SEO strategy, this is especially valuable. Even more so if you’re an older site and you’re struggling to rank.

Why? I find that many older sites have a lot of older content on them and that older content isn’t up to snuff. Perhaps you forgot to use your title tag or meta descriptions, or you were using a lazy content marketing company. Even if the content isn’t duplicated, it could be generic or low-quality enough that it’s just dead weight.

I have a complete guide on performing a content audit here. Please give it a look, review your content, and get rid of the stuff that’s holding you back. It’ll probably raise your search rankings even if you don’t do anything else, to be honest. Just make sure the pages you’re deleting don’t have any strong backlinks, conversions, or organic traffic. You’ll also want to look for red flags, like a large drop in your click-through rates in Google Search Console or disappearing from the Google Search Results completely.

On many occasions, I’ve deleted anywhere from 100 to 1,000 blog posts on a website and saw the organic traffic increase by 200-500%. If you have content that isn’t indexed or yielding any significant traffic, there’s a chance that it’s actually holding you back. If you’re not able to delete those pages, you may be able to noindex them instead or block them in your robots.txt file.

Audit your links and remove, nofollow, or rel=sponsor them as necessary.

Another audit you should perform is a link audit. Thankfully, this is faster to do than a content audit (usually).

You can use automated tools to scrape and compile all of your links (WordPress even has some easy plugins to do it for you) and test them.

• You should remove broken links. If they were essential to the post, you can fix them and point those broken links to comparable live resources.
• Links that point to no-longer-relevant sites, 404 pages, and through redirects to homepages should likewise be removed or replaced.
• Links that point to low-quality sites should be replaced with links to higher-quality sites (or removed).
• Questionable links should be nofollowed.
• User-generated links should be flagged with rel=”ugc”
• Links that are monetized in some way (through sponsorships, affiliate links, etc.) should be rel=” sponsored”.

Chances are, this will eat up a majority of your old links and a lot of your newer links. I always err on the side of caution with nofollowing my external links, and I recommend others do as well. A few low-quality outbound links won’t hurt a site, but a suspicious trend of spammy backlinks might.

While you’re at it, work on adding more internal links. You probably have a lot of posts that reference topics you didn’t have content about at the time, but do now; interlink them.

This is, by the way, why I put the link audit after the content audit. You don’t have to care about links on, to, or from pages that you’re removing.

Double-check for plagiarism and copied content issues.

Old sites (especially websites from the bad old days before Panda) often have issues with duplicate content. Sometimes, whoever ran the website just copied content from elsewhere, and before 2011, that strategy may have worked.

These days, of course, plagiarism is taken seriously, and search engines primarily reward the original publisher of that content. So, invest in a tool like Copyscape/Copysentry to scan your site and look for duplicates online.

If you find duplicates (and you probably will), determine whether they’re stealing your content, you stole theirs, or if it even matters.

• If the content was yours originally and is worth keeping, take steps to get it removed.
• If the content wasn’t yours initially, get rid of it.
• If the content isn’t good enough to save, get rid of it.

This process is another reason why I decided to save this step for after the content audit; a lot of the more problematic posts will be gone by the time you reach this step.

Optimize site speed, load times, and Core Web Vitals.

Google prefers sites that load quickly and don’t have issues with content jumping around as they load. Their page speed updates, Core Web Vitals, and other modern algorithmic changes push site owners towards a fast and reactive internet.

On top of that, Google is not just looking at your page speed; they’re also looking at your user experience. If your page is loading in a clunky way, or if significant elements are shifting around, that can hurt your page experience and your Core Web Vitals metrics.

Do what you can to speed your site up, optimize various aspects of modern SEO, and work on your Core Web Vitals.

Wrapping Up

The larger a site is and the more quality content it has, the more its ranking influence will grow. Thin sites won’t rank well, even for their brand name.

Consider publishing to your blog at least once per week, if not more. Shake off the cobwebs! Work on link building, improve your user experience, and continually add new pages to your website. Let Google and users know that the site is actively being maintained and that the lights are still on. You’ll notice that Googlebot will start coming by more frequently to check for your fresh content, and your entire site will start to rank better as a whole. Nothing happens fast in the SEO world – be patient, and your hard work will pay off.

Beef up that site, and you’ll be able to move from the shady EMD spammer bucket to the legitimate brand bucket in no time.

Are you having issues showing up for your company name in organic search results, or is your page not ranking for critical company terms? Please let me know in the comments below! I’ll redact your website URL before approving your comment and give you detailed feedback on what you can do to improve.

The post Why Your Website Isn’t Ranking for Your Brand Name appeared first on Content Powered.

I’m a firm believer in the power of a table of contents. I’ve seen some pretty dramatic effects ever since I started using them on my site, and so have the clients I’ve convinced to let me install them on theirs. I wrote a guide on automatically adding them on a WordPress site, and they’re one of my top tips in my list of Advanced Blogging Tips. They’re even great for some simple internal links, in a way. A table of contents helps both search engines and visitors digest your content better.

The thing is, not everyone uses WordPress. I covered how to add one to a WordPress site, but what about users of other platforms?

Well, I thought I’d start rectifying my coverage gap today. First, let’s talk about Shopify.

Shopify is a popular eCommerce platform for online stores, but (as I’ve written many times before) the blog leaves a lot to be desired. They’ve been slowly improving it over the years, but it’s still a long way from being a powerhouse like WordPress. That said, you can improve it on your own, and one of the ways is to add something like a table of contents. Anything that adds usability and functionality to a Shopify blog is excellent in my book.

To that end, I’ve found three methods you can use to add a table of contents to a Shopify blog.

Let’s dig in!

Method 1: Jump Links Shopify App

If you’re used to WordPress, you’re probably used to having a dozen different choices to do pretty much anything you could want to your site. Unfortunately, the Shopify app marketplace is much sparser. They (as of this writing) only have one app to add a table of contents. That app is called Jump Links ToC, and here’s how to use it.

First, log into your Shopify account, then click the link above. That will take you to the Shopify App Store page for Jump Links ToC, where you can then click the “Add App” button to install it on your site.

From there, go to your Shopify store dashboard and click on the Apps section, and then the Jump Links ToC icon, which lets you open their settings.

In that settings menu pop-up, you can customize how the table of contents will appear on your posts.

• Choose a header. You can have a title for the ToC box that says something like “Table of Contents” or “Navigation” or “Quick Links” or whatever you like, or not have anything at all. I prefer a simple header. Click the check box to enable it and type in your text, as desired. Bear in mind that it’s an all-or-nothing setting; you can’t customize it per-post.
• Choose an item/list format. You can have items be bullets or numbers. I prefer either bullet points or nothing; if they have numbers, my subheadings already have the numbers, so adding numbers here would duplicate them.
• Choose a position. You have two options here: the top of the page directly below the post title (and image) or right above the first heading in the post. Do you want to have an intro section above the ToC or not? This section is where you make that decision. Adding it before the first heading (right after the intro) is the best method, in my opinion, similar to how Wikipedia uses its table of contents.
• Set scrolling. “Smooth Scroll” will have the user scroll to the position in the post, whereas leaving it disabled will make it an instant jump. This section is just a user experience feature and won’t affect SEO, so it doesn’t matter all that much.
• Customize Design Theme. This section is where you apply colors and formatting to your table of contents. Background and border colors for the ToC box, title/link/hover colors, and so forth. Pick colors that match your storefront and homepage styling as closely as possible.
• Choose which H tags are included. If you’re the kind of person who uses nested sub-sub-sub-subheadings down to H5 or H6, you can choose whether or not to have them. I usually recommend sticking to just H2/H3 and maybe H4 unless you’re creating an immense reference document.

You can also choose specific posts (by post ID) to ignore when generating tables of contents for your content. It’s a pain if you want a table of contents on some but not all of your posts, but if you want it on every post, you can ignore that section. It also adds a drop-down menu to your blog post section that enables you to click “No table of contents” if you want to disable it on future blog posts.

Finally, save your settings and then click the “run engine” button. It will take 30+ minutes to run, pulling all of your content, generating the tables according to your settings, adding those ToCs to the posts, and saving the changes. It’s a big script doing it, and you have to wait for it to apply everything. If you make any changes to your posts between clicking Run Engine and finishing, those changes might be lost.

There are three major drawbacks to this app option.

• It costs money. Specifically, it costs you $4 per month, indefinitely, to use the app. The cost is a pretty annoying fee, especially for us WordPress fans who are used to getting simple plugins like this for free.
• It’s not very customizable. The customization options are pretty much limited to what I listed above. It may or may not look good with your theme.
• It’s clunky. That’s not a problem with the app as it is with the Shopify API, though, so I can’t blame them for it.

All that said, there are two other options I have for you. Ready?

Method 2: Changing Themes

The second method to add a table of contents to a Shopify site is to, well, change your website. Fairly dramatically, I might add.

See, rather than using an app for a table of contents, many Shopify themes have a table of contents baked into it out of the box. The problem is that you need to find a template with a table of contents, which is not exactly a popular feature. I only know of one theme variant that has it off the top of my head, and that’s Plak Theme.

Specifically, it’s both Plak and Grass, two of the themes offered by Plak the company. The other one, Sly, doesn’t seem to have a table of contents.

There are quite a few drawbacks to this option, unfortunately.

1. First of all, it’s a massive change. Changing your theme is a huge investment and can disrupt your site’s aesthetic and branding, and that’s not an easy ask for something as relatively minor as a table of contents. Don’t get me wrong, I love ToCs, and they’re pretty valuable, but they’re not that valuable.
2. Secondly, it’s pretty expensive. Plak costs $295 for a single-site license, with higher prices for more licenses. The Grass theme is very slightly cheaper, starting at $245. They’re lifetime licenses, at least, but it’s still a tall order, considering you have to completely change your website.
3. Third, I don’t think it looks as good as many competing themes. The demo page for the theme has a blog post with a sample, and it seems like a basic table with some default font/links/CSS. I’m sure you can customize it, but the whole theme looks pretty basic to me. It would take a decent amount of work to get it unique enough to build a brand on, in my opinion.

Still, I wouldn’t recommend it as a realistic option, especially when other options don’t require that you spend hundreds of dollars and completely redesign your website. Such as:

Method 3: Use a Tool

Someone else was fed up with having to pay $4 a month for a table of contents, so they made a tool to generate one for you. It’s not an app, so you don’t have to pay to use it. However, you have to hope they maintain it and that it doesn’t break at any point. Still, it’s not that difficult to use.

Here’s a quick tutorial:

1. First, write your blog post as you usually would. You want it to be in the Shopify window, though if you write elsewhere and only put it in Shopify as part of the publication process, you can do that too. The key is that you want the raw HTML, not the text.

2. Next, go to the HTML view by clicking the <> icon. If you didn’t know, this section shows you the code behind the formatting and links and all that jazz. You’ll want to copy the entire HTML for your post. The tool needs the HTML to know your headers (H1, H2, etc.), pull the text from them, and generate the table of contents with the jump links.

3. Then, go to the site for the tool, which is here, at the very bottom of the page. Paste your blog post in the larger box at the top. Here, you can customize the container for the table of contents. By default, it has a 5-pixel border with some padding and margins and a pre-chosen color. You can customize this however you like as long as you know the CSS to do it. If you customize it, I recommend that you copy the CSS code into a document you can keep stored for whenever you use this tool. Alternatively, if you know what you’re doing, you can code up a cloned version of the tool for your personal use. You can also customize the list style here.

4. Once you have all that in, hit submit, and the tool will generate a new copy of your post. It’s all the same HTML as your original post, with the HTML/CSS for the table of contents added to it. It would help if you had the whole thing because your headings and subheadings now have the anchors for the links in them. So, copy the entire code, and replace the code in the <> HTML view in Shopify with the generated code.

Now, there are a few issues with this option that I see.

• You have to repeat the process every time for every post. This process includes customizing the CSS in the box because the tool won’t save it for you. Also, if you edit your blog post enough to change your subheadings, you’ll need to re-generate the table of contents or manually edit your HTML code to update that new subheading in your table of contents. This plugin generates a static element, so if you change the title of one of the jump links, you also need to update the table of contents title to match.
• It doesn’t account for scroll offsets the way the first option on this list can. If you have a navigation bar that scrolls with your site, it will cause an offset on where the scroll leads. You have to add that offset to fix the issue manually.

That’s mostly it. It’s not a bad tool, and adding a table of contents of any kind can be beneficial for your user experience, search engines, and ultimately for your conversions.

It does add extra steps and can be tedious to do if you have a detailed blogging process. I hope that somebody creates an alternative that automates this applies a table of contents to previous posts.

Hopefully, we’ll have a better option in the future, but this is one of the best options available, and it’s completely free.

Are There Other Options?

Usually, I cap off a post like this with “these are just three of the many options available” or some other way of mentioning that my recommendations aren’t comprehensive, and I can’t do that this time. As near as I can tell, these are the only three ways (short of custom code you develop yourself) to add a table of contents to a Shopify blog.

That’s it.

Until a better option comes along, this is what I’ve got for you. Now, is it worth using these options for a table of contents? Maybe. I’d probably go with the app, to be honest. A table of contents is excellent, but it’s not worth changing your theme over. The manual process would get tedious after a while, especially if you need to apply it manually to hundreds of existing blog posts. That said, the decision is up to you.

The post [Guide] 3 Ways to Add a Table of Contents to Your Shopify Blog appeared first on Content Powered.

Links are essential for SEO, user experience, content discovery, and more. Google tested a version of their search engine that ignored link metrics in their algorithm, and the results were awful. They’re the backbone the web is built on – quite literally, the strands of the web – so it stands to reason that you should be putting plenty of effort into optimizing them.

There are thousands of guides for external linking and link building, but I see relatively few people talking about internal link structure. Internal links are just as important as external backlinks, but they’re all too easy to forget about. I always make sure I have plenty of internal links and outbound links on my posts. It’s pretty hard not to do that organically, anyway.

In the past, I’ve written tutorials about internal link building, primarily in the sense of “how many you should have.” There’s no correct answer, though; it’s all about context and value. You can read that post for a rundown.

Today, I wanted to talk about WordPress plugins. There are a lot of plugins out there that deal with internal link suggestions in different ways. Some of these plugins handle your links automatically, and others work more semi-automatically. I will recommend various plugins and their features and leave it up to you to decide which ones to use.

The Risks of Automation

You’ll notice that some of the plugins I’ve recommended below are automated link plugins. These, well, automatically insert links into your posts where the plugin thinks they’re relevant. There are benefits and drawbacks to using plugins like these.

On the benefits side, it ensures that every new post you create has plenty of internal links. Even if you forget to include internal links, the plugins ensure you have at least a few of them. Some are configurable and robust, while others use their black-box algorithms to determine relevance and hope that it works.

On the drawbacks side, there are a few.

• It’s typically not a good idea to generate automatic links for Google. This is especially true of dynamic links. Automatic links can come off as spammy. An automatic link inserter might not have a good idea of context or even care about it at all. If I interrupted this list with a link to a completely unrelated piece of content I wrote, would anyone like that? Would it be valuable? Probably not, but that’s what some of these plugins can do. They aren’t exactly powered by artificial intelligence; most of them just tie keywords to pages or categories that may be a good match.
• Automatic link insertion can go overboard. You can configure a plugin to link what is an appropriate amount of times for some content, but it might end up inserting too many links in some pages and might even insert links into pages where you don’t want them.
• Some automatic link insertions may not be reversible. Let’s say that you have a WordPress blog with 200 blog posts. Suppose you were to enable automatic link insertion and misconfigure it. In that case, some of these plugins may inject incorrect links into your posts, and you may end up having to manually audit all 200 of them to undo whatever they did. That would be a nightmare for blogs with thousands of posts – at that point, you should restore from a backup.

The moral of the story is that you need to pay attention to what any automated plugin is doing and make sure it’s not doing something wildly off-base or just plain wrong. So, while I’m recommending some auto-linking plugins below, they’re far from the only options, and I would generally caution you against trusting them blindly. At the very least, review your links from time to time.

Terminology for WordPress Plugins

I’ve listed a couple of keywords for what they do and how they act in each plugin. I wanted to define them here so I don’t have to reiterate those definitions in each section.

• Automated/Manual – Automated means the plugin will insert links into your content automatically, either based on some list you provide, based on keywords or its algorithm, or in some other way. Manual means the plugin will only suggest the links to add, and you have to add them yourself.
• Contextual/Non-Contextual – This is essentially the descriptor of whether or not the plugin uses an algorithm to determine what links go where, or if it just more-or-less randomly picks links from a list or your site across the board. Most of the plugins on this list, if not all of them, will be at least a little contextual.
• Content/Non-Content – This is all about where the links are placed. Are they above or below the content, or are they in the content? These can have very different modes of operation.
• Free/Paid – This is pretty obvious; is the plugin free to install, or does it cost money to use the linking features? Some will be free with an optional “Pro” pricing, as well.

Now, let’s look into the plugins.

YARPP

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin, or YARPP, is a highly-recommended and commonly-used WordPress plugin. What it does is simple: it creates a section at the bottom of your blog posts, where it links to other blog posts on your site. You can configure it within some limits, and it will show the preview image, title, and description of the articles it links.

YARPP is automated in that it uses an algorithm to decide what content it links to from what other content. It primarily uses data from categories and tags to do this, so it’s not very sophisticated, but it still works pretty decently. It’s also one of the oldest free plugins with active development without changing its core focus.

In general, I consider something like YARPP to be essential to a modern site. It’s an easy and expected way to cycle people through your links. Even though it’s dynamically generated (and thus likely can have issues with Google indexing), it’s still potent for user retention and bounce rate metrics.

Yoast

Yoast is one of the most extensive SEO plugins out there, and for years, it has been nearly uncontested as the champion of WordPress SEO. Rank Math has been eating a good portion of their lunch lately, so I expect to see some shakeups in the SEO world.

Yoast has a ton of SEO features, so it’s a little too heavy to stand on its own when it comes to internal links. I wouldn’t recommend installing Yoast just for the linking features, but if you need all their other SEO features, you can certainly do worse.

Yoast doesn’t automatically insert links. Instead, it analyzes the content you’re creating as you create it and suggests other content on your site that you can link to in your post.

It’s contextual because it uses keywords and semantic analysis to provide these recommendations, and since it’s suggestions, you can put those links in your content.

The only downside is that it’s a premium feature, which means you need to be spending $90 per year on the plugin to get that feature.

Internal Link Juicer

Internal Link Juicer is an automatic internal linking plugin with advanced features that require a lot of configuration. It doesn’t use an algorithm. Or, instead, it does, but it requires you to build that algorithm before it starts suggesting relevant links. You have to determine keywords, assign them to posts, and essentially create an entire keyword and linking algorithm for your site. You can block and allow specific posts and taxonomies, and you can configure the number of links per post, how often posts are linked, nofollow and target options, post types, blacklist, and a whole lot more. When you dig into it, it is an entirely custom automation engine for links within your site.

These features make it both extremely powerful and extremely difficult to use. It’s one of the hardest to configure plugins on this list, and if you misconfigure it, it can do a lot of damage before you rein it in.

The plugin is free but has a premium version for $70 to get more automation and categorization. I would recommend getting the premium version because the more robust your options, the better it will work with a system like this.

Breadcrumb NavXT

Like YARPP, NavXT is one of my most highly-recommended plugins for any WordPress site. It makes internal links, but not in the way you might think. Take a look at the top of my blog post; you see the links with Home > Blog > Category > Title? Those are breadcrumbs. They’re a simple form of static internal link (so Google can index it quickly) and excellent user navigation.

The plugin is automatic (you don’t need to insert breadcrumbs every time), contextual because it pulls the category and title of the post, and it’s free. It won’t significantly impact your SEO or user retention, at least not right away, but there’s approximately zero chance that it can hurt you to use it, so it’s a 100% win to install it. It is assuming, of course, that you don’t already have breadcrumbs set up with a different plugin, anyway.

Link Whisper

Link Whisper is one of the most unique and most robust internal link plugins I’ve come across. It’s very much like Yoast SEO’s link suggestions, except it’s stand-alone (so you don’t have to worry about all the other SEO bloat or conflicts with other SEO plugins), and it’s free to get basic link suggestions. The blogger does have to insert them manually, but it’s easy to do so. The premium version even allows you to one-click insert links with anchor text already configured.

I list both manual and automatic because the free version is manual, and the paid version can be automated based strictly on keywords you configure ahead of time. I don’t know that I’d want it to automatically link every instance of a keyword, so I recommend sticking with the manual option, even if you pay for extra features.

Interlinks Manager

Interlinks Manager is designed to be more of a bulk link management tool than a link creator. It analyzes your site, identifies your internal links, monitors link juice and link status, and gives you reports on them. It has a free version that does this, but it doesn’t have any of the other features we’re looking for.

The paid version gives you two options. You can use its scraped data to recommend link suggestions based on the keywords you use in your posts. Or, you can create a keyword-based link injection schedule that adds links to your content wherever they’re used in your content.

Overall, it’s a relatively simple link manager. You can think of it kind of like a simpler version of Internal Link Juicer.

Inline Related Posts

I can almost guarantee that you’ve seen this plugin in action before and never realized it. It’s present in many high-end publications, including Entrepreneur, Business Insider, and The Wall Street Journal.

It works almost the same way as YARPP, except instead of adding those internal contextual links to a box below the post, it adds them to a container that can be placed inline in your content. You can add this box pretty much anywhere you can insert an image in the Gutenberg editor. It’s free, easy to use, and can help make your site look a little more professional; what’s not to love?

Well, it’s not particularly robust, and despite inlining the links, I don’t consider it content links. Those boxes can be ignored by adblockers, for example, and by Google in many cases. They’re great for user retention but less so for your page SEO. Still, it’s worth a shot.

LuckyWP Table of Contents

LuckyWP Table of Contents is another plugin I use that you can see at the top of the screen. See that table of contents box, full of links to all of the plugin subheadings? That’s this plugin.

Now, I’m cheating a bit with this one. While these are technically internal links, they are anchor links and function a bit differently. They take you to different parts of the same page rather than to other pages on the same site.

However, that’s not to say it won’t help your SEO. It’s great for SEO because it benefits the user’s experience. For users who want to jump to the answers right away, what better way is there than with a table of contents? I recommend this plugin for pretty much every one of my clients and anyone else who asks. I love it, and I think you will too. It’s enabled on this very blog post; you’ll see it towards the top of this article.

Your Favorites

I know I’ve only scratched the surface with this list of plugins. There are several more I know of and several major plugins like Rank Math that do the same thing as, say, Yoast. I haven’t given them all a try, though, so I’m turning to you.

Have you used an internal linking plugin I haven’t? If so, what’s your verdict? Please share with me in the comments section; I’d love to hear your thoughts and if we left any plugins out from this list!

The post 8 WordPress Plugins to Internally Link Content (Auto & Manual) appeared first on Content Powered.

If you know me or read some of the blog posts I’ve written recently, you may have noticed something. I’m somewhat obsessed with page speed. Several times recently, I’ve learned about a new trick to speed up a site, and I’ve lost six or seven hours in a day tweaking this site to implement it. I break things, and I fix them to be faster than they were before. It’s practically a way of life at this point. My friends make jokes that I won’t be satisfied until my site loads before you realize you’re looking for it.

Whenever you’re working to optimize something, you pick a starting point and go from there. Over time, you progress through the list until you wrap around back to where you started, and you might realize that the optimizations you made back then are no longer good enough.

It’s now time to reach the point with something near and dear to my heart: social sharing plugins.

For a few years now, I’ve been a big fan of Social Warfare. When I was initially starting this venture, I determined it to be one of the fastest, most responsive, and most fully-featured social sharing plugins out there, which is why it keeps making my lists of best WordPress plugins to use.

So, with a heavy heart, I announce that I have switched away from Social Warfare and have picked a new best friend in the WordPress social sharing plugin world.

Here’s the thing; when I was first starting to use Social Warfare, it was great for site speed, and the responsiveness, customization, and functionality were game-changers for social plugins.

It makes sense. We’ve all been there. You’re about to click a link or tap a button, and right as you do, the page shifts, and you end up either missing or, worse, tapping something you didn’t want to. Images loading late, ads loading, shutters; these kinds of things can be disruptive to the user experience. We hate it, and now Google hates it too.

What Do The Tests Say?

One of the foremost resources in WordPress site speed and core web vitals is WP Rocket. I will vouch for WP Rocket as one of the best plugins for a power user to optimize a site’s speed. I use it, and I recommend it to anyone who will listen, anyway.

WP Rocket has performed some tests on social sharing plugins to see how they affect site speed. They compare the plugins with an empty WordPress website with no sharing plugin installed; you can read the data and the test environment here. Your choice of WordPress themes, customization options, web host, plugins, and caching will all be factors that influence your score.

Under a basic WordPress configuration, WP Rocket’s top five picks, in order, are:

• Grow Social (Formerly called Social Pug)
• Social Warfare
• MashShare
• Social Snap
• AddToAny

My pick is on this list, but it’s not Grow Social. Why not?

This information is great if you want an objective test of the effects a plugin will have on a page or if a small plugin size is essential to you. There’s just one problem.

Who, in 2021, who cares about site speed, isn’t using caching? 

Heck, caching is one of the first things any good WordPress setup guide will tell you to implement. Caching is going to skew the results of the test quite a bit, but that’s fine. Caching is a real-world implementation, and site speed is a real-world metric. Google doesn’t care how fast your site is in isolation, and neither do your users. They want to know how fast it appears to load to visitors and how usable your website is. It’s like testing a car to see how quick it is in a vacuum; in the real world, you have air resistance to deal with, so the experiments aren’t valid.

What’s My New Choice?

My new choice of social sharing plugin is Social Snap.

It has many niche features, and a couple of them are even more effective or better than other social sharing buttons.

• They cover over 30 social networks. They ditch some fringe networks no one uses, but they still have quite a few popular social networks that you might want to emphasize, like Telegram, WhatsApp, and Reddit.
• They have highly flexible placement options: inline buttons, media buttons, the traditional sidebar, a sticky bar, and more. Customize precisely where you want your buttons to display. You can have them inserted automatically or with a shortcode. You can also use their live previews and popups to show you what your social buttons will look like before they go live on your website.
• They have plenty of styling options. The button sizes, shapes, alignment, labels, colors, and animations, are all customizable. Make them look and feel like more a part of your site than something slapped on. I use the floating sidebar, but you can also display an inline share bar (or both).
• Share media share count tracking. Most social sharing buttons either track social share counts by harvesting API data from the social network or by letting you specify the number of shares. What about sites that don’t offer that data anymore, such as LinkedIn? Social Snap can track user clicks to have a more accurate share count. It can also import share count data from other plugins so your old posts will still show the correct numbers.
• Social Snap supports data management for Open Graph, Twitter Cards, and other social site metadata. Yoast and other SEO plugins can also manage this, but I like having it in the social sharing area rather than a general SEO. You can also implement UTM tracking to monitor performance and create a Google Analytics integration.

Social Snap has both a free plugin and a paid plugin.

The paid version also has a few features pulled from other social plugins you might use, like a social locker, social login oAuth, and social media auto-posting. Those can be a pretty great bonus to roll into one plugin instead of using three or four to do it.

Social Snap has a free version with a limited selection of features, and I pay for the premium version because the advanced features are well worth it. Plus, the cheapest premium plugin – “Plus” – is only $30 a year. Pro is $70 per year, and Agency is $210 a year, though Agency is overkill unless you’re, well, an agency.

If you want the add-ons like the auto-poster and the social locker, you need the Pro version at a minimum. If you want it for more than one site, too, you need Pro or higher. Otherwise, Plus gets you everything you could need for a single website.

Why Is Social Plugin Asset Cleanup Necessary?

There’s one thing I do for the social sharing plugins that I think everyone should do. Or, instead, I think it should be a default configuration within social sharing plugins, but it isn’t – that thing is called asset cleanup. Both Social Warfare and Social Snap (and just about every social plugin) place their code on pages where social buttons are not present, triggering errors in Core Web Vitals and hurting your score.

The truth is, my decision to switch from Social Warfare to Social Snap had more to do with how lean the plugin is.

The plugin’s icon pack is more efficient, there’s more customization to tell the plugin when and where to load, and I can choose the elements I need while stripping out the non-essentials. Changing these settings was able to significantly improve my page speed and provide a better user experience. I’m a power user who is looking for a plugin that doesn’t slow down my website, and my decisions are made with that in mind.

To that end, I’ve put a lot of time into social plugin asset cleanup.

Let me ask you a question.

Probably not, right? If you were, it would be because there was a clause you wanted to draw attention to, and you’d screenshot and highlight it. That’s not even a page that has social buttons enabled on it.

So why does your privacy policy page load all of the plugin dependencies for loading your social buttons?

Asset cleanup is all about making sure your pages are only loading the necessary code and stripping plugin code from pages where they are not needed. Plugin files, scripts, hidden images; anything that doesn’t need to be there should be removed from the page code. Stripping those assets from pages that don’t need them can drastically improve your PageSpeed score.

You can do this in two ways; with a plugin or by manually locating and dequeuing those elements in your fucntions.php file.

Plugins that do this are a little hard to come by, but there are a few you can try. AssetCleanup seems to be the big one, but WP Asset Manager and Autoptimize both seem pretty good as well. I use HTTP2 Push Content and Autoptimize.

I’m going to be honest, though; I’m primarily a blogger and content marketer, but I’m also a front-end developer. I don’t always use a plugin to do all of this; sometimes, I do it myself. I’ll locate and dequeue unnecessary assets from pages that aren’t needed, and I may even tweak plugin code or inline critical parts.

It gives me more freedom to explore and experiment than using a plugin would, and it lets me figure out which plugins are creating the most bloat and which plugins I don’t have to keep as close an eye on.

Which Social Sharing Plugin is Fastest?

There are many different answers to this question, so I will run through some scenarios and choose the one that best fits you. Your decision, in part, will come down to your skill level, how much you’re willing to play around with the code, and what kinds of site speed plugins and tools you’re using.

If you’re a casual user with no caching:

Casual WordPress users who want to do the easiest thing to speed up their sites can use either Social Warfare or Grow Social. Grow Social, installed on a basic WordPress setup without any caching or plugins, is the fastest social sharing plugin.

I prefer Social Warfare between the two, for various reasons that mostly come down to personal preference and having discovered it first. You, of course, can feel free to try out whichever one you prefer and like the look of more.

If you’re a moderate user with caching but no asset management:

Using a cache system throws a wrench into testing since it will significantly improve the load time of your website and change how assets are loaded. I like WP Rocket for managing my page cache and many other speed settings, and I heartily recommend using it in conjunction with whatever social sharing plugin you use.

In my testing, I found that Social Snap works best with WP Rocket and the other caching options I’ve tested. It’s a little better optimized, and it handles some things like social sharing counts a little better. If you need to pull data locally, it’s faster than using an API, after all. Also, if you only want to use the share buttons with no sidebar, or the sidebar with no share buttons, it will only load the necessary code for those sharing elements.

The icons for each of the social media networks account for the bulk of the assets being loaded in these plugins, as Social Warfare loads a heavy icon font family.

Social Snap uses modern SVG images for their widgets, which can, in turn, be lazy-loaded and optimized. It’s much more efficient to load the visible social media icons than load the entire icon font family containing the logos of all social media platforms.

Social Snap wins here, and I had a definitive performance increase after switching.

If you’re a power user willing to manage assets manually or automatically:

If you’re like me, though, I have to say that it’s a wash. The differences between Grow Social, Social Snap, and Social Warfare are all reasonably minimal when you’re manually digging into code and optimizing them. And, either way, we’re talking about milliseconds – or fractions thereof. If all you want is to get to 90+ in PageSpeed Insights, you can likely do that with any configuration of the plugins I’ve listed.

If you’re trying to get 95+ or a perfect 100, you need to do a lot of manual tweaking. None of these plugins will likely get there out of the box in a production environment.

If you’re unsure of which situation you fall into:

If you’re not sure which situation you fall into, why not leave a comment? Let me know what kinds of optimization plugins you’re using, and I can take a look and see what situation would work best for you.

Any option on this list is likely going to work well for you. As long as you have caching enabled, a CDN, minified scripts, and other basic site speed optimizations, you’re going to be up there in no time. Advanced optimizations like using WebP images and compressing them down, lazy-loading or deferring large media, and significant changes like using a CDN, a framework like Genesis, or a speed-optimized site theme are likely to have a much more substantial impact than changing out your social sharing plugin. I’m just a perfectionist; I see a score, and I want to achieve the best possible score that I can.

The post What’s The Fastest Social Share Buttons Plugin for WordPress? appeared first on Content Powered.

In the wide world of SEO, there are a thousand different search ranking factors. Some are nearly as old as Google itself, while others are so new that they’re barely even understood.

One, which has been around for a few years but is growing in importance, is page speed. Google has offered the PageSpeed Insights tool for years, so there’s a ton of information available online about how to speed up your site.

The trouble is, most of these articles are designed to take a site from “bad” to “okay.”

When you check a site on PageSpeed Insights, you’ll see three ranges; 0 to 49 is red and is considered “Bad.” A score of 50 to 89 is orange and is considered “Acceptable.” A score of 90 to 100 is “Excellent.” Most articles about speeding up a site aim to take you from red to orange or low orange to high orange. After all, that’s “good enough” for most people and still puts you in the top 10% of websites out there, if not higher.

My goal is never “good enough.” My goal is greatness. That’s why I’ve spent hundreds of hours tweaking every little code snippet, plugin, image, and script on my site to achieve the best website performance in Core Web Vitals, PageSpeed Insights, Pingdom, and GTmetrix. I’ve put a ton of time (probably too much) into optimizing my site for loading speed, and now I’m ready to share my top five tips so you can get into the green as well.

Let’s get started!

1: Use WP Rocket

One of the essential tools I’ve found for a WordPress website is to use WP Rocket.

WP Rocket is a comprehensive speed, caching, and optimization plugin. It does a little of everything, and it does it all quite well, unlike many all-in-one style plugins. I’ve been using it for years now, and I’m incredibly impressed.

Frankly, unless your site is pretty bad, WP Rocket alone will get your site into the 75+ range. You have to have a pretty slow server, some broken scripts, or some significant issues for it to fail. Well, that, or misconfigure it.

What does WP Rocket do for you?

• One of the best things you can do for a website is set up caching. Caching allows pages to be generated and served much more quickly than if everyone had to fetch your site and wait for WordPress to pull every piece of data from your database. WP Rocket is one of the best caching systems I’ve seen for WordPress, mainly because it does more than just caching, eliminating the need for multiple plugins.
• Cache Preloading. Caching doesn’t do a lot for initial page speed or Core Web Vitals if the visitor (or Google) generates the cache first. WP Rocket pre-generates caches whenever your pages change, so there’s a cached version ready to go when a user visits for the first time. In my opinion, this is one of the best reasons to use WP Rocket, and where most other cache plugins fall flat (like W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache).
• GZip Compression. By compressing huge assets on the server and extracting them on the user’s end, you save a ton of time that visitors would spend downloading giant blocks of code. This optimization is especially relevant if you have complicated plugins on your pages.
• Code Optimizations. Javascript and CSS files can take up a lot of processing time, and one of the keys to good a Core Web Vitals score is deferring them and combining them so that they don’t delay initial loading. There are a lot of technical details I’m glossing over, but suffice it to say that WP Rocket follows modern best practices to condense, defer, and optimize your code without affecting functionality.
• Image Lazy Loading. Images have an enormous file size compared to text and scripts and take a comparatively long time to transfer and load. Smushing your photos helps, but you also need to lazy load them so that they don’t get in the way of other site elements. More importantly, it would help if you did so without it affecting your Core Web Vitals, which WP Rocket handles.

WP Rocket also works out of the box with most CDNs. Incidentally, using a CDN is another excellent idea, but it’s familiar enough I’m not making it one of my five. Suffice it to say that you should always use a CDN if you can, but pick a good one.

2: Enable PHP-FPM and OPcache

PHP is a perfectly functional framework for running a website, but it’s not exactly the world’s most optimized codebase. There’s a lot that can go wrong. It works fine for most small and mid-sized sites, but it needs something more optimized to avoid issues and downtime when a site gets larger.

PHP-FPM is FastCGI Process Manager for PHP. It’s an advanced form of PHP developed primarily to help large, high-volume sites speed up and optimize their architecture.

Essentially, rather than running PHP scripts one at a time, it enables a “pool” of workers that run them concurrently, without conflicts.

“But James, my site’s not a high-volume site. Why do I need PHP-FPM?”

Well, you don’t, necessarily. But that doesn’t mean you can’t use it. Just because the tool is designed for larger sites doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of it.

The trick is, you need to enable this with your web host, and not all web hosts support it. The best way to do this is with a dedicated server or a virtual private server, and it’s unlikely that you’ll be able to take advantage of it on a shared WordPress hosting package. If you’re trying to get a high 90’s or 100 scores on Google PageSpeed, you’re going to want the fast server response time anyway. Doing that on a shared hosting account will be very difficult (unless you have a very lightweight website).

Here’s an example of how to enable PHP-FPM with one web host, specifically InMotion. Most web hosts that support it will have instructions similar to this. Be aware that you may need to change your PHP install, especially an older version, to ensure it works with PHP-FPM. On that note, the website speed benefits of upgrading PHP to the latest version are massive.

The other aspect of this is OPcache. OPcache is server-side caching for PHP, specifically OPcode caching. It takes your human-readable PHP and processes it down into faster, more efficient, computer-readable code called OPcode. That code is then cached to process and load much quicker than if your server needed to process your PHP every time.

Many web hosts that use PHP 5.5+ should already have OPCache installed and enabled. However, it can be worthwhile to check and verify that it’s working on your server and enable it if it’s not. You can check by uploading a phpinfo file, visiting it in your browser, and doing a search for “OPcache.” It’ll tell you if it’s enabled or not, and if the cache is getting any hits.

3: Use Cloudflare’s APO

Cloudflare is one of those vast “invisible” companies that power enormous portions of the internet – but people who aren’t webmasters aren’t familiar with it or have any idea that it exists. In addition to DDoS protection and other services, they offer a CDN that is pretty much top-notch. Sure, Cloudflare has its share of drama and issues, but I’ve still found it to be an excellent service.

Most people are already familiar with Cloudflare for its advanced DNS-level features like minification, free SSL, and browser caching. More than “use Cloudflare” though, my specific recommendation is to use their APO.

APO stands for Automatic Platform Optimization. What is it, and what does it do? I can quote Cloudflare for this one.

“APO allows Cloudflare to serve your entire WordPress site from its edge network, ensuring consistent, fast performance for visitors no matter where they are. Automatic Platform Optimization is the result of using the power of Cloudflare Workers to cache dynamic content intelligently. By caching dynamic content, Cloudflare can serve the entire website from our edge network to make a site’s time to first byte (TTFB) both fast and consistent.”

Are you noticing a theme?

Here are a couple of notes about this one, especially if you’re using WP Rocket.

• You’ll want to disable the built-in Cloudflare add-on for WordPress. It’s neat, but it conflicts with WP Rocket. You’ll have to install the official Cloudflare plugin and use that plugin to clear your Cloudflare cache.
• You’ll need to verify that it’s working. Check your HTTP headers and look for “cf-edge-cache: cache,platform=WordPress”. If you don’t see it, APO isn’t working. You may be able to disable and re-enable Cloudflare to get it to work; if that doesn’t, talk to Cloudflare support for troubleshooting options. The “cf-edge-cache” tag may not show up for 10-15 minutes; it takes a while for them to store your pages on their servers.
• If you’re using Cloudflare’s Free plan, you’ll have to upgrade to a paid plan to use APO.

Overall, APO for WordPress is a powerful tool, and Cloudflare’s Edge Caching is really the primary reason to use Cloudflare in the first place.

4: Audit Your Plugins

One of the more common advice to speed up a WordPress site is to cut down on plugins. More plugins mean more code, and more code means slower page loads, right? Well, not quite. I wrote a whole post breaking down the truth of the matter, but I’ll summarize it here.

Some plugins can slow down your site, but others might not impact side speed at all, and others will speed it up. It all comes down to the plugin’s purpose, what parts of the side code the plugin touches, and where it places its dependencies.

Greedy plugins (plugins made by developers who don’t put much thought into their dependencies or how they interact with other plugins) will put their dependencies all over the place. Unfortunately, this can have a dramatic effect on your site speed in a negative direction.

Given that there are thousands upon thousands of WordPress plugins out there, not counting custom plugins you may have developed for your site alone, I can’t list the plugins that you’ll want to avoid. I give some tips for what kinds of plugins to look for in that linked post up above, but it’s far from comprehensive.

You have three options for finding resource-hungry plugins.

1. Selectively disable and test.

Check your PageSpeed. Then, disable a plugin, and recheck it. Did your site speed metrics go up? If so, that plugin is slowing down your site. You can try to fix it, defer it, or replace it. Unfortunately, this method is tedious (especially if you have dozens of plugins) and can temporarily break your site in the meantime. You can clone your site and keep one noindexed version as a testbed, but that’s an extra expense.

2. Cross-reference lists of known plugins.

A few sites out there like this one maintain lists of plugins that slow down sites. You can cross-reference your plugin list with a list like this and minimize the impact of plugins you find.

The trouble with this option is that you rely on the list to be comprehensive. Again, there are thousands of plugins out there, so there’s no single list that is entirely comprehensive. You might have plugins slowing your site down that aren’t on the list.

Additionally, some plugins slow down your site but provide necessary critical services. For example, that list above shows Yet Another Related Posts Plugin slows down your site. You don’t want to get rid of related posts – they’re too helpful for user experience, conversions, and bounce rate reduction – and it’s unlikely that another related posts plugin will do any better. But, proper caching eliminates this problem. I have YARPP installed on this post, and my site scores in the high 90’s without issues. Caching is key.

3. Use another plugin to check what your plugins are doing.

Short of digging into server logs that you might not have access to, you can use other plugins to monitor your site and generate reports. Reading these logs can help show you plugins that are causing problems.

Two such plugins include:

• Plugin Performance Profiler
• WP Control

Using these will give you a good idea of what your plugins are doing and help identify problems you need to solve. By the way, if you know of another option beyond these two, let me know, and I’ll add it to the list.

5: Use Custom CSS

I told you that I had spent dozens of hours optimizing my site, and a large portion of that time has been spent optimizing my CSS. Every last drop of speed I can squeeze out of it, I will. I’m very close to a 100/100 Google PageSpeed Insights score on mobile, and I’m going to do everything I can to hit it. Hitting 100/100 on the desktop checker is a lot easier.

What do I do?

• Inline CSS. WP Rocket does this automatically, but manually doing it is better and more comprehensive.
• Hide unnecessary elements. Especially with mobile sites, your site might try to load and then hide desktop elements, which gives you all of the speed issues with none of the benefits. Using the visibility:hidden; attribute (as I describe in this post) helps prevent those elements from rendering when they aren’t visible. Most mobile sites hide images designed for the desktop site, but those images are still being loaded, and on a slow mobile connection, that can hurt your page load times and PageSpeed mobile score quite a bit.
• Fix CLS. CLS is a cumulative layout shift. Any time you see a web page that starts to load and then shifts elements around as other elements load, that’s a layout shift. You want to minimize that by blocking out space for those elements immediately. You can read about it here.

These and other related issues are all best fixed with custom CSS. Unfortunately, many WordPress themes and frameworks don’t handle CSS in a speed-first way, so you’re going to have to go digging and tweak elements manually.

Extra Credit

If you’re already using the tips above, here are a few advanced tips that may help you push your site from the low-90’s to the high-90’s on Google PageSpeed Insights:

1. Pair WP Rocket with Autoptimize. It’s generally not advisable to mix optimization plugins, and WP Rocket is especially sensitive to this, as it does so much and has a lot of room for conflicts. However, WP Rocket works well with Autoptimize, as it isn’t a caching plugin. I like Autoptimize for a few reasons. First, it pairs with a paid service called RapidLoad, which reduces unused CSS more reliably than WP Rocket.

This WP Rocket feature is still in its beta phase, and I didn’t get the best results. It removed CSS essential to my site, and there wasn’t any easy way to allow those elements. RapidLoad is way more granular. Autoptimize is better at handling CSS in general compared to WP Rocket, though I prefer WP Rocket for JavaScript handling. I also like the Critical CSS add-on for significantly improving First Contentful Paint and Largest Contentful Paint scores.

Lastly, it does a few things that WP Rocket doesn’t do as well, like optimizing and minifying your HTML and improving Google Fonts delivery.

2. Use HTTP2 Push Content or WP Plugin Manager. These plugins can help you remove JavaScript files from specific pages.

For example, if you have a slideshow plugin on your “Gallery” page, but that plugin is being loaded on your homepage for some reason, you can use these plugins to remove the code from every page where it is not needed.

3. Use Imagify. There are quite a few image optimization alternatives to Imagify, but I like it because it’s from the same creators of WP Rocket and plays nicely with it. I’m also grandfathered into an earlier $5/mo plan. Imagify helps optimize every image on your site and converts them to WebP, or as Google it, “Next-Gen Image Formats.” It will even convert your WordPress theme images in addition to your uploads folder.

It backs up the original jpeg and png files if you ever want to roll back, and you can choose your optimization level. It’ll even resize images for you automatically. It’s a set-it-and-forget-it plugin to boost your score.

I had a hard time moving from the low 90’s to the high 90’s, and Autoptimize paired with WP Rocket is what got me there. It’s not perfect out of the box and takes some tweaking, but it’s a great combo.

Be careful that you don’t have any conflicts by enabling similar features on both. What’s strange Autoptimize was throwing a warning that there could be a potential conflict, even though CSS optimization was disabled in WP Rocket. It’s something to be mindful of if you see a similar warning.

Lastly, triple-check your site to make sure everything is loading smoothly, and adjust your CSS if necessary. The “RapidLoad” feature did a great job (99% perfect), but I did have to adjust some parts of my theme’s stylesheet. Making my element selections more specific fixed these issues (example, instead of #calltoaction, try something more granular like .single .footer #calltoaction).

It’s a pain to tweak your site at a high level like this; you’ll do a lot of cache clearing, OPcache purging, Cloudflare cache clearing, and rebuilding of your critical CSS. Once it’s optimized, though, you can leave it alone and get back to focusing on creating content.

Your Turn

Now, I offer content marketing services, but I also like my clients to show tangible results, so I often do SEO work. I write about it to help you optimize your site yourself, but if you want someone to handle it for you, consider giving me a call. I won’t just do some SEO for you, but if you want me to run your blog, I’ll make it run well as I do. Otherwise – well, I’ve given you the homework; it’s your turn to start optimizing!

The post 5 WordPress Tips to Help You Score Above 90 on PageSpeed appeared first on Content Powered.

One of the oldest features in WordPress is the link-based trackback and pingback system. They have been around for ages, and there’s a ton of content written on them, like why or how you should use them. As with any old topic in SEO, though, a lot of what is written out there is outdated. How do you know whether or not you’re reading something that still applies?

My goal with this FAQ is to demystify trackbacks and pingbacks for 2021 and beyond. What you’ll find in this FAQ is the most up-to-date information I know. It’s also meant to cover the most common questions I see asked and give you advice on how you can (or why you shouldn’t) use trackbacks and pingbacks.

If you have a question I didn’t cover below, feel free to ask in the comments. I’ll do my best to answer, either there or as an added question in the FAQ itself.

What are Trackbacks?

Trackbacks are a means of communication between WordPress blogs. They act as a form of networking.

Here’s how they work.

• I write a blog post on my site.
• You want to respond, but you want to do so in a medium where your readers can see it.
• You write a blog post on your blog, explicitly as a response to mine.
• You tell WordPress to send a trackback to me telling me about your post.
• I can then choose to display the trackback on my site, similar to a comment.

This process allows me to see when someone is responding to my blog outside of my site. It lets you notify me when you write a response, which could get a link, some engagement, a reply back, or all/none of the above.

This system is enabled in WordPress by default and does not require a plugin to activate or manage.

Note that the ability to send a trackback has been disabled in the Gutenberg editor but is still available if you use the Classic editor. WordPress essentially deprecated it because it’s nearly identical to how pingbacks function, and no one used it regardless.

What are Pingbacks?

Pingbacks are a means of communication between WordPress blogs. They act as a form of networking.

Here’s how they work.

• I write a blog post on my site.
• You want to respond, but you want to do so in a medium where your readers can see it.
• You write a blog post on your blog, explicitly as a response to mine.
• WordPress automatically generates and sends a pingback to me about your blog post.
• My dashboard automatically checks to verify that your link exists and is from an actual website.
• I can then choose to display the pingback as a comment.

This process allows me to see when someone is responding to my blog outside of my site. It automatically notifies me when someone links to me from a WordPress site and lets me utilize that notification for engagement purposes. At the same time, you get a link or engagement out of it in return.

By default, this system is enabled in WordPress and does not require a plugin to activate or manage.

What’s the Difference Between Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

If you read the two sections above, you might be concerned that I just wrote the same thing twice. That’s because trackbacks and pingbacks are very similar.

There are a few differences, though.

• Trackbacks require manual action to initiate, while pingbacks are automatic.
• Trackbacks are deprecated in modern WordPress, while pingbacks still work.
• Trackbacks show an excerpt of the content of the linking post, while pingbacks include just the title.

Other than that, they function in more or less the same way. A trackback or pingback may be generated when the content on another site links to you, and that website is a WordPress site. This x-back appears in your dashboard as a blog comment.

Why Don’t People Like Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

There are a few reasons why most serious bloggers don’t like trackbacks or pingbacks.

1. First of all, pingbacks can get out of hand with self-pingbacks. Pingbacks trigger automatically, but more importantly, they can appear when you link to your blog posts. Since internal linking is an essential part of SEO, this can get extremely tedious to deal with.

Pingbacks and trackbacks are also very commonly used for spam. Spammers will “write” “content” that links to your posts in hopes that you’ll automatically publish their pingback comments. That comment ends up linking your site to a spam site, passing some of your SEO value off to their spam, and advertising their website on your comment sections.

If you choose to deal with that problem by requiring moderation for them all, you’ll be increasing your admin burden significantly. The larger your site grows, the more WordPress sites will be linking to you, generating more and more trackbacks and pingbacks. You have to watch them all and make sure that you only consider the good ones for publication, which can be a huge hassle.

2. There’s also the issue that trackbacks and pingbacks are, by default, nofollowed links. A nofollowed link means that the link value issue above is minimized, but the value you get from legitimate x-backs is essentially eliminated. You can enable followed links, but that can make you the target for a lot more spam.

Are There Benefits to Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

Despite the drawbacks, there are some potential benefits to using trackbacks and pingbacks.

1. First of all, they are an automatic, nearly-instant way to see when another WordPress site has linked to you. While this only works for WordPress sites, it’s a powerful way to track when your posts are connected to other sites. It’s much faster than using tools like Ahrefs or other backlink monitors since WordPress sends the x-back directly. Massive backlink monitoring tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs need to index pages to find those links before reporting them, and even a scraper like Google takes a little time to do that.

2. They also act as a form of positive reinforcement. It can be an enjoyable and rewarding feeling to see a trackback or pingback appear from a relevant industry site, especially when it’s not the result of dedicated outreach on your part. These notifications are especially relevant if you aren’t using a tool to monitor your backlinks already, and thus, you may not have discovered those backlinks otherwise.

3. Another benefit is that they can provide a form of engagement that you wouldn’t otherwise get. If your blog has very few or no comments, approving the occasional trackback or pingback can make your site look more active and engaged, which can encourage further engagement. It’s a minor effect at best, however.

4. You can also use pingbacks to spot content theft. If a site scrapes and steals your content to re-post on their domain, and certain conditions are met, you can spot it.

Those conditions are:

• The scraper is using WordPress.
• The scraper has not disabled pingbacks.
• The scraper did not remove links from the scraped content.
• You included internal links in your content.

If all of that is true, when the scraper posts your content on their site, the internal links now become backlinks and generate pingbacks. You can then investigate, discover that the pingbacks are coming from stolen content, and take action to get that content removed.

Of course, a lot of things have to go right for that to happen. You’d be surprised at how much content theft doesn’t account for something like that.

Should You Approve Trackbacks and Pingbacks?

Most WordPress sites these days automatically hold trackbacks and pingbacks for review before publishing them. Keeping them in a moderation queue allows you to check where the link is coming from, what the link’s content contains, and whether or not you want it shared on your site. You can then choose whether or not to approve it and display it on your site.

Should you approve it?

There are three reasons for this.

1. Trackbacks and pingbacks have historically been used far more by spammers than by actual bloggers. Spam is why they have been deprecated and why most people don’t use them. Using them might tell people or tell Google that you’re either not aware or don’t mind using spam to your advantage, which can be detrimental.
2. They create a reciprocal link situation. With large sites that link to others in their industry all the time, there’s nothing wrong with this. For smaller websites, though, it can look like a link trading deal. Reciprocal links are against Google’s guidelines and can get you penalized in the right situation.
3. Trackbacks and pingbacks are not unique in their value and have enough risk that they aren’t usually worth it. They don’t necessarily benefit you. You can obtain the benefits listed up above in many different ways.

For the most part, every top-tier SEO pro will tell you to disable them and not worry about them.

There are better ways to do what they do, with less administrative overhead and less risk.

Can You Reduce the Spam Issue?

Two different spam issues come up with trackbacks and pingbacks.

1. The first is third-party spammers leveraging them to try to get spam links and comments on your blog. If you blindly approve trackbacks and pingbacks, you’re going to end up allowing spam that you would usually catch in WordPress spam filters.

You can help get around this by using anti-spam plugins. Akismet is my go-to recommendation for stopping most comment spam. They have their issues – which I wrote about in detail here – but they do an excellent job at catching blog spam, including spam coming from pingbacks and trackbacks. You can also use other anti-spam plugins, like Sucuri or Antispam Bee.

2. The other way spam comes up is with self-pingbacks. As I mentioned above, pingbacks generate when a WordPress site links to a WordPress site. It doesn’t matter if both of those sites are the same site. You’ll create a pingback for yourself every time you link to your content.

You can solve this by using relative rather than absolute links. For example:

• https://www.contentpowered.com/blog/what-value-added-content/ is an absolute link. No matter where it’s posted, it takes you to this page.
• /blog/what-value-added-content/ is a relative link. On my site, it appends contentpowered.com to the start of it and takes you to this page. It would take you to their domain’s version on another site, which would be a 404.

Relative links aren’t good practice. They’re harder to manage, don’t let you see pingbacks from spammers as mentioned above, and can break canonicalization. They’re generally bad for SEO and are only good if you’re doing back-end shenanigans and moving from domain to domain frequently, which you shouldn’t be doing.

How Can You Use Trackbacks and Pingbacks Effectively?

In my mind, the way to use pingbacks and trackbacks is as a replacement for more robust (but paid) services.

You can use pingbacks as a bargain version of backlink tracking. Google is better but slower, and sites like Ahrefs are way better but cost money to use. They’re worth the money once you reach a point where you’re focusing on your link-building efforts—until that point, using pingbacks to show you some backlinks from WordPress sites kind of works as a limited version.

You can also use them as a way to monitor for content theft. There are better ways to do that, too, like Copysentry, but pingbacks can work as a warning system for some content theft if you don’t want to pay for the monitoring. Not all, not even much, but some.

If you get legitimate pingbacks and trackbacks, well, use it as the basis for genuine engagement and outreach. Don’t rely on WordPress to do the work for you. Reach out to the site owner, leave comments, and build a real relationship. It’s so much more worthwhile.

I highly recommend setting up tools to do what pingbacks do badly and just disabling them across the board. It’s not worth the moderation hassle to see them.

What about you? Are you thinking of disabling pingbacks, or are the notifications helpful to you? Do you get any pingback spam? Do you have any questions for me? Leave a comment, and I’ll reply to your question! I’m happy to help.

The post Should Your WordPress Trackbacks and Pingbacks Be Disabled? appeared first on Content Powered.

Shopify is one of the best platforms available for starting up an eCommerce storefront in a matter of days. That is, from a storefront perspective. Some of the other platform features are a little less than stellar, and some are downright lacking, but that’s okay. It’s very much an introductory-to-intermediate platform, not meant for larger businesses or unusual endeavors.

One thing I like looking at when I find a new site is their blog. I’m a content marketer at heart, so I like looking for what a business is doing. Are they putting real effort into it? Are they doing the bare minimum?

With Shopify, the blog system included with their platform is very basic. Yet, there are quite a few brands out there that use it successfully. Here are fifteen that I’ve picked up and identified as having something unique, valuable, or just done well.

When I’m looking at a blog, I tend to look for some specific elements.

• How does the blog use images? Most blogs on the web don’t use pictures as much as they should. They help break up large walls of text, provide context and examples, and give posts more visual interest.
• Calls to action. Where do they place their CTAs, what are their offers, how are they pitching them? Many Shopify blogs use a similar selection of CTAs, but how they use them (including how they style them to stand out) matters a lot.
• Site design. Simple Shopify sites are pretty bland, but a few simple tweaks can make a website stand out. More importantly, custom code can open up many avenues for a brand willing to make that investment.
• Two aspects of content stand out to me; relevance and length. I’m a big proponent of long-form content, which is why all of my posts are at least 2,000 words. Many of the sites on this list (though not all) have blog posts that are at least that long. Many of the articles I write and link to are much longer. Relevance is essential as well; a narrow focus on a specific topic helps a lot with SEO. Conversely, one issue I see frequently is blogs that mash 2-3 barely-related posts into one another, convert the titles into subtitles, and call it good. It doesn’t work, in my experience.
• User experience. Some Shopify blogs layer themselves so profoundly with CTAs, ads, and plugins that it becomes hard to read the content. There’s such a thing as moderation in design, after all.

So, keep an eye on elements like this in the sites I list.

1: Skinnydip London

I have a lot of complaints with Skinnydip’s blog here. All of their posts are very short, and some of them barely have any words at all. It’s not going to show up quickly in web searches, that’s for sure. However, I like how they use Shopify’s ability to embed products directly into the blog post to showcase what they’re talking about. Considering most of their blog posts are announcements of collaborations with other groups, designers, or artists, that works out well.

What I’m pointing out, though, is the call to action at the bottom of the post. It’s a big box, colored faintly to stand out from the background, with an email opt-in. As an incentive, Skinnydip London gives you 10% off any order. Since most people visiting their site will likely be interested in shopping already, this is a great incentive.

2: Bulletproof

There are two things that I like about the Bulletproof Blog. First, at the top of each post, highlighted in gray, is an “at a glance” summary of the article. It’snot the table of contents (that part comes later), but it gives readers an overview of what they will find in the post. It’s an easy way to ensure readers get what they want out of your content.

The other is the assorted interstitial boxes along the way. In particular, the featured product boxes are an excellent way to include a graphic call to action without being too disruptive. They also have custom “related post” boxes along the way that keep interested users reading.

3: Rebecca Minkoff

This website is another example of using the feature that makes a Shopify blog unique out of the gate, featuring products inline in the blog. The linked post is a simple post about turning a scarf into a mask (from the start of the pandemic, before face masks were standard) and then selling scarves. Simple, easy, good to go.

Also, notice the same discount-for-email call to action box at the bottom of the page, just like Skinnydip. However, buried beneath the product images and above the footer, it blends in with no background or border. Highlight it, Rebecca!

4: Heinz to Home

Heinz is the company primarily known, in America anyway, as the ketchup company. Around the world, they produce a variety of different condiments, and this UK-based blog is a more robust brand presence than you might expect. It’s not even ketchup-red! And that’s part of the magic.

This website is a highly customized Shopify theme that even changes color for each recipe they post. It just goes to show that Shopify is a very flexible platform if you’re willing to invest in the custom code for some of those features. It goes a long way to improve the user experience.

5: Pixi

This site is an example of a great blog across the board. It has decent content with a good length, lots of attractive pictures, and even a custom plugin to insert charts and tables into the post. It uses the embedded products feature too.

They did an excellent job with their design and color pallets. Plus, from a marketing standpoint, it has a friendly sticky call to action at the top. It just shows that even a simple design can work well when you optimize every bit of it.

6: BestSelf

This example is a Shopify blog showcasing the various calls to action you can have on a page.

It has:

• An exit-intent/timed pop-up with a 10% off coupon if you sign up.
• A subtle bar across the top promoting a recent piece of marketing.
• A FOMO pop-up in the corner showing recently purchased products.
• An embedded product link you can use to buy the item they mention.
• A sticky nav bar to ensure you can always see their navigation in the post.

My only gripes are about user experience. Their blog topic research and content quality are both excellent. Unfortunately, they desperately need images in their post, and they could use a little more color in general.

7: Beardbrand

This website has an elementary blog if you look at it. Simple font choices, a few images, a pretty basic design. So, why is it on my list? Well, examine the content itself. This brand knows its target audience and doesn’t bother trying to be a generalist about it. They write highly focused, high-quality blog posts and let the content speak for itself. As a consequence, they rank pretty well for a lot of beard-related topics.

Heck, the post I linked is 5,200 words long. If anything, I might split it into 2-3 other blog posts and use the “ultimate guide” version as an eBook upsell, but clearly, this option is working for them, so why change it?

8: Gymshark Central

Gymshark is an apparel company for gyms and exercise. Since there’s not much you can write about gearing specifically for training for a general audience (though there are tons for specialists), this company has taken their blog in the broader exercise direction.

They have plenty of pictures and gifs to showcase the exercises they’re highlighting. They also don’t try to push their apparel too much. They’re here to show you what can be done with various activities, and if you want gear to make it easier, well, why not get it from this gym that has been so helpful?

9: Deathwish Coffee

While Deathwish Coffee doesn’t have the best topic research for attracting an audience of coffee fanatics, their blog design is quite good. Their floating nav bar at the top with their round logo popping out shows just how versatile and brandable Shopify can be with a custom Shopify theme.

Their blog focuses primarily on images with a giant featured image section and plenty of visuals throughout their blog posts. They did an excellent job matching their blog theme with the rest of the site. Still, I can tell that their blog is a bit neglected, and most of their blog posts seem to be news-related and content to feed their social media pages, instead of the quality coffee-related evergreen content we would have liked to see.

10: Luxy

The Luxy Hair Blog nailed its design and strategy. Their blog topics are spot on and attract visitors who are potentially interested in their products, and their theme is finely tuned and effective. Their calls to action are visible and attractive in their sticky sidebar, and their blog posts are loaded with helpful images.

They also made great use of the Shopify product functionality by including every product they highlighted in their blog post after the article. They titled this section “Shop the look” and gave it some attractive custom styling.

This site is an example of a Shopify blog done right, folks. Their blog is one of our favorite examples on this list of what is possible on Shopify.

If I had to nitpick something that they could have improved, their font size is a little too small. It’s set to 16px on a desktop device, which is suitable with some fonts, but their font choice is slightly hard-to-read at this size. I think it would improve user experience to increase their font size to 18px.

11: The Ridge

The Ridge is a company that sells a narrow set of accessories: phone cases, wallets, backpacks, and charging cables. It sounds eclectic until you realize the theme that unites all of them. That theme focuses on slim form factors, security, multi-functional capacity, and a slick design. Their blog reflects this in discussing those specific concerns. If you’re the kind of person who worries about, say, RFID skimming for your credit cards, they write content for you.

They are good at images, good at content, and have a good design. They could maybe use more calls to action or slightly more in-depth content, but as it stands, they’re doing quite well.

12: Huel

Huel is one of the primary competitors to Soylent as a single nutritionally complete meal replacement drink. Their blog is interesting because the blog index is more of a giant table of contents than the usual grid feed you see on most blogs.

They publish content relatively rarely as a consequence, but you can see everything they’ve created on their index. The actual blog posts are well-written, have good formatting and images, and have the occasional embedded CTA, making it a pretty robust design.

13: John’s Crazy Socks

This Shopify site is a cool one. John’s Crazy Socks does charity work with the Special Olympics, and the founder, an ambitious 22-year-old man with down syndrome, made over $25 million in the first two years of launching. They utilize Shopify and maintain an active presence by publishing regular updates.

In recent months, their blog is more focused on company news and PR than attracting new visitors from search engines, but they maintain an active presence and publish regular updates. They occasionally publish articles geared towards attracting new visitors, filled with many internal links to socks that they sell.

I love the message, their products, and their charity programs, and they effectively communicate with their audience. I feel like they could benefit from an email opt-in to build a large audience and keep their customers and visitors up-to-date, and perhaps splitting their blogs into two sections; news and blog.

14: Tushy

Tushy is a brand centered around your butt. Everything they do has to do with healthy bathroom habits, from diet to cleanliness to tools. They have a great sense of humor about it, which is a powerful source of branding for them.

They make sure to work in their products in their content (but only where applicable!), and they have a great iteration on the discount call to action at the bottom. My gripe, again, is primarily with images, in that they don’t have many. They could be creative and add more if they wanted.

15: Pretty Litter

This example is another pet-centric blog, but this one is focused on cats rather than dogs. Like the dog digest above, this one effectively explains deep, niche topics relevant to cats and cat owners, no one else. Their blog index is very graphical and compelling, and their post layout has room for CTAs on the left side, which is a little unusual and draws the eye.

They have a top banner CTA, but it’s not sticky, so it’s easy to lose. They do, however, replicate the same CTA as an interstitial box, so that works out.

Did any of these examples give you inspiration for your Shopify blog? Do you have any examples you’d like to share? Please share with me in the comments below! I’d love to add them to the list and get a conversation on Shopify blog optimization started.

The post 15 of The Best Shopify Blog Examples for Inspiration appeared first on Content Powered.

When you started your blog or business, how much thought did you put into the name you gave it?

Some people do hours of consideration before choosing a name. Some spend days. Businesses might spend weeks or months on market research to come up with a focus-tested and mother-approved name. And, of course, some pick a word and run with it.

Fairly often, this results in the eventual, slow realization that the name doesn’t work. For example:

• Philip Morris, the cigarette manufacturer, changed their brand name to distance themselves from tobacco and is now Altria.
• Kentucky Fried Chicken ditched the lengthy official name and went with the slick everyone-used-it-anyway KFC.
• Lucky and GoldStar, a plastics company and electronics manufacturer, decided to rebrand into a slicker name for a western audience and became LG.

So, sometimes it could be a chance to distance yourself from a name with a bad reputation. Sometimes it’s a rebranding to something snappier or more unique. Sometimes your business has changed enough that the old name no longer applies. In the world of web businesses, too, you might find cases where people have started a brand under something like an Exact Match Domain and, now that the company is successful, are moving to something branded instead.

More commonly, many businesses are switching to (or from) a subdomain, so their name and the primary domain aren’t changing at all. Some business owners may be tired of the CMS platform they’re on. It may even be the case that you bought a premium domain, like how GetDropbox.com became Dropbox.com.

Regardless of the reason, sometimes you want to change your brand name, which means changing the blog URL. This process is more complicated than it sounds, depending on how you’re doing it.

Determining the Content Management System

The first thing you need to do is figure out whether or not you will be changing from one CMS to another. CMS is something like Shopify, Squarespace, or WordPress, and changing from one to another involves a lot of hassle.

Part of the issue is that changing from one CMS to another might change your associated URL.

• If your site is a Squarespace or Shopify site and you want to switch to a self-hosted site like WordPress, you may need to migrate everything manually. Shopify has apps that may accomplish this, and Squarespace will need a URL Map for each new link. These are a little trickier since they are hosted in the cloud, and you don’t have FTP access.
• If you’re going from a WordPress site on one URL to a WordPress site on another, this is a much easier process. Some plugins even let you clone the entire site to the new website without ever leaving your WordPress dashboards.

There are innumerable guides around the web written for migrating from one CMS to another. Sometimes it’s supported with automatic API-fueled migration tools, and sometimes it’s a matter of “time to export and import everything and rebuild it from scratch manually.”

The difference comes down to which CMSs you’re using, so figure out what change you’re making and find yourself a guide.

Here are a few guides to start with:

The SEO Concerns with Changing Domains

The biggest concern with changing your domain name is simply that your domain name is the unique identifier for your site. Everything is tied to it. Most importantly, Google search value, link juice, SEO weight, and associated accounts are connected to that domain name.

You know that you’re changing the name, but the business is the same. Your customers know that you’re rebranding, and the new name is the old business. Google, however, doesn’t know that until you tell them in Google Search Console and implement redirects.

As far as Google is concerned, every URL is a unique identifier for the content that resolves behind that URL. A different URL is a separate page. If two URLs have the same information, duplicate content can get one of them penalized. If you move your content from one URL to another, the new one is exactly that; it’s a brand new URL. It doesn’t have SEO value because it’s new, even if the content is the same as the old URL.

Now, there is a way to preserve at least some of that SEO value. You can implement redirects. Redirects happen whenever a user lands on one URL and is directed to another to load. It happens all the time, all over the web, and it happens so quickly that most users don’t even notice it.

When you redirect – using the right kind of redirect – an old URL to a new one, some (but not all) of the SEO value of that page transfers over. It’s the one correct way you can tell Google that there’s continuity between the two sites and that it should preserve some of the value of the old site for the new site.

It’s also how a lot of mechanical web-based sources of value transfer over. You’ve built up backlinks over the years at your old URL, but those links don’t change just because your URL changes. They either break, or your redirects transfer users who click on them to your new URL.

Redirecting is also helpful to the Google bots, which record link networks and use that information to determine SEO based on backlink profiles. It’s also beneficial to users, as they don’t want to be directed to an old or broken site if a newer updated site exists.

So, it would be best if you implemented redirects to preserve your SEO.

How do you do it?

Relevant Redirects

A redirect is a bit of code on your web server that says, “actually, you’re looking for X.” So, someone might try to visit www.oldsite.com and will be redirected to www.newsite.com. Or, more specifically, they’ll try www.oldsite.com/blog/blog-post-name and be redirected to www.newsite.com/blog/blog-post-name instead.

Now, you can do this manually with 301 redirects. These redirects are simple directives, precisely like described above. Page A on “oldsite” becomes Page A on “newsite.”

Simple, right?

Well, it’s simple, right up until you realize that a website can have thousands, if not tens of thousands, of individual pages. Every product page, every blog post, every system page, it all needs to be redirected. That’s a very long list of redirects to implement.

Isn’t there a way to do this automatically? Thankfully, yes, there are several ways.

Option 1: Plugins

Depending on your CMS setup, you might be able to use a plugin to automatically redirect all of your pages, so long as you keep your site structure the same and change the domain. For example, if “oldsite” is on WordPress and “newsite” is the same WordPress setup, just using a different domain name, you can use a plugin like Redirection to implement those redirects automatically with the “Relocate Site” feature.

It’s simple, it’s easy, and it works; if and only if you’re using WordPress, going from one URL to another with the same site structure, and you’re not doing anything fancy with the migration.

Here’s a helpful guide on how to switch from one WordPress URL to another:

Option 2: .htaccess Code

Another option is to use a .htaccess file on your hosting, which is the option that is most common with self-hosted bloggers who aren’t using WordPress. The .htaccess file is a system file used by several server architectures, most notably Apache, and can manage redirects for anyone who visits your website.

The critical thing to note about the .htaccess method is that it’s relatively straightforward to use for a wildcard redirect.

What is a wildcard redirect? It’s a single redirect script that catches anything coming to your old domain and sends it to the exact location on your new website. You can also use a wildcard redirect for a few other configurations, such as catching any traffic that would go to a 404 page and sending it to a specific landing page.

By default, a .htaccess wildcard redirect will keep the same URL structure and rewrite the domain. Exactly like the hypothetical example above. The script is simple, too:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^olddomain.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.olddomain.com$
RewriteRule (.*)$ http://www.newdomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]
</IfModule>

Just add this code to your .htaccess file, replace the URLs with your old and new domains, and after some testing, you’re more or less good to go.

The trouble is, this falls apart if you’re changing your site structure too. For example, if you’re migrating between pages with completely different URLs like these two examples, you won’t be able to implement a simple wildcard redirect:

www.blog.oldname.com/blog-post-name
www.newname.com/blog/blog-post-name

The reason is that it will simply change “oldname” to “newname” and won’t reconfigure from the subdomain to the subfolder – or whatever other structure you’re trying to change.

Option 3: Manual Redirects

Your main option, if your site structure is changing – or if you’re going to lose access to the original CMS, like if you’re migrating from WordPress to Shopify – is to use cPanel redirects.

Using cPanel to manage redirects is time-consuming and tedious but can be done if you have a few simple tools to help you. Since you need to add a redirect for each URL manually, you need to create a file with all of your old and new URLs for the redirects.

Developing a Redirect List

If you’re forced to create a complete list of redirects – that is, you’re not able to use a wildcard redirect because your site structure changes – you will need to create two lists. The first is the list of all pages on your old site. The second is the list of all pages on your new website, in the same order. So:

• oldname.com/page1.htm
• oldname.com/page2.htm
• oldname.com/page3.htm

And

• newname.com/blog/page1.htm
• newname.com/blog/page2.htm
• newname.com/blog/page3.htm

To use a simple example with a relatively minor redirect but a tangible change in the site structure.

This strategy seems simple enough, but it adds up quickly when you have thousands of pages on your site. How can you do it?

First, create your complete list of pages. There are a ton of different ways to do this. I like using Screaming Frog to create a page list, though it might be overkill for this simple task or if you already have an XML sitemap. You might also be able to use your sitemap with a bit of data processing to remove any extraneous information and leave you with a clean list of URLs.

Second, run your list through a tool like TextMechanic. This tool is a find-and-replace engine that supports regular expressions, wildcards, and other quirks, making it easier for you to convert the first list into the second in bulk.

With your old list and new list in hand, merge them into redirect directives.

You can use .htaccess for this too. For example, this line:

Redirect 301 /page1.htm https://www.newname.com/blog/page1.htm

This .htaccess code works to redirect across different site structures as well. It’s not a wildcard redirect, so you have to have entries for every page on your site, but that’s why you have the lists.

You can, essentially, use TextMechanic to do a find-replace from the original URL into the full redirect string.

Additional Tips for Successful Redirects

There’s a lot to consider with a URL migration. You have a lot to think about, whether you’re doing a simple migration from a subdomain to a subfolder or a complex migration changing your URL structure completely.

First, make sure you verify your redirects in the Google Search Console. Telling Google that you’re migrating is better than letting them find out on their own time and speeds up the indexation process and confirmation, which means your SEO will be minimally disturbed.

Of course, your SEO will be disturbed temporarily. You will experience some ups and downs, and chances are you’ll lose some percentage of your rankings and traffic in the move. You can build back up from it, but you need to be prepared for that initial hit.

You should also make sure to test your redirects to make sure they’re working. You can do spot-checks manually by visiting old URLs and seeing if you land on new ones. You can also use Screaming Frog to scan your list of old URLs and see if they correctly redirect to their new home. I prefer that method because it’s more thorough, and it helps facilitate complicated migrations with our client’s blogs all the time. You don’t want to redirect 98% of your pages accidentally; using software is very helpful in spotting pages that you missed so that 100% of your pages resolve to the right place.

I also recommend setting up a 404 monitor on your new domain. These tools will notify you when anyone lands on a missing page, and you can check to see if they were trying to come from an old URL and the redirect didn’t send them to the right place or if there’s another issue.

Some people forget about their old website that they redirected years ago and let it expire or stop paying for their hosting, which means that the .htaccess file is no longer in place. I recommend leaving your old website redirects active for the life of your new website, which means you’re stuck with it for a while. If those redirects disappear, your rankings and site authority may take a hit as well.

Have you ever had to do a site-wide, structural URL redirect? Have you used plugins, or .htaccess, or cPanel, or another method I didn’t mention? I only covered the basics here, but if you have a unique migration problem that you’re stuck with, please let me know! I’d be happy to help, and your situation may help others. Please drop me a line in the comments below, and I’ll do my best to help.

The post Blog Migration Guide: How to Move Your Blog to a New URL appeared first on Content Powered.

Once upon a time, I had a business dinner with Neil Patel. We talked shop and covered a lot of different topics. I asked him what his favorite SEO techniques are, and one of his answers surprised me.

He’s used it to significant effect for both new clients and massive sites and has as much as doubled traffic using nothing but that one little plugin.

Sounds shocking, right? How can one simple little widget have such an enormous impact? Well, the truth is, it’s a powerful technique, and it’s one that I’ve firmly believed in since my early days as an SEO professional. I fully trust Neil when he says this because I’ve seen similar results. So, today, I decided I wanted to talk specifically about this plugin and how you can use it on Shopify to achieve those results.

What Does a Related Blog Posts Plugin Do?

First of all, let’s take a minute to talk about what I’m even talking about. What is a related blog posts plugin? What does it do?

Well, chances are pretty good that you’ve seen this kind of plugin used all over the web, which is why you’re reading this article. Though, some of you might not realize what this is, why you need one, or what one looks like.

I use it on my site! If you scroll down to the bottom of this post (go ahead; I’ll wait), you’ll see a Related Posts section.

That section will list three other posts on my site related to the topic in some way. In my case, they’re pulled from the same category of the article that you’re reading (posts on blogging, SEO, or what have you.) The plugin will automatically fetch similar posts from the blog to recommend them.

I’m not the only site to use these, of course. HubSpot has them down at the bottom of their posts, and Ninja Outreach puts theirs in the same place. It’s all over the web, and once you learn to recognize it, you’ll see it everywhere.

Why Should You Add a Related Posts Plugin?

Why should you bother adding something like a related posts plugin to your site? After all, aren’t you already adding a ton of internal links, so people always have options to click on more of your content? And, you know, breadcrumb navigation, sidebar links, and all the rest? It’s not like there’s any shortage of options for a reader to click through to other parts of your site to read more of your content.

Each different method of internal linking has pros and cons.

• Sidebar links are easily ignored as part of the gutter, similar to “banner blindness” that makes people ignore banner ads when they see them too often.
• Internal links typically only have an anchor text, whereas a related posts widget offers a thumbnail, drawing more attention and increasing interest.
• Breadcrumbs take people to other parts of your site, including category pages, but that requires users to know what they want to read and how to find it. People who aren’t familiar with your site or aren’t initially interested in exploring it won’t click them.
• Navigation links blend in with the site background and are often ignored, even if you’ve made them highly visible. Users also don’t click on them unless they have a purpose in mind, similar to breadcrumbs.

Related posts have one primary advantage: they’re related. A user landed on your site because they searched for a specific topic, and your site came up in the search results for that topic. They’re interested in that topic. A related posts widget then gives them more interesting content on that subject that you’ve also written.

There are a few great reasons why this benefits your site.

• It increases the time users spend on your site. Google’s algorithm seems to promote sites that have higher than average dwell times since it’s an indication that a user has found something worthwhile on your page and is spending time reading it rather than simply bouncing.
• It reduces bounce rate. One of the greatest issues with bounce rate metrics is that there’s sometimes no way to tell the difference between a user who clicked, spent three seconds on your site, and left, and a user who read through your whole post and bounced. There’s no second metric to track to measure time. A related posts widget gives you another event to follow in your Google Analytics. Related posts encourage clicking through to another page, giving you that second event and reducing your bounce rate.
• It improves conversions. It keeps users on your site, which lets you show them more calls to action. Whether it’s a Hello Bar, a shutter, a sidebar ad, a slide-in, a pop-up, or even just in-text calls to action, another pageview and another piece of content consumed are more opportunities for a call to action to work. When a user finishes reading a post, and there’s nothing else for them, what are they going to do? They’ll probably click “Back” in their browser, and you’ll lose that visitor. Keeping visitors engaged is beneficial for your conversion rate.

It’s worth mentioning that related post widgets are a bit different than your other internal links. Since it’s a widget, it’s code that generates dynamic links, which means they aren’t typically indexed the way static content is indexed. They are likely to change, especially as you create new blog posts that might be more relevant. Some apps choose related posts and keep those posts static for a while, and other plugins ask you to select the articles yourself.

It’s a good idea to understand how, why, and when those related posts show up. The WordPress-related post plugins (like YARPP) have the functionality to limit these posts to articles that were posted within the past year or match a certain percentage of keyword relevance. Either way, this functionality is something to keep in mind.

You can check to see if the apps have any granular settings like this or if you have to try to crack the case yourself.

What Options Do You Have on Shopify?

Since I’m talking primarily about Shopify, let’s look at what options you have for installing a related posts widget on a Shopify website.

Check Your Template

The first thing you might want to check out is whether or not your Shopify theme supports related posts out of the box. Some of them do, and it might be a feature you need to enable. I can’t tell you where to check offhand, so consider digging through your admin control panel (or explore the homepage for your theme) to see if it lists related posts as one of the features it includes.

Every Shopify template is different. Some templates might have this feature hidden deep in your theme settings, and others may include these as a template block that you have to include manually. Some include a very simple related posts plugin that you may want to disable and replace with something more robust.

DropInBlog

DropInBlog is one of my favorite recent discoveries for Shopify. I’ve always been a massive fan of WordPress, but more and more of our clients are built upon Shopify, and I’m slowly becoming a power user. I have to admit; I haven’t earned my “10,000 hours” expert badge in Shopify yet. I know that millions of people love Shopify, though, and I’m doing my best to share more helpful information and expert tips for Shopify specifically – hence posts like this one.

DropInBlog is a script that you can add to virtually any website framework to give you a polished and optimized blog, ready to go. The official Shopify app is a great option and doesn’t involve any manual code editing. What’s excellent is DropInBlog supports related posts out of the box. Overall, I consider it one of the best ways to run a blog on Shopify. I even wrote a more detailed review of it over here:

DropInBlog starts at $24 per month, but you need the $49 per month package to have related posts. That’s pretty expensive, so is there a better, cheaper option if all you want is the widget?

Related Blog Posts

This plugin by Digital Darts is one of the most popular plugins in the Shopify app directory. It gives you a related posts widget, and it’s completely customizable. You can choose the number of posts to display, which featured image to use, what text to say if there are no related posts, the post theme, and you can even build a blacklist of posts you don’t want to show up as related posts.

The best part is, the app is entirely free. It’s a plug-and-play app, and it’s effortless to set up. The default styling is pretty plain, so you might want to add some custom CSS to spice it up a bit.

There are a few 1-star reviews, but if you read them? You’ll get a good chuckle. There’s the usual selection of people who can’t figure out how to install it and one amusing review from someone who thought it promoted other blogs, despite never saying or implying that. Nope, it’s 100% your content, enabled on your blog.

Pro Blogger

Not to be confused with Darren Rowse (ProBlogger.com) Pro Blogger is an app from Low Fruit Solutions. This app gives readers a direct option to purchase if they like what they read. It’s a little like Related Blog Posts, but on steroids. My favorite part is that, besides recommending related posts, it can also suggest related products from your store. I’m sure this has a relatively low conversion rate compared to more traditional engagement funnels, but you know what? Even a single conversion makes it worthwhile.

The app does have a charge, so it’s not free like the Related Blog Posts app above. On the plus side, it’s one of the cheapest useful Shopify apps I’ve seen and only costs you $6 per month. Not bad.

Related Products & Blogs

This app is very similar to Pro Blogger. Zestard Technologies make this one, and it’s also one that offers related products and related posts.

There’s not all that much that separates Pro Blogger and Related Products & Blogs. I’m inclined to recommend Pro Blogger out of the two, just because the writing for the app page is a little sub-par. It’s also much less popular and has lower reviews, and it has a higher price: $8 per month instead of $6. I don’t see anything in it worth the price upgrade, so skip it, IMO.

Better Related Blog Posts

If the “Related Blog Posts” app is good, how much better is the “Better Related Blog Posts” app? Well, that depends on what you want out of the widget.

This widget is streamlined for site speed above everything else, though I have to say, it’s pretty rare that a related posts plugin significantly slows down your site. You can customize how many posts display, which of three templates you want to use to show them, and you have exclusions. In general, it’s pretty much just like Related Blog Posts. The main difference? This one costs you $5 per month. Still cheap, but when there’s a near-identical alternative for free? You may be better off with the free plugin.

They have a seven-day free trial, so you can always install it and try it yourself to see if it is good enough to keep for good.

Manual Code Implementation

One final option is to manually develop and insert code to handle related blog posts on your site. Honestly, though, I don’t recommend it. There are too many good plugins out there to do it for you, and there’s virtually no reason to custom-develop code to reinvent the wheel. Manual development is more prone to bugs and errors, it’ll be slower, you’ll have no support if it breaks, and it’s expensive and time-consuming to DIY. When possible, use a plugin, especially when there’s a solid free plugin available.

If you’re running a massive site and want advanced functionality similar to YARPP on WordPress, such an app doesn’t yet exist for Shopify, and you’ll have to develop it.

Which Option Do I Recommend?

It’s probably pretty apparent already, but I recommend using Related Blog Posts for all of your related posting needs. It does essentially everything you could want – unless you also wish to link associated products, in which case you can use Pro Blogger.

Free is just too hard to beat. Maybe that’s my WordPress loyalty talking, where you can use just about everything from the framework to the plugins for free, but I don’t like spending a monthly fee on something I don’t need to. I have enough other ways to spend my business budget.

But wait! I said “tutorial” in the title, but I haven’t given you any instructions yet. What gives?

Well, the truth is, the most challenging part of this process is learning what options you have and which one makes the most sense for your blog. You should be pretty familiar with installing an app by now, but if you aren’t, Shopify has a great guide here:

Just click the Related Blog Posts link, make sure you’re logged into your Shopify account and click the install button. It will install, and then you have to configure it. There’s not even that much to configure, either; you can choose the relationship, the number of posts, whether or not you include an image and a few other configuration options. Set those however you like.

It’s worth mentioning that you can still customize this widget entirely with CSS. If it doesn’t look good out of the box, tinker with the CSS, or pay a frontend web developer to spend half an hour fixing it for you. You can find a freelancer to do this for $50 or less, and the result will be better than an app that is $5-$10/month. Paying a freelancer for a one-time CSS improvement is better than spending a monthly fee until the end of time.

Well, folks, did you like this post? If so, why not check out one of my related posts below?

The post Tutorial: How to Add Related Blog Posts to Shopify Articles appeared first on Content Powered.

For almost a decade now, you had three options to manage your SEO in detail on a WordPress site.

• You could run Yoast SEO, the gold standard of SEO plugins.
• You could run AllInOne SEO (now known as AIOSEO). They have been Yoast’s primary competitor for a long time, and it’s a suitable plugin in its own right.
• You could run an assortment of plugins controlling individual aspects of SEO.

Each of these has had its pros and cons. Yoast has been a high-quality and relatively faithful plugin for years, but it’s had its ups and downs, including the occasional potentially devastating error. AIOSEO has been a solid standby but never entirely pushed itself to the point where it was worth switching. Running a mix of individual plugins worked but was a pain to keep updated and made it impossible to control all of your SEO from one dashboard or interface.

Why do I bring all of this up?

There’s a new player in town, and they’re swiftly putting the pressure on Yoast for number one. You may have heard of them by now, or maybe not. It’s Rank Math.

All About Rank Math

First, let’s dig into what Rank Math has to say for itself, what features it lists, and its pricing.

Let’s start with the brags. Rank Math boasts:

• 900,000+ happy users.
• Recommendations from Ahrefs, SEMRush, Moz, Backlinko, Product Hunt, and HubSpot.
• A focus on performance, efficiency, and user-friendliness.

I can verify some of this. I’ve been able to find mentions of the plugin on the listed sites, and I can tell you that their plugin indeed has a smaller file size and is more efficient than Yoast and the other comparable SEO megapacks. Nearly a million users, though – that one I have no way of knowing.

So what about the features list?

Rank Math does just about everything that Yoast does, as well as some additional features that I’ve had to use third-party plugins to handle, such as:

• Breadcrumb management, similar to the Breadcrumb NavXT plugin.
• Redirection management, comparable to the Redirection plugin.
• 404 monitoring and control, again close to Redirection.
• Automatic image alt/title text. Numerous plugins do this, though it varies in quality.
• Automatic “open links in new tab/window” is a minor feature but nice to have.
• Schema support. Yoast supports Schema, but not well; I’ve been using Schema Pro.
• Google Search Console integration. Usually, you need to use an analytics plugin to show you reports in your dashboard.
• SERPs Rank Tracker. Tracking your search ranking for critical keywords usually requires a third-party tool.

These features are the ones that I’ve identified that Yoast either doesn’t or doesn’t do very well, in my experience, poking around at the plugin. They also boast a quick and easy setup wizard, which, sure. I’ve never really had trouble installing and configuring a WordPress plugin, but I’m a power user; someone new to WordPress might appreciate it.

Rank Math also has a smaller, cleaner, and more efficient SEO panel. Yoast likes to show you a ton of SEO information, including many ⬤ icons when you don’t follow their exactingly specific directives, which is kind of annoying, especially when those directives aren’t relevant to the post you’re writing.

Rank Math seems cleaner and friendlier to use to me, though that’s probably in large part just personal inclination.

If you look at the Rank Math features page, one thing might stand out to you. They put a HUGE emphasis on schema markup. Honestly, I’m not surprised. I fully expect Google to go wild pushing Schema more heavily in the next 5-10 years, at least until they have a tried-and-tested semantic indexing algorithm, which is much further off. Schema is very helpful for telling the search engines exactly what each piece of content on your site means, which is more important than ever.

Rank Math Pricing

Now let’s talk about the pricing. Rank Math has three pricing tiers. I will give you a simplified rundown of what they include, but if you want to see the complete features list comparison, you can find it here.

Free

The free plugin is pretty powerful, at least in terms of the features they promote. It’s very functional and is probably perfectly fine for small blogs and new businesses.

It offers 18 schema setups, limited Google Analytics reports and SEO reports, most of the primary and intermediate SEO settings, data imports from other SEO plugins, and some of the advanced features like automatic image SEO, content analysis, Robots.txt control, redirection management, 404 monitoring, and so on.

Pro

Pro is the cheaper of two paid plans. What does it give you that isn’t included in the free plan?

• Advanced Google Analytics integration.
• Rank tracking for up to 500 keywords.
• The schema generator and validator (as opposed to just preconfigured schema setups).
• Schema imports.
• Advanced sitemap support.
• More frequent analytics checks and extended historical data tracking.
• Integration with other popular plugins, like WooCommerce.

That’s a pretty solid features list, and I’m only cherry-picking the most important (in my opinion) features they list.

How much does Pro cost? $59 per year, or $5 per month. Not bad!

Business

The top-tier plan for Rank Math is the Business plan. The name is a bit of a misnomer, though; it’s meant for agencies. Small businesses can use Pro with no issues. The licensing issue only comes up if the sites you’re using Rank Math on are not owned by you.

While Pro gives you unlimited personal website licenses, you can’t use it on multiple client websites, and they do a scan and check these things. The Business plan lets you put it on up to 100 client websites. If you’re a large agency with more than 100 clients, you can reach out to their support and discuss higher volume plans.

What else does it offer over the Pro plan?

• Tracking up to 10,000 keywords instead of just 500.
• Client management features, including white-label-friendly SEO reports.

That’s about it! Business is 100% meant for agencies. Price-wise, you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise since it’s relatively low for an agency/enterprise plan: only $199 per year, or $16.50 per month.

I do need to make one note about the pricing. Rank Math has a small banner on its pricing page saying that these are “launch prices” and that the introductory deal is ending soon and the new price will take effect. How soon? No idea. Is this real, or just a sales technique to make you think you’re getting a deal? No idea. What are the “full” prices?

• Pro: $129 per year ($10.75 per month)
• Business: $429 per year ($35.75 per month)

Still not too bad, but reasonably high if you’re running a small business and don’t have a lot of income or much budget to spend.

My Opinions on Rank Math

You didn’t come here just to read a rundown of what they publish on their site, right? You want to know what I think. Well, here are my opinions. Keep in mind that some of my clients use Rank Math, but I haven’t switched over to it yet. I use a combination of many of the plugins used above, some of which have more extensive options and features.

First of all, I want to mention their talk about their plugin having fewer files, fewer lines of code, and smaller file sizes, especially compared to Yoast. As far as I can tell, all of that is true, but it doesn’t matter much. The speed increases you get are minor at best for something like this (since it’s not a user-facing script in large part). More importantly, though, you should be using a caching plugin like WP Rocket, which makes all of it a moot point. I’ve never paid much attention to the file size of my plugins.

A lot of the features Rank Math offers are, well, standard. No plugin would be viable for SEO without them, so they’re included. Things like metadata handling, sitemap generation, keyword analysis, and content reports – that’s all expected. Rank Math might display the information more pleasantly than Yoast, but it’s still basically the same features.

As I mentioned above, Rank Math does offer several built-in features that I use other plugins to handle. Things like breadcrumb management, 404 trackings and redirection management, and even that “open links in new window/tab” feature are all things I have other plugins for. If I switched, I could remove a couple of those plugins. Not all of them, though; in particular, the redirections/404 tracking are better handled by the Redirection plugin, at least as far as I’ve seen.

Being able to click a button and have alt text filled out for your images is pretty handy. It’s also pretty clever how this feature works. It’s a script, so it executes when an image loads for display, and there’s no supplied alt text. It doesn’t change the stored alt text in your WordPress dashboard, so you can always go in and add alt text without having to identify and replace bulk-added text.

Perhaps, unfortunately, it’s pretty limited in what alt text it adds. For the most part, it just adds the filename for the image file as alt text. That’s great if you use descriptive file names, but if you’re used to uploading files like DSCN1024.jpg or Post245Image3FINAL(2)(2).jpg, it’s not going to help. It’s slightly better than nothing, but not by a lot. You can read more about how it works here.

Now, if Rank Math integrated image recognition and could generate a descriptive alt text, that’d be awesome, but I doubt that’s on their agenda. It’s a ton of processing power, with many inaccuracies even at Google’s level of technology. I wouldn’t expect a smaller company to try it.

Rank Math (Free) is roughly comparable to Yoast (Paid) while being significantly cheaper (at least until the introductory pricing wears off if it ever does.) That said, I don’t think Yoast is necessarily worth paying for, especially with how they segment-specific features like local SEO off in separate paid plugins, and Rank Math’s Free plan is better than Yoast’s free plan.

 If you want one plugin to handle 99% of your SEO, Rank Math is a great option. It has a ton of SEO details all in one place, with a reasonably intuitive and responsive interface for managing it all. It might be overkill for a small blogger just starting, but then, so are many SEO plugins, to be honest.

 If you want precise control of specialized features, you may be better off with the free version of Yoast, along with a handful of specialized plugins for the features you want advanced control over. That’s what I’m doing now; Yoast Free, alongside plugins like Breadcrumb NavXT, Redirection, Schema Pro, Open External Links in a New Tab, WP Rocket, and so on. This combination is the power user option. It’s not recommended for newbies because you can end up with plugin conflicts that can be annoying to resolve. You have to know what you’re doing to get it all to work correctly, but you may be rewarded with better functionality on those features.

Finally, if you decide to switch from Yoast to Rank Math, make sure to monitor your site performance. Run some SEO reports using third-party tools to check for any gaps in coverage. Check the Google Search Console directly (not through Rank Math) to ensure no new errors or manual actions crop up. Monitor your site with rank trackers and other tools for site health, site speed, and other scans to ensure nothing has broken.

Yoast has been coasting on their name and on thousands of “best SEO plugins” articles that list it as the #1 option for a long time. They’ve had a few too many significant errors and user-unfriendly decisions over the years, and now they’re going to have to shape up or lose a part of their market share. I think that competition is a good thing here.

The post Rank Math Review: Is It Worth Switching From Yoast? appeared first on Content Powered.

Schema.org is nothing new at this point. In case you don’t know what it is, though, let’s give you a quick rundown.

Schema markup is called “structured data,” and it’s a way to add code flags to specific elements of your pages. This code is metadata that allows search engines like Google to ensure that they have the correct information tagged as the right category when they index your site.

If you remember the internet ten or more years ago, you might remember that there was the occasional issue with things like product pages. For example, you’d see a Google search for a product where most of the results show it as $20.00, but one of them shows the price as $500.00. Of course, it’s nonsensical, so what happened? Someone wasn’t selling the product for 25x more than its base price, were they?

What happened is Google looked at the page and, when it tried to find the price, it found the number 500 on the page. That number was, say, the quantity of available product or the SKU for the product, or a number that was important to have on the page, but not the price. So somewhere in the indexation process, wires got crossed, and Google assigned the wrong number as the price.

It’s not a good thing when this happens. Nobody will click through to buy a product when the price is so dramatically out of line.

Schema tags were the response to this issue. Using metadata like the Price tag to flag specific elements of a page and identify them, you can tell Google exactly what each piece of information is and what it means. That way, their robot doesn’t have to try to figure it out on its own. Search engine spiders can still gather their information about a page. Still, the one in a million mistake can happen, and it’s relatively common when there are trillions of pages indexed.

One question that comes up today is, “can you use multiple types of schema tags on the same page?” There’s a little more nuance to this question than you might think, but in general, the answer is yes.

Different Types of Schema Tags

The first thing to recognize is that there are multiple kinds of schema tags, and they tend to augment one another rather than conflict.

For example, you might have a schema tag for your blog post category calling it an article and another schema tag flagging a specific article as a HowTo post. These can both be true at the same time, right? A blog post can be both a general article and an informative guide, and that’s fine.

At the same time, you can have other kinds of schema tags on the same page. For example:

• If you’re writing about jaguars, what type of jaguar are you referencing? Is it the car? Is it the cat? Is it the sports team? A schema tag can help sort that out and not conflict with the category definition tags.
• Or, think of something like a product page. Your product page can have category tags attached to it. If the word “case” appears on your page, a schema tag helps Google identify whether you’re talking about a case for a product or the brand name Case. Other tags flag specific data, like model number, price, quantity, and size definitions.

While this page, in general, will be tagged with “product page” as the available schema type, you may also have a “review” tag on there because you have reviews for the product on the page. Google can then identify reviews for that product on the page and use those reviews as rich snippets and notable search results for product reviews.

If you’re using a plugin that manages a specific kind of content on your website (such as a product pages plugin, a reviews plugin, or a recipes plugin,) you probably have multiple types of structured data already embedded – which is fine. There are just a few considerations to keep in mind.

Considerations and Concerns

There are a few things to keep in mind when using multiple kinds of schema markup on any given page.

The first is that Google isn’t going to be able to display all of them at once. The knowledge graph boxes and rich snippets they show in their search results pick a single kind of data at a time. Now, that’s for a single search engine query – different search queries with different intents can find the same page with totally different snippets! For example:

• “Product Name Price” as a search will show structured data that pulls pricing information from your site.
• “Product Name Review” as a search can pull up the same page with reviews instead.

Google even pointed this out in a tweet specifically in 2019. Here’s the tweet. It says,

“Using multiple types of structured data on a page is fine. However, keep in mind that Google may not be able to display all types together, so if you have a preference regarding a specific rich result type, try to focus on that type. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/search-gallery has more.”

The link there takes you to this page, the “explore search gallery” portion of the structured data section in the Advanced SEO portion of the Google search central webmaster resource.

The other primary consideration is overlap, mixed signals, and confusion.

Above, I used the example of a page that has both Article and HowTo tags. This strategy is good practice, as an article can be both an article and an instructional at the same time.

On the other hand, you can send Google mixed signals if you have too many similar tags. What if your post has Article, HowTo, Recipe, Guide, Review, and FAQPage schema, all at the same time? Well, Google’s going to think you’re spamming them with schema tags to try to get rich snippets on too many queries. Rather than try to determine which one is relevant, they’re more likely to ignore your rich data entirely.

That’s not to say you couldn’t potentially be all of those. You’d have to have a page with 10,000 words of content on it, divided into sections for a recipe, a review, a guide, an FAQ, and so on. While that’s possible, quite frankly, it’s probably better if you split your post into several smaller sections, each more focused on one aspect of that data.

The most common issue you’ll have with schema data is duplicate (not conflicting) schema tags. For example, let’s say you have a food blog:

• You use Yoast SEO for SEO control, and it adds a Recipe tag to your pages.
• You use WPRM (WordPress Recipe Manager), and it adds a Recipe tag to your pages.
• You recognized that schema is beneficial, so you grabbed WP Schema Pro to add the Recipe tag to your pages.

Now you have three instances of the recipe tag on your page.

I even had this issue here on Content Powered. I use Yoast for SEO, and I use WP Schema Pro for my schema needs. I didn’t realize it at first, but after running a structured data test, I noticed that I had duplicate tags because Yoast and Schema Pro were adding them independently.

As a side note, I’m starting to get miffed by Yoast. I’ve recommended it a lot in the past, and it’s a good plugin for basic SEO controls, but it tends to get a lot of nuance wrong. I’ve had many issues in the past; for example, the time it just made all of my tag and attachment pages visible and tanked my SEO until I figured it out.

It tries to do everything, and it does enough for an entry-level blogger. Still, once you reach a point where you care about specifics, it’s probably better to replace it with a handful of other plugins that specialize in different elements of SEO. Sure, it isn’t convenient to manage three or four plugins instead of one, but it gives you better control over each piece on your site and ends up better in the long run. Page caching is like that in many ways; NitroPack gets you 80% there, but to get 100% there, you need to use several different plugins instead.

Identifying and Troubleshooting Errors

If you’re concerned about your Schema data offering errors, you have two tools you can use.

The first one is the “report of record” in the Google search console. This section is the Structured Data Report that you can find in your Google search console dashboard. It’s a preview of what Google sees and indexes on your site and will show you any relevant issues. Not only will they monitor your site for your structured data integrity, but they even email you when they detect a new error. You can read all about this report here.

The downside to this report is that it only works on code that’s live on your site, and it only reports errors when Google discovers them. Unfortunately, that means you may need to publish your code and wait for it to get indexed. Meanwhile, that error is there on your live site, hurting your SEO.

The solution to this is to use the Structured Data Testing Tool. Google also offers this tool, and it allows you to test and make sure your schema is compliant and error-free. You can fetch it from a live page or paste in a code snippet directly, and their tool will process it and parse it. It’s a little less robust than the actual live report because it doesn’t take the whole context of the entire index into consideration, but it’s still helpful in detecting errors.

At least, that’s what I would say, except for one thing: Google is deprecating the tool!

I know, right? Luckily, they’re replacing it with a newer, better version of the tool. It’s called the Rich Results Test tool.

This tool works the same way; you can run a URL through it to test a live site or run a code snippet. You can also choose how Google looks at it, either as a mobile or a desktop client. Since Google is heavily promoting the mobile experience, I recommend checking that one first (though you should check both, obviously).

This tool gives you a ton of helpful information about the rich data on your site. It lets you know whether or not your pages are eligible for rich snippets. It also tells you if you have any rendering or code errors. You’ll know which rich data tags you’re already using, as well as what they are and where on your page they are. All in all, it’s an excellent tool. After implementing and testing thoroughly with this tool, I still recommend checking Google Search Console for a few weeks afterward to ensure you didn’t make any mistakes.

Using this tool allows you to diagnose any errors you may have with your site. One thing to note is that it may throw up many “errors” for optional tweaks. You can fix all of these, but they aren’t always relevant in most cases. Optional means that, while you can specify the data, you don’t have to. This situation is often the case when using a plugin that manages a specific kind of content, like WPRM for recipes. WPRM has many fields for data you might not use, like videos and the caloric content of recipes. The forms are still there and are hidden if you don’t fill them out, which means the error appears even though the data isn’t required. It’s usually fine to ignore these, though removing them or filling them out is better.

Rich snippets and schema aren’t all that hard once you get the hang of it. It would help if you thought a little bit like a robot. What does the robot see on your site, how do you want it to categorize the content it sees, and what tags can you add to tell it those categories? Give it a try! Using schema generators or a plugin like WP Schema Pro is easy enough, and the SEO boost is worth it.

The post Can You Use Multiple Schema Tags on The Same Page? appeared first on Content Powered.

One of the most critical modern metrics for SEO is site speed. That is, of course, in terms of purely mechanical things you can influence, rather than the more subjective content quality metrics. Site loading speeds have been a ranking factor for years, but they’re getting progressively more important. How are they getting more important?

Well, first, it was simple page loading speeds that were important to search engines. Then Google started adding nuance to it. They began viewing pages on both desktop and mobile and grading each version separately. With the mobile-first indexing update a while back, they’ve also started ranking sites more on their mobile experiences than desktop versions.

And, of course, the new Core Web Vitals are all narrow, nuanced versions of page speed. The latest update rolls these Core Web Vitals into page experience, which means if your site is slow, your page experience is “poor.” Trust me; you don’t want that if you can avoid it.

The primary tool we web admins can use to grade our sites regarding speed is the PSI tool, also known as Google PageSpeed Insights.

The PSI tool allows you to run a URL through Google’s servers and get a graded report on everything relevant about page speed and load times. I recommend checking both PSI and the Core Web Vitals reports.

• PageSpeed Insights
• Core Web Vitals

That said, PageSpeed Insights now includes data about Core Web Vitals, so you can get away with just using PSI if you want to.

When you run PageSpeed Insights on your site, you’re presented with a report that runs you through something like 36 different tests, looking for specific quirks of site design that can slow it down. These can be anything from using next-gen image formats to minifying scripts to the error we’re going to talk about today.

What Does “Defer Offscreen Images” Mean?

One error PSI can give you is “Defer Offscreen Images.” When you pass this audit, it shows up in green in the “passed audits” section. When you don’t, it shows up in red and offers a list of images on your site, as well as the potential size savings you could get from deferring them. The question is, what does that mean?

If you look into the description, here’s what Google says:

“Consider lazy-loading offscreen and hidden images after all critical resources have finished loading to lower time to interactive.”

They also have a Learn More link that leads to this page.

One thing worth mentioning is that this error shows up more frequently for mobile sites than for desktop sites. There are two main reasons for this. One is that mobile designs are often less optimized than desktop sites, based on themes and construction. The other is that Google is harsher on mobile sites than desktop sites, primarily because there are more mobile phone users in the world than desktop users. In addition, the mobile experience is very reliant on load times, just because of how easily frustrated users tend to be when browsing on the phone. If a user is in a spotty service area and they try loading your site, having a clumsy and poorly-optimized site is only going to lengthen the time it takes for them to render your site.

What this error means is that your site is loading images when it doesn’t need them, slowing down the overall load times dramatically. Typically, the solution is to lazy-load the pictures on your page, as Google suggests. However, you can still have this error even though you’re lazy-loading images, so what gives?

Two Causes for the “Defer Offscreen Images” Error

There are generally two reasons why you might have this error showing up in your PSI report.

1. The first is that you aren’t doing any lazy-loading at all.

What is lazy-loading? If you don’t know, it’s time to learn. When a web page loads, all of the assets on that page need to load, so the user can browse it, right? Well, that’s not strictly true. Yes, every include on the page needs to load, but you can defer some to a later stage in the process. For example, if you have assets like images way down the page, what good does it do to load them if the reader clicks a link at the top and never scroll down? That delayed your load time unnecessarily.

Enter lazy-loading. Why is it called lazy loading? You’re making the loading of those lower assets “lazy.” The files, typically images, don’t load until the user is getting close to them by scrolling.

If you have lazy-loading enabled, your initial page load times will be faster because many assets won’t load right away. However, even if you’re crunching your images correctly, their file size is still huge. These take longer than most files to load, so they still slow down your site. And, of course, the longer it takes a page to load, the worse a score you get on PSI.

2. The second cause of the error is your mobile site hiding images. A common trick for a mobile site is to hide photos that aren’t necessary on the smaller, mobile-focused version of the page. So, for example, if you have a gutter sidebar with images for a call to action in it, do those load on your mobile site?

They shouldn’t because your mobile design doesn’t have a sidebar. Mobile screens are both too small and laid out in the wrong way for a sidebar to work. However, many mobile responsive designs hide the sidebar and the images in it.

Here’s an example. Visit ProBlogger’s Blog on a desktop site. You can see the sidebars. You have the newsletter CTA, the social media CTA box, and so on, including a handful of image banners for various services.

Now, resize your browser window to be tall and narrow. Websites with a responsive design set their design based on the size of the viewport, so by making your browser window smaller, you can see it shift directly into the mobile version of their website.

You’ll notice that the sidebar is no longer visible. However, the images are still there; all of those sidebar elements are now hidden from view.

Now, ProBlogger uses a trick here. If you refresh the page while your window is in mobile view (and clear your cache if necessary), it reloads the page as what will load with the mobile version loads. If you then expand the window, you’ll see a brief flicker where the sidebar pops in, but the images haven’t loaded; placeholders load instead. Those placeholders are much smaller than the actual images, which replace them in a matter of milliseconds.

Sites that don’t explicitly use a trick here will find that all of that hidden content still loads, and it still delays site loading times, even though the images aren’t visible or relevant. That’s bad practice.

Fixing Cause #1

If you don’t have lazy-loading implemented on your site, well, do that. That’s your solution to the issue. There are, thankfully, a lot of different ways to implement lazy loading.

Native lazy loading. This feature is a relatively recent one, and new HTML versions now have a “loading” attribute attached to images. Loading is an attribute that can have two different values: Lazy and Eager.

• Lazy: The image is delayed and doesn’t load until certain conditions are met – typically, the user’s viewport reaching the point where you would display an image.
• Eager: The default behavior. The image loads when the page loads.

To use this, all you need to do is add the attribute to the HTML code for an image.

Your code will look something like this (Example from W3Schools):

<img src="/w3images/paris.jpg" alt="Paris" style="width:100%" loading="lazy">

I recommend only doing this for images and elements that are below the fold. If pictures above the fold are delayed, it affects the Core Web Vitals, specifically the First Contentful Paint. This metric is the time between initiating a connection to a site and the first significant element loading. Typically, the first notable element is the most prominent image above the fold, so you want that to load quickly.

Why doesn’t everyone use this? Well, it doesn’t work on older web browsers, or any version of Safari, at the moment. That might not be a deal-breaker, though – if it works on most modern browsers and resolves the Google PageSpeed warning, that may be all you need for some elements.

There are alternatives you can use as well. This page from SitePoint offers four other options, primarily JavaScript, that implement lazy loading. Also, if you’re using WordPress, you can generally pick up a plugin that handles it for you. This list includes several options, including a3 Lazy Load. WPRocket is also a good option.

Fixing Cause #2

If you have lazy loading enabled and it isn’t working, or there’s some other issue with your site’s configuration, you can fix the problem with CSS. Here is what I do now, and it’s pretty brilliant.

Specifically, there’s a CSS attribute called content-visibility. When it’s set to hidden, anything flagged with that CSS attribute won’t render until the browser is told otherwise. To quote the Mozilla Developers page for it:

“The content-visibility CSS property controls whether or not an element renders its contents at all, along with forcing a strong set of containments, allowing user agents to potentially omit large swathes of layout and rendering work until it becomes needed. Basically, it enables the user agent to skip an element’s rendering work (including layout and painting) until it is needed — which makes the initial page load much faster.”

This practice is ideal for one primary reason: it can tag more than just images. Lazy loading generally works for pictures and a few other large media types, but it’s not that great for scripts and various kinds of code. This CSS works on anything, including entire DOMs or large swaths of content.

Here’s an example of some code I’ve used:

@media (max-width: 767px) {
    .single .remove-lazy {
        display: none;
        content-visibility: hidden;
    }
}

This code works smoothly and is a good option as an alternative to lazy loading.

I love it; it’s clever, and it will be perfect soon. So why only “soon” and not now?

The major downside to this method is that it’s still new and experimental. The most recent reports don’t work on Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Safari at all. That said, it’s an excellent way to future-proof your site; I’m hoping that it will pick up in popularity very soon because it’s a very clever bit of code. As soon as it’s in regular circulation and the major browsers support it (and Chrome, Edge, and Opera already do), it will be a great choice.

The good news is that it will improve your Google PageSpeed score, and it will help remove the “Defer Offscreen Images” message.

Make Your Images Lazier

These tips generally indicate that your site needs to be optimized for both the mobile and desktop user experiences. It’s a constant quest to try to reach the highest score that you can in PageSpeed Insights. I’m currently scoring somewhere around 96/100 for mobile and 98/100 for desktop. But, of course, that’s with a lot of work and clever tweaks like this put into place.

Luckily, getting to 100/100 isn’t that important. Google says that you shouldn’t expect to score 100 – it’s not realistic:

“A ‘perfect’ score of 100 is extremely challenging to achieve and not expected. For example, taking a score from 99 to 100 needs about the same amount of metric improvement that would take a 90 to 94.”

Anything over 80 is fine, and the returns are pretty diminished after 90. The goal is for all of your pages to be score “Good,” which is 90 or higher.

Perhaps more importantly, PSI doesn’t necessarily tell you the whole story. PSI is what Google measures, and getting yourself optimized for Google is a good idea, but it’s not necessarily entirely on track. Your users aren’t loading your site from Google’s servers, after all. They could be anywhere in the world, using all manner of different origin points. Some people will naturally have longer or shorter paths to your servers, with longer or shorter load times as a consequence.

My recommendation is this. Start by using the PageSpeed Insights tool to identify any significant issues that might be occurring on your site. Then, make sure to check both desktop and mobile! For example, a buddy’s site I know of has a 97 for the desktop site but only 43 for mobile. That’s quite a disparity and is pretty bad for Google’s mobile-first indexing policies. Luckily, it’s not too bad to identify and fix the problems.

Finally, remember that the goalposts are always moving. Every time you make a significant change to your site, make sure your tests still pass. Moreover, every 3-6 months, you should check to make sure nothing substantial has changed. Google often makes changes to what they care about and how they measure it, and it’s always possible that they now care about a metric they didn’t before. Plugins could also update, and some of them have a pesky habit of including resources all over your site where they aren’t needed.

Lazy-loading images and other media is a great way to help speed up your site. So is using a CDN, and doing both in conjunction works very well. On top of that, using CSS tricks to help hide entire chunks of the site when they aren’t necessary – and prevent their rendering, rather than rendering them invisibly – is an excellent option.

Give this a shot, and let me know how it turns out for you!

The post Fix The “Defer Offscreen Images” Message on Google PageSpeed appeared first on Content Powered.

Schema markup is a great tool that Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft introduced to help their search engines better identify what specific site elements are. You often see it cited for sites focused on a certain kind of content. For example, a food blog can use schema markup to flag ingredients, instruction steps, nutritional values, and tags like “vegan” or “keto” on their recipes. Likewise, a review blog can flag the star or numerical reviews they create for individual sections or products as a whole.

The schema data allows Google to use it as part of a rich snippet. For example, when you search for a recipe with a specific identifier, Google will show a few rich snippets with that identifier pulled from the schema data. It’s pretty useful.

The thing is, that’s for specific niche blogs, like food blogs or review sites. What about the rest of us, such as websites like mine where I write good evergreen content?

There’s no schema markup for plain old content, is there?

Using Schema for Regular Blogs

There is! Many websites don’t specialize in recipe articles, regular review posts, or another type of traditional schema-friendly content. So while you may think of your content as generic content, there’s still a category for your content. Schema has you covered.

Many schema markup types can apply to “general blog content,” like what I often produce.

1. Article. The Article markup is a general category for pretty much any content that doesn’t qualify for another schema tag. It’s also a good idea to implement it across your entire blog, so everything is flagged as an article, even if it’s also another kind of content. So, for example, an FAQ page or an instruction guide can still be tagged as an article.

The “article” designation doesn’t reward you with unique rich snippet options, unfortunately. You can, however, set a ton of specifications, ranging from word count to the author’s info to the copyright holder. Most of these will rarely appear, if ever, as crucial bits of information in the search results. The Article tag essentially is there to identify your blog posts as blog posts instead of system pages, product pages, or other content. Thus, it’s safe to use on all of your blog posts.

There are also specialized versions of the Article markup that y can use for narrow kinds of articles. For example, NewsArticle is for articles specifically covering news (like in newspapers) and gives you an additional markup tag for the dateline. TechArticle is a specialized article for technical content that may have flags like “proficiency level” and “dependencies” that are prerequisites a user would need to have completed to follow along with the article’s steps successfully.

2. HowTo. One of the tricks you can do with schema is to use more than one flag for a single piece of content.

The HowTo markup is an excellent example of this. We’ve all written guides on how to complete tasks within our industries, with step-by-step instructions; now, you have some structured data markup that you can take advantage of for these posts specifically. It lets you flag data like the estimated cost of performing the task, the time it takes to do it, the tools you’d need for it, and so on.

A blog post can be both a general article and a how-to guide, at the same time, especially if you’re writing a longer and more comprehensive guide.

3. FAQPage. Another common sub-section of content is the FAQ. One blog post you produce could have all three of the tags I’ve mentioned! The article flag tells Google that it’s a general, comprehensive article on the topic. The HowTo tag flags a specific section of the post as the guide, and then the FAQPage tags it as having an FAQ section.

Now, Google has probably designed this to be more stand-alone for websites that have dedicated FAQs. Schema.org is an excellent example of this, with a dedicated FAQ page here.

You see what I’m getting at here. Other specific article types with unique flags are tags like the Recipe and Review snippets. These two are both common examples.

Schema can be divided (roughly) into three kinds of tags. First, you have page-level tags like the above that give Google an idea of the type of web page they’re crawling. Second, you have specific data tags that tell Google what a particular element of a page is about (like the author, or a recipe ingredient, or the dateline). Then you have site-wide tags that specify what particular elements are when those elements appear on most or all of the pages of your site.

Site-wide tags are elements like breadcrumbs. I love breadcrumb navigation – it’s such a great little tool for users, and many users take it for granted and will be disappointed if they want to find it and it’s missing. It’s also a great way to show Google that there’s a hierarchy on your site, with category pages, sub-categories, and specific content. The breadcrumb tags allow you to specify them for what they are.

Breadcrumbs are a type of markup that you add to your primary navigation elements (like the Service/Company/Contact/Blog links at the top and the menu items for each, like the pricing page and the case studies page). This markup is one of the most critical schema elements to add, simply because it gives Google information to generate Sitelinks. It also helps them efficiently understand your site structure. For example, if you search for my brand name, you see my listing has Sitelinks for, you guessed it, Service, Company, Contact, and Blog.

On blog posts, however, the breadcrumbs will usually display the category of your blog post. All of this helps to categorize every element of your site in a way that search engine bots can read with no ambiguity. It may be tedious for some custom websites to implement these, but it’s still a great idea to add them. If you’re on WordPress, this is as easy as installing a plugin such as Breadcrumb NavXT.

How do you implement these other Schema tags, though?

How to Implement Schema Markup

There are a few different ways you can try to implement schema markup on your site.

1. The first option is to do it manually. Learn enough about schema to determine which elements you want to use, figure out where on your page you want to flag those elements and plug in the code yourself. It’s just JavaScript, so it’s not all that different from tweaking or editing your site as you usually would. Assuming, of course, you ever interact directly with your JavaScript in the first place.

Those of you who spend most of your time using WordPress with plugins and never touching your code, well, this probably isn’t the option for you.

2. The second option is to use Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper. This tool lets you pick a category for a website and then paste in either the JavaScript or the URL of the page (depending on whether it’s published or not), then uses its interface to generate a tag manipulator. It will render the page in a window, allow you to click an individual element, and then tag it to tell you which schema markup to use. This tool does a decently good job of covering most of what schema will do for a general site, but it’s a bit tricky to use, and it does just output JavaScript for you to paste into your site code, which you may not want to do.

You might notice that the structured data markup tool doesn’t have some of the tags I’ve mentioned above. That’s because it’s a pretty simple tool designed for introductory-level usage, and anything more advanced should be interacting with schema directly. Remember, I’ve only covered about six elements so far; there are thousands of these, all nested in hierarchies, and it’s unrealistic to try to keep them all on your mind. So we’re just focusing on the ones that have the most impact.

3. The third option is the one I use and takes advantage of a plugin to manage your schema. One of the plugins I use is WP Schema Pro. WP Schema Pro is a paid WordPress plugin for bloggers, so it already has most of the ordinary schema tags you’d want to use built into it. It’s also straightforward to use and tag specific parts of your site with the correct schema.

If there’s a tag you want to use that they don’t yet support, you can put in a request, and they’ll probably add it in their next update. The existing tags are already pretty comprehensive, and the developers are adding more support on every update.

The most significant benefit of a plugin like this is that it’s site-wide. When you use the structured data helper, it generates code only for the page you’re marking up, but that will not apply to every page on your site. You can use it to generate markup only for site-wide elements if you want, but that leaves out most of your content, including your specific blog posts. A plugin like this just automatically flags your content according to the tags you’ve set up in the past, and it’s intuitive in configuring anything new.

Yoast SEO also supports Schema tags, though it’s not as robust or user-friendly as WP Schema Pro.

Once you have your schema tags implemented, you can go to the Rich Results Tester to validate your schema data. Just plug in your URL and choose to test mobile or desktop, and you’ll get a rundown of what schema Google detects, how it renders if there are issues, and if you’re eligible for rich snippets.

What is Speakable?

One thing you might have noticed, especially if you clicked through any of the links to schema attributes to browse their specs, is that there’s a section for “speakable” tags. What is it?

Speakable is a new sort of schema data markup that Google is currently beta testing. It’s essentially a way to flag specific parts of your content as suitable for text to speech. So, you might tag your blog post body content as speakable body content. Navigation elements can also be speakable, as someone might want to browse your site navigation using a text to speech tool.

Google says not to add speakable tags to some content types, specifically, “content that may sound confusing in voice-only and voice-forward situations,” such as datelines. They also say to only flag key points.

Remember, when a user is browsing your site looking for information, they typically skim. The same should hold with users using voice search, voice navigation, and text to speech options. They want the key points and conclusions, not all of your roundabout discussions. If they want that, well, that’s why you can convert your blog posts into podcast audio versions, as I do with that little button in the upper right.

Consider that someone browsing using a voice to text system is either visually impaired or browsing in a situation where they can’t use their eyes, such as while driving. You can assume that read time is essential, and users want to get to the point quickly.

Speakable is in beta right now, so you aren’t required to use it, and it may only give you a few minor usability benefits. In the future, it will likely become a core part of the schema system, but I doubt it will be a crucial SEO element for a while. Still, stranger things have happened.

Advice from the Experts

As I was writing and researching schema types for this article, I was blown away by how incomprehensibly huge the schema library is. We’re talking thousands of different schema types with tons of overlapping elements. You could spend months trying to find the perfect tags for every little bit of your site.

I wanted to be pretty comprehensive with my schema implementation, but I know I’m still far from how much you could implement. So, I reached out to a handful of other experts to weigh in with their favorite schema markup for their blog posts.

Here’s what they have to say:

Mark Marino

Mark Marino, an SEO for around ten years and currently working as an SEO lead at CVS Health, says that the FAQPage schema has been his best tool for blog posts:

“While Google had shown less FAQ treatment in the SERPs than when they initially rolled it out (and continues to tighten the guidelines), it’s still a big CTR win.

Before adding the FAQPage schema markup to my blog posts, they were virtually non-existent. The content markup and expanded SERP features increased the posts’ impressions, clicks, keywords, and rankings. They are visible in Google’s ‘People also ask’ area, Featured Snippets, and the FAQ headings also show up as Sitelinks in Google SERPs.

• CTR: +27%
• Impressions: +105%
• Clicks: +89%

I use Semrush Keyword Overview & Magic Tool and Google’s related searches to find the best questions to answer and mention in my FAQ sections. Yoast FAQ blocks generate the markup in WordPress, and FAQ is virtually a ‘requirement’ for all new posts.

Google will show up to 4 questions and answers in the SERP. Adding more (suggested) will allow for the expandable accordion feature in the SERPs.”

Matthew Reif

Matthew Reif, the owner of the digital marketing agency The Marketing U, says that the Star Rating schema has had the most impact on his client’s blog performance:

“I like adding star rating schema to pages that are already ranking because it helps our client’s websites stand out among the competition. Everyone wants to see what other’s say about a product or website before purchasing what they have. A recent study showed that 91% of people trust online reviews as much as they trust a personal recommendation.

One of my clients, a local Honda dealership for which we write blog content, saw a five-position jump in keyword ranking about one month after adding the star-rating schema. They also had a 66% increase in total clicks in the three months since we implemented the star-rating schema. This increase can be attributed solely to the star-rating schema.”

Rob Powell

Rob Powell likes using a Table of Contents section in his articles. While it isn’t a traditional schema tag, Google still adds jump links to your SERP snippet, so the result is very similar to adding a schema tag:

“My best little-known schema markup tip is to use a Table of Contents in your article. On desktop (though not on mobile), Google takes specific headers from your ToC and adds them to your SERP snippet as hyperlinks. These new sections make your SERP snippet stand out, and Google uses these as if they were structured data.

The hyperlinks are taken automatically from H2 and H3 headers. It’s a bit unconventional and creative, and most people don’t know about it. They can also be added automatically to every blog post.”

Jordan Brannon

Jordan Brannon, the president of Coalition Technologies and an annual keynote speaker at the Global eCommerce & Retail Forum, is a fan of adding video markup to blog posts.

“With one of our clients, adding video schema increased organic traffic by more than 140% and new visitors by over 150% compared to the previous period. You can add schema to any blog post with video using the VideoObject tag.”

Wrapping Up

There are a handful of different schema tags you can add to your blog posts. You shouldn’t add this markup to blog posts where it isn’t relevant, and you should choose where you decide to add your markup carefully. Please don’t force it, and don’t add schema just for the sake of adding it. You’ll end up confusing search engines, and it could even work against you.

Did I forget any from this list? Do you have a favorite that you’d like to share with everyone? Let me know in the comments section below! I’d love to get a conversation started here and hear what’s working and what isn’t.

The post Adding Schema Markup to Your Blog (With Expert Tips) appeared first on Content Powered.

Website load times and site speed are incredibly important metrics that are invisible until they go bad. Google has been pushing website owners to pay attention to them, from their PageSpeed Insights tool to their inclusion in the Core Web Vitals metrics.

I’ve written before about how a WordPress site can be slow, and what you can do about it. The thing is, not everyone has a site where this advice works.

Drag-and-drop website editors that create WordPress sites can be very convenient, but they aren’t always well designed. They use discrete code modules for individual features, like navigation elements, image lightboxes, slide-in boxes, and other page elements. The trouble is, while each one of those modules may be fine in isolation, they’re only designed to look good together, not work well together on the back end. They tend to have a lot of redundant code because the site builder can’t rely on their users using individual elements together.

What this means is that a lot of your standard tricks for improving the speed of a WordPress site don’t work. What kind of tricks?

• Lazy loading images and scripts.
• Deferring loading of off-screen images.
• Minifying scripts, CSS, and code.

Since you’re not able to dig into the code the page builder is using, you can’t make edits to them, and plugins don’t work with them. It’s a huge pain when you’re trying to speed up a site that you could usually just optimize by, say, slapping on WP Rocket and calling it a day.

These tips apply to the following drag-and-drop website builders (and others):

• SeedProd
• Beaver Builder
• Divi
• Elementor
• Visual Composer

There are a few ways you can work to optimize these kinds of pages, but they aren’t your usual speed optimizations. Here’s what I’ve come up with through tinkering on them myself.

Load CSS Inline

Loading CSS from an external source takes time, even if the source is local and the CSS is small. It’s faster for an initial load – which Google cares a lot about, using their first contentful paint metrics – so a minor change can have a slightly less than minor benefit to your site.

One easy way to do this is to edit your WordPress PHP files directly. Now, this might require a little bit of knowledge of how coding and PHP works, but it’s pretty easy. You have two choices here; you can edit your header.php file directly, or you can edit your functions.php file to include a function editing your header. Editing the header directly is more dangerous because you can accidentally break something and need to replace it with a backup or fresh version from your theme. The functions.php file is meant to be a sort of sandbox you can use to keep your custom code isolated from the system files.

Either way, the code you want to add looks something like this:

<style>
<?php echo file_get_contents( “/home/public_html/yoursite/wp-content/themes/themename/style.css” );?>
</style>

If you want to use the functions.php version, you can follow the instruction on this page for using a functions.php script. Make sure you edit the file path and file name as necessary to customize the code as well. Change “yoursite” and “themename” (and possibly the style.css filename) to match your theme’s CSS file.

This script executes when a user loads your page and pulls your CSS in faster than using an external file. It won’t be a huge impact unless you’re doing a ton with your CSS, like animations, but it should be at least a small benefit to your core web vitals. That is, once they update, which can take a while.

Manually Optimize Images

Images are usually second only to video and unoptimized scripts in terms of how much they can delay the loading of a website. That’s why there are so many plugins out there to automatically smush or compress images when you upload them to your WordPress page. Unfortunately, with a drag-and-drop web builder, you can’t use those plugins.

There are other ways you can optimize your images, but they’ll involve adding a new process to your content workflow. Specifically, you’ll need to use some kind of tool to optimize your images before uploading them. Here are a few options.

Option 1: Use a tool. There are a bunch of web-based tools out there you can use to optimize your images. You upload them to a tool, it does the optimization work with its software and feeds you the optimized image that is ready to download and use on your website. You can try some of these:

• TinyPNG. This tool handles PNGs and JPGs and compresses them by evening out colors in an imperceptible way. It can even handle animated PNGs if you use them. It’s free for files up to 5MB in size, which is a bit limiting if you use large photos or vectors as source files. It costs $25 a year to bump that limit way up and give you a better interface for optimizing images in bulk.
• Optimizilla. This tool is pretty similar to the above. You can drop in up to 20 images at a time, in PNG or JPG format. It’s a lighter page and gives you a before/after comparison and the ability to adjust your desired level of optimization, both of which are pretty useful.
• Compressor. A slightly more robust image compressor, this tool works with PNGs, JPGs, SVGs, GIFs, and WEBPs. You can set varying levels of compression, choosing lossy or lossless, and it handles files up to 10MB.

These are some great options, but only if you have an active internet connection and are willing to upload your images. If your images are too large, in an unsupported file type, or are private enough you don’t want to upload them, you may want to do some manual optimization.

Option 2: Manual optimization. Picking up a tool like Photoshop allows you to do a ton with images natively on your computer. It’s a little overkill to get a high-end art program just for some image compression, but if you can’t do it any other way, it works.

There are a handful of tweaks you can make.

• Change the file type to one with greater compression algorithms, typically PNG or JPG.
• Reduce the dimensions of the image to a more usable and smaller size.
• Reduce the number of colors in the image. Images with millions of colors and images with thousands of colors look identical but save a lot of space.

You can read deeper into this on WPBeginner here.

Use a Next-Gen Image Format

Do you know how long we’ve been using the same old suite of PNG, GIF, JPG, and so on? JPG was invented in 1992. GIF was invented in 1987. PNG was invented in 1996. I’d say that 20-30 years is a long enough time for an image format to get outdated and need replacing, wouldn’t you?

WEBP is the new image file type being pushed by Google. They invented it in 2010, and it’s very slowly gaining some more traction as browsers and software start recognizing it. It’s taken a while to get to this point, but it’s an option.

WEBP is essentially a new file type with a new compression algorithm that allows it to store more data in a smaller package. It can be up to 26% smaller than the same image in the same quality as a PNG. It sounds petty good, right?

The primary downside to WEBP is that it’s not fully supported. Safari and Internet Explorer don’t recognize the image format, though Chrome, Firefox, Opera, and Edge all do. More and more support is being added every year, but if you have users on old browsers, you may need to do some tricky code work to make your site serve a backup PNG to anyone who can’t render WEBPs.

Much like compressing images, you can make WEBP images manually using Photoshop, or you can use an online tool like this one to convert a file to a WEBP file. From there, you can generally just treat it like any other image file on your site – upload it, add metadata, and use it in a post.

Drop Backgrounds and Animations

One thing a lot of novice web designers like to do is create a website using one of two things; a large, complex background, or an animation.

Backgrounds aren’t necessarily bad. If you use a simple tiled effect, a gradient, or even just a simple image, they’re fine. The trouble is, a lot of people decide to create a huge image that loads in the background. That slows everything down, and frankly, most people are going to ignore it anyway.

If you insist on using a background, make sure to compress the image as much as possible so it loads quickly. Otherwise, something like specifying a color in your code will work much better and won’t slow down your site at all.

Animations are a bane as well. Sure, a website can do some very clever and very cool stuff using CSS3 and HTML5 animations, but are you doing that? Chances are if you’re reading about optimizing a drag-and-drop web builder, your site doesn’t have these less-common technologies. You’re more likely to be using embedded videos, image slides or galleries, or GIFs with large file sizes. Even something relatively simple, like adding a snowfall script to your website, can slow it down and make usability a nightmare.

I highly recommend disabling animations and replacing animated images if possible. They don’t add that much to a modern web page, and if you want them later, you can use them the right way. Until then, leave them to the people who can implement them in a low-size and fast-loading way.

Don’t Forget Mobile

Remember that the mobile internet and the desktop internet are different, these days. Oh, the same content can be accessed on them both, but the way they look and feel varies dramatically. A mobile site design looks a lot different from a traditional site design.

Google cares a lot about mobile site speed, so much so that their mobile-first update made it a priority. Mistake #1 I see a lot on mobile sites is keeping large, above-the-fold images from their desktop sites in their mobile design.

This slows down your site and hurts your PageSpeed metrics. The large image has to load to display the first paint of content on your site, and that takes ages, especially on slower mobile connections. It also hurts your site usability, since the user has to wait for the image to load before they can start interacting with your site (another Core Web Vital, time to first interaction), and it fully loading can push content around mid-tap.

Consider optimizing your mobile site to remove such large media. It’s difficult to appreciate on a mobile site as it is, so you should leave it as part of the desktop experience.

Use Server-Side Speed Assistance

There are two ways you can use server-side apps to help speed up your site.

The first is to use an app like Varnish. This is a server-side caching app that essentially renders and caches your website for delivery at the speed of the network. No waiting on servers to do things, no waiting on HTTP call-and-response cycles, none of that. It’s a very powerful app, but it can be intimidating to implement. Blame the Linux guys for that, none of them think much about user experience.

The second option is to use something like Cloudflare. Cloudflare’s CDN service essentially removes your own web server from the equation. They mirror your site on their content delivery network, so it’s always available at a high speed from a data center local to your users. Different users get the same data from different sources, though all of it comes from your site originally. It doesn’t change anything like your URL and can’t get you into duplicate content issues, it’s just a performance, speed, and security program.

Wrapping Up

To be honest, 90% of the battle for site speed comes down to images and CSS. Keeping CSS in a separate file is always a little slow, but really, it’s the images you should worry about. Removing unnecessary huge images like backgrounds, compressing the images you do use, and offloading their loading to a CDN can do wonders for your site speed.

The post How to Improve the Speed of a Drag and Drop WordPress Site appeared first on Content Powered.

Performing a full content audit on your blog (or a client’s blog) is a great way to get an overview of the blog as a whole. You can harvest the metrics of each blog post, you can analyze what needs to be improved or removed to boost your site’s performance, and you can use the audit results as a historical record moving forward.

There are a bunch of different ways marketers offer to perform a content audit. There’s not necessarily one right or wrong way to do it, so long as you know your objectives and the method you use meets them.

What I’m about to offer you is just one of many possible ways to audit your content. I’ve found it useful, but you may want to remove some steps and add others to suit your needs.

Step 1: Download Post Data

Performing a content audit is a lot easier if all of your data is stored locally, in one easy to access space. I like working in Excel, but any spreadsheet program can work for you – LibreOffice, Google Sheets, what have you – so long as you can use cell formatting with colors.

There are a few different ways you can handle downloading all of your data. If you have access to the site’s database directly, you may be able to export it, either as a natural backup file you can edit or via a SQL query to export data. If you don’t feel comfortable with queries or a direct download, or you don’t have access to it directly, I recommend Screaming Frog.

Screaming Frog is a web scraper that can crawl an entire website and harvest data about it. I like it for two main reasons. First, it works on any site, and you don’t need internal access to use it. Second, it harvests a bunch of extra data about the sites it scrapes, which you can configure. Some of that data will be useful to both this audit and future audits, such as broken link data and duplicate pages.

Screaming Frog is free for small usage, but if you want extra forms of data like spelling checks, direct integration into Google Analytics, or a crawl limit of more than 500 URLs, you need to buy a premium version. Access for a year costs about $200, but it’s well worth it in my opinion, especially if you want to use it on a large site or multiple client sites.

Run your scraper and download your data. You should be left with a spreadsheet that has basic data, including the blog post title, the URL, the metadata, the HTTP status code, and so on. This is all the general report that Screaming Frog puts out.

For a content audit you won’t need all of that, so hide (or delete, but I prefer hiding) columns you don’t need.

Step 2: Harvest Post Data

Once you have the overall post list for your site set up in a spreadsheet, you need to harvest more useful data about it. Here are the pieces of data I’ve found useful to have, but you can add any you feel are useful and remove those you don’t need.

1. Word count. You can harvest word counts however you like. The WordPress plugin WP Word Count gives you a bunch of interesting data, including word counts per post, per author, per month, and other displays. Per post is what you’re after. Sites like WordCounter allow you to paste in your blog posts and get a word count to fill in. And, of course, your favorite word processor will have a word counting feature as well. Just make sure you use the same tool for every post since different tools can count words differently.

To assist with analyzing this data, color-code the boxes. Any post with under 1,000 words, color red. Anything over 1,000, mark green. If you want more granularity, you can set a middle range (such as 1,000 to 1,500 words) to yellow, with anything 1,500 or over as green.

You can do this manually, or you can apply an automatic filter. Conditional styling in Excel is pretty easy and will adjust automatically if you change the value in the cell (such as when you edit a post to add more content, increasing word count.)

2. Organic traffic in the past 30 days. For this, you need access to your site’s Google Analytics, or whichever analytics platform you are using. Unfortunately, you need access to historical data, so you can’t swoop in and install Analytics and get your data right then. You will need to install it and wait at least 30 days to get this data.

Here, you can set your thresholds. Using a similar color-coding scheme as above, pick a range of monthly visitors that you consider to be worthwhile. For a small site, anything over 10 visitors per month may be worth keeping. For a mid-sized site, anything over, say, 50 is good. For a larger site, anything over 100 or 1,000 may be good – it depends a lot on your benchmarks. The point here is to remove posts that have very little to zero traffic.

Using 50 as an example, set any cell that has under 50 viewers in the past 30 days to the color red and anything with 51 or more to green. This can give you a quick at-a-glance overview of what posts on your site are drawing in traffic the most.

3. Total backlinks. To harvest the total number of backlinks pointing at a post, you’ll need to use a tool.

• Google Analytics.
• Neil Patel’s Backlinks Checker.
• Ahrefs.
• SEMRush.
• Monitor Backlinks.

Google Analytics is often the best choice if you have access to it, but it also might be incomplete or missing some historical data. Other backlink checkers rely on their indexes and may vary depending on what data they’ve been able to harvest.

For the most part, your data here will just be a numeral. If a post has zero backlinks, mark the cell red. If it has one or more, mark it green.

You can also do a more detailed link audit, now or later. Go through your backlinks and audit them based on their quality. Is the link from a legitimate site or a spam domain? Is the content relevant or is it just tossed in? Is it an English site (or whatever your primary language is) or a foreign site? If the link is questionable, mark the cell yellow or red depending on whether it’s simply questionable or worth disavowing.

4. Total social shares. This is a metric that you may or may not care about enough to harvest. I like to use something like Social Warfare to count the social shares of your posts. The trouble is, a lot of social networks have discontinued their APIs for social share counts, so the number isn’t going to be very accurate. You could have a ton of shares on Facebook, but since you can’t just pull that data from Facebook directly, it’s inconsistent whether or not they’re counted. The same goes for Twitter.

There’s also the fact that social shares aren’t long-term meaningful the way backlinks are. Backlinks (even if they don’t actively refer traffic) are still a factor for SEO. Social shares are not. If you choose to ignore social shares as a relevancy metric in your content audit, that’s fine. I won’t tell anyone.

If you do choose to use it, like the other metrics, set a threshold for meaningful. Maybe it’s 1, 10, 100, or whatever else. Anything under it, mark red. Anything over it, mark green.

5. Total comments. Blog comments are generally more meaningful than social shares and can be an additional value to your posts. Some people, like Neil Patel, argue that blog comments add to the overall word count of a post. Others argue that comments are generally not likely to be valuable. A lot of it depends on whether or not your blog generally gets comments like “thanks for the post” or more insightful, meaningful discussions.

For a simple numerical indicator, just make it a binary; if the post has one or more comments on it (that you didn’t leave yourself), mark it green. If it has zero, mark it red.

If you frequently get comments but most of them aren’t meaningful, you can audit those comments. Tally up not just the number of comments, but the number of them that are meaningful, based on whatever metrics you want to judge them. Again, mark posts that fail to have meaningful comments in red, and those that have some in green.

6. Quality score. No, I’m not talking about the usual quality score metrics, like what you see with Google ads. In this case, the quality score is a little more subjective, and it’s something you have to judge manually. You can either do this yourself or enlist the help of someone you trust to be relatively impartial and objective.

Pick a scale. I like 1-10, but some people like 1-5. Read through the post. Think about it. Did the post help you understand a topic or solve a problem (if you had a hypothetical problem)? Did it satisfy you? Was it boring, rambling, off-topic, or disjointed? Assign the post a value on your scale.

You can also choose to regiment this. For example, you might come up with five categories to judge the post on, such as:

• On a scale of 1-10, how well did the post satisfy your curiosity about the subject as a hypothetical reader?
• On a scale of 1-10, how well did the post solve a problem you had as a hypothetical reader?
• On a scale of 1-10, how easy or difficult was the post to read, with 1 being very dense and difficult?
• On a scale of 1-10, how valuable would you say the post is, in general?

Average out the values to get one overall value for the post, to go in your spreadsheet. Usually, six is the threshold for a 1-10 scale; anything 1-5 should be marked red, and anything 6-10 can be marked green. Again, use yellow for a middle range if you want more nuance.

Yes, this step will take a lot of time, especially if you have a very large site with hundreds or thousands of articles. The larger your site is, the more helpful it is if you establish an objective scale and enlist the help of a few trustworthy people to audit.

7. Copyscape results. In comparison to the previous metric, this one is easy. Run your posts through Copyscape. Anything that has zero duplicate results, mark green. Anything that finds results, mark red.

Keep in mind that sometimes Copyscape can come up with false positives. If you quote a passage that’s a sentence too long, Copyscape might flag it as duplicated content. Likewise, content syndication throws it off something fierce. As you analyze your posts, just check what kind of copied content comes up. If it’s legitimate, like a quote, mark the post green anyway. If it’s scraped or stolen content, mark it yellow or otherwise flag it to handle that issue later. See my post on how to handle stolen content for more details.  And, of course, if your post has stolen content from elsewhere, flag it red.

You may also want to put an additional marker or use an additional color for real instances of copied content on your site. Those are a priority to get rid of, and even if the post has other positive metrics for it, if it’s stolen, it’s a potentially huge landmine waiting to go off (if it hasn’t already).

8. Grammarly results. This is another relatively easy one. Run your posts through Grammarly and see what comes up.

Keep in mind that Grammarly has a lot of less than perfect suggestions. They love to make style suggestions that aren’t worthwhile recommendations, and they occasionally just get things wrong. This is doubly true if you use industry terms or jargon that have other meanings outside of the industry. Talking about agility as a business procedure will confuse their algorithm since the word “agile” has a defined meaning that wouldn’t necessarily make sense in context.

In any case, analyze the results and give your post a rating. Red for if the post has a bunch of legitimate spelling and grammar errors, and green if it’s fine, even if Grammarly wants to scream about stylistic choices.

9. Google Indexation status. Another easy one. Take the URL of the post and search for it on Google. The first result should be your post. If it’s not, and if you can’t find the post in Google’s search results, flag the column as red. If you can, flag it green. Indexation issues are important to deal with, but they’re also somewhat independent of other auditing metrics, so you might consider flagging it yellow instead of red as a priority to sort out.

Step 3: Analyze the Results

Now you have a spreadsheet with plenty of data on your posts, nicely color-coded to indicate if a post is in a danger zone or if it’s doing fine.

First, go through this and look for any issues you flagged as priority issues, such as copied content or indexation issues.

If a post has copied content on it, consider deleting it immediately. Google penalizes sites for copied content, so even if the post had backlinks, comments, and traffic, it’s possible that none of those metrics were benefitting your site. If the other metrics are beneficial enough that you want to keep the post, identify the copied sections, and rewrite them to be unique.

If the post is not indexed, look into why. Check for robots.txt or other bot directives that might be blocking it, or noindex flags in the metadata. Make sure it has other internal links pointing at it, and that it’s in your sitemap. Make sure there are no errors on the page. There are a lot of possible issues and solutions.

Once the priority issues are solved, look at the rest of the metrics for the posts. Posts that are mostly green are fine and can be kept around with no issues. Posts that have a few red cells might be worth buffing up and improving with better content, or they might be worth removing, in the case of time-sensitive content that is no longer relevant.

Posts that are mostly red should be examined. Is there any value there that is worth saving? A post with zero traffic and zero other beneficial metrics, but with a few backlinks, might still be worth saving. You can consider merging, expanding, or otherwise improving the post. Otherwise, it might just be better off if it was deleted.

Before deleting a post, especially a post with a couple of green boxes, you might also consider checking the historical traffic for the past 1-3 years. If the post performed well but its traffic dropped off suddenly, there might be a good reason for that. There are some explanations, like Google algorithm updates, that you can address with simple changes to get back in Google’s good graces. Others, like new competition, might be beatable if you expand the content to exceed the competition. Still, others might not be worth fighting for – ultimately that’s a judgment that you need to make for yourself after reading each post and determining if the post is actually helpful or just full of fluff.

Overall, a content audit ends up being a lot of work, most of which is subjective. There are a few tools out there that can help you, but there’s no substitute for human judgment. Analyze your posts, decide if they’re worth keeping, figure out what’s working the best for your site, and adjust accordingly.

The post How to Perform a Blog Content Audit (The Right Way) appeared first on Content Powered.

Most of the time, when I’m writing a post for this blog, I’m assuming my readers have at least a passing familiarity with the industry or the subject I’m writing about. Sometimes, though, it’s worthwhile to reexamine that assumption and teach something that most of us take for granted or “just know.”

In this case, one thing I want to discuss and reexamine is the concept of unsolicited guest posting requests. It’s a common occurrence, and most of us bloggers dismiss it out of hand, but it occurs to me that a lot of newcomers to blogging might not know what the deal is and why we ignore it.

So, let’s talk about it!

The Phenomenon

First, I want to describe the phenomenon in question. You own a business, and you’re starting a blog. Maybe you’ve been running it for a few months, or maybe a year or so, but you’re starting to pick up steam. You’re getting daily visitors. You’ve got all the trappings of a good blog established, and that means you have contact information on your page.

So you’re checking your email, and you’re noticing something.

You’re getting a lot of emails that look a little something like this example from BlogClarity:

As an avid blogger, your blog [blog name] has been a great resource for all blogging queries. I especially like your post, “Title of Recent Blog Post,” great suggestions for visual, navigation and content to keep in mind for my blog!

On behalf of my client NAME, I would like to send you a piece to read about, “Unrelated Blog Post Topic” complete with tips on how to promote your blog through hosting themed parties and events. The content will be offered exclusively for the YourBrand blog and will be crafted to harmonize with your voice and values.

Furthermore, it will be insightful and practical, NOT advertorial. If this is something you think you and your readers would be interested in I would be happy to send you the post to read in which you can determine whether or not it is a good fit for your audience.

Or, you know, something like it. There are a ton of different variations to this pitch, but the core message is always the same:

• “I found your blog and like it.”
• “I have a blog in a similar niche.”
• “I would like to publish content on your blog with a link to my own in it.”

Some of them might go deeper on the value proposition. Some of them might be on the behalf of a client, while others are for themselves. Some of them will take pains to point out something specific and relevant with their posts, though most will not. Some won’t even link to the blog they want you to promote.

So, what’s going on here?

What’s Going On Here?

To adequately describe what’s going on, we need to dig into the history of guest posting a little bit.

Guest posting is a form of blog networking. You as a blog owner approach another blog owner. You say “hey, I like your stuff, and I think I’d be a good fit to write something for your blog. Up for it?” However you decide to couch the proposition, it’s always the same.

The goal is simple. The other blog has an audience that is different from your audience, but in the same industry and topic, around the same size or larger.

By writing content for that blog, you gain quite a bit of value.

• You gain exposure to their audience, building brand awareness for your website and author awareness for you personally.
• You get a link on their site. This can refer traffic to your site and, if it’s not set to rel="nofollow", it can give your website some extra SEO value and authority.
• You gain a networking connection with the blog owner. If the post performs well for them, you can leverage this for future opportunities and partnerships.
• You open the door to a reciprocal post; they write something for you, with a link to their site, and return the favor.

All of this is valuable to your site. While the traffic you get out of guest posting might be questionable, there are a ton of variations on the technique and the value you get out of it. More importantly, like normal blogging, it’s a long-term prospect. The incremental value you get out of a single guest post compounds as you leverage your growing reputation to work with other, larger bloggers, and eventually, work your way up to major sites in your industry.

It was so bad for a while that the official representative of Google’s WebSpam team, Matt Cutts, wrote a post decrying it and saying “guest blogging is dead“.

Millions of words online have been written about how this is both true and false, about how Cutts was only referring to low-quality guest posting, how to go about guest blogging in a reputable and high-quality way, and on and on.

If you read that Matt Cutts blog post, you’ll see something interesting. He has an example of a spammy blog outreach email in his post that looks suspiciously like the one above. He wrote that post seven years ago and, while the industry has changed a lot, it’s still relevant today.

Here’s the truth about guest blogging today:

This is why the requests are so generic and formulaic; they’re wide-spread scattershot in every site the spammer can find with a contact form. That’s why you get hundreds or thousands of those emails; the spammers use bots to “automate outreach” or they hire a shady outreach service to do it for them. That’s why we all ignore them; they’re almost always low-quality requests from low-quality websites.

Now, are there some genuine requests in there? Rarely, but every once in a while, maybe. After all, if you want to reach out to a blog owner, how are you going to do it? Probably through their contact form.

Why are these people reaching out to you? It’s not because they like and admire your site, especially if you’re a small company with a small blog and a small readership. No, all they see is that you’re a site in good standing with Google and from a relevant industry.

They’re in it for the numbers. If they can get 100 people to publish their crap, they get a temporary boost to their SEO and may get some traffic to promote their affiliate links, or they run some ads to monetize their site.

What Are the Benefits of Saying Yes?

I get it; some of these pitches can be quite tempting. I ran a site for a long time specifically dedicated to guest posting. I know all of the tricks and techniques to use to get someone to say yes to a guest post. It’s a great value proposition, after all, and that’s why so many people are trying to get it.

So, let’s look at the potential benefits and the potential risks of saying yes.

First, the benefits.

• You get free content for your site. I’m a blog manager; I know how difficult it can be to produce enough content to fill an editorial calendar with a regular schedule. Having a slot filled with free content sounds great at first.
• You might get some promotion in return. Some of these offers are reciprocal; they graciously allow you to write content for their site and get a link in return. Seems nice, right?
• You might get paid. No small number of these guest post spammers out there will offer some kind of compensation for the guest posting slot, usually some money. Usually, this is between $5 and $50, depending on the size of your site.

Seems alright at first glance. Let’s get into some of the downsides.

What Are the Risks of Publishing Them?

There are quite a few risks to publishing unsolicited guest posts on your site.

Here are some of the most critical things to consider:

• The content you promise to publish could hurt your site. It might be spun content. It might be extremely generic content they bought for $5 from Textbroker. It might be plagiarized from another site that has already published this content.
• Most of the content you’ll get from them is going to be valueless. At least 99% of the time, the sites asking for you to publish their guest posts are extremely low quality, if not outright spam. Many of them are sandboxed or blacklisted by Google, so they’re giving you at best zero SEO value.
• The site might not even be real. Many times, these sites are a part of a private blog network. They’re drawing your SEO value into their network, making themselves look less sketchy, essentially “laundering” link juice through you. This even has the potential to backfire and drag your site down with you if their PBN is penalized. More on that in a bit.
• Their link might not be relevant to your site. Most of the time, these guest blog spammers aren’t even looking at what your website is about – they’re using software to scrape millions of websites. Look at the website they want to promote – if it has nothing to do with your industry, it’s safe to ignore.
• The links look spammy. Google is very good at determining when a website links to a source naturally to cite their facts, and when they’re linking to a website for SEO value. If there are keyword-match links like “buy scuba equipment” or “cheap CBD vapes”, it’s obvious what keyword they’re trying to rank for, and it’s obvious to Google as well. If your editorial process overlooks this and publishes this kind of spam, it does not reflect well on you.
• Your traffic could drop. In some cases, the website you’re linking to can be actively detrimental and can result in a penalty. This is what is known as a bad link neighborhood. If Google penalizes a large group of websites linking to a spam site with the same keyword, and you’re part of that group, you could get caught up in this link scheme. If you search around a bit on Google, you’ll find plenty of examples of sites that saw massive drops in traffic and business after publishing a guest post like this.

At best, you get a neutral or valueless link, some generic content that won’t drive any traffic, and maybe $15. At worst, your site is penalized by Google for violating the Webmaster Guidelines, and you’ll have to work to audit and delete the offending content in hopes of lifting the penalty.

If it sounds to you like the person emailing is probably getting the better end of the deal, you would be correct.

Should You Ignore Guest Posts Emails?

Remember how up above I talked about how guest posting is a valuable strategy, and then I mentioned how the legitimate channels for guest posting are identical to those used by spammers? Yes, that’s a conundrum. What if there’s a legitimately valuable outreach opportunity buried in that pile of emails?

It’s a 1 in 10,000 chance, but sure, it can happen. And, again, I ran a business focused on guest posting for a long time. I know there’s real value in it and real people do it.

Between the sites I manage, they yield tens of millions of visitors per year. Among all of them, over the past 10 years, I can only think of one legitimate guest blogger who submitted quality content and who wasn’t trying to spam. Thanks, Devesh Sharma!

The other emails were all spam.

The trick is, it’s an advanced technique. It’s something experienced content marketers should handle, not newcomers to blogging. It’s not something you should just blindly believe out of your inbox. You don’t believe in the Nigerian prince who has a million-dollar check to give you, and you shouldn’t believe in the myth of endless quality content for free, either.

If you want to avoid missing any of these opportunities, it’s going to be a lot of work. I bet you’ll get tired of it before you get a solid lead, but hey, maybe I’m wrong and you have a good one sitting there already. If you want to check and filter them, here’s how.

1. Read through the email. Is it appropriately personalized, showing knowledge of who you are and what you write? Or does it feel more like a form letter with a few blanks filled in for your brand? Did they address you by name, or did they say “Hi there”? Is their email from a company email address that matches their website, or is it a Gmail account with a fake name created for spam?
2. Consider the pitch. Was the article already written and attached in the email, or are they pitching you an idea? Guest blog spammers are most likely to already have content written up to serve their purposes.
3. If it passes the sniff test, does it specify what site it’s representing? If they’re asking for a link, what site are they linking to? If they aren’t asking for anything in return, do they still mention who they are? If not, disregard them.
4. Look at the site they’re promoting. If you search for it on Google, do any results show up, or is it deindexed?
5. Run their domain through analysis; what is the Domain Authority? What kind of backlinks do they have? What’s their spam quotient?
6. What does their site look like? Do they have a logo? Do they include unique images, or just stock photos or photos stolen from Google image search?
7. Look at the sites they link to. Are they unrelated? Are they just other vaguely-related blogs like yours? Or are they high-quality sources with facts and information supporting their posts?
8. Look up the author. Do they have a social media presence? Do they show up on other sites, and what quality are those sites? Did they make up a fake name and email?
9. Read the content from start to finish. Check it for plagiarism with Copyscape. Does it come up as plagiarized or stolen? See if it’s above the average word count. Check it on Grammarly to see if it has errors. I have some gripes with Grammarly and their false-positives, but it will light up like a Christmas tree for garbage content. How well does it read? Did it teach you something? Is the topic too generic, or tightly focused on something relevant to your audience?
10. Check all of the links in the guest post. The sole reason spammers send these emails is to promote their website, so see if you can find it. Guest blog spammers love linking to homepages primarily, but also to product and services pages. Can you find any spam links, or are they all linking to quality pages to cite their facts?

If they pass all of the above, it might be worth considering. Over 99% of the time, you’ll find it fails most (or all) of these checks.

I would wager that every single email you get asking about a guest post is going to fail these checks. I also guess that you’re going to get tired of scanning through them when they all fail over and over.

What About Real Guest Posts?

Now, let’s say you want to leave the channel open for guest posting, but you don’t want to go through all of this trouble reading unsolicited messages. What can you do?

My recommendation is to set up an official “guest post for us” page on your site.

You can use a contact form there (though it will be spammed), or you can just write instructions on how to do it. Here are my recommendations:

• Write strict requirements. Make sure whoever submits a pitch knows that you’re picky and you only accept extremely high-quality content from good sites.
• Claim you’ll strip all links and find your link to their site, as relevant. This will stop most people who are trying to filter SEO through a single page or include other promoted links they don’t tell you about.
• Ask for a pitch rather than a full piece of content. Many spammers just have pre-written content ready to go and won’t put in the effort to develop a unique pitch.
• Add a “trap” filter. A common one is “email us with the subject line X” with a specific subject line showing they follow instructions; ignore anyone who doesn’t. You can also request a specific keyword in their email or something else that you can use to filter emails and reject unsolicited requests.

This filters out most of the spammers, though some will still try to slip through. From there, you just have to be willing to audit the site of a submitter and reject those who don’t pass muster.

Alternatively, just ignore these. If you want a guest post on your site, ask a blogger for it. Anyone asking you to publish their content is after a link; anyone you ask for content is being asked because of their quality.

Hopefully, this clears up some things for those of you who haven’t been in the content marketing game for a decade like I have.

Feel free to ask me questions, though! I respond to all comments on this site and would be happy to help. 

The post Why Are People Emailing Me to Guest Blog for My Site? appeared first on Content Powered.

Page load times are an important part of modern SEO. Google is paying more and more attention to speed as a metric, both in terms of general load times and in some of their newer metrics, like the Core Web Vitals. So, it’s no surprise that just about everyone is concerned with site speed at this point.

One common piece of advice I see for WordPress sites, in particular, is to cut down on the number of plugins you have installed.

“More plugins means more code, and more code means slower loads!”

It’s a sound rationale at first, but only if you don’t yet understand how plugin authors decide when and where that they should be loading their plugin’s dependencies. Indeed, cutting down on plugins can increase the speed of your site, but only in specific cases. It depends entirely on the specific plugins.

As a WordPress developer and a PageSpeed-optimization geek, I’m going to do a little bit of myth-busting on this one. We’ll look at some real-world examples, as well as learn how to discover if a plugin is slowing down your site or not.

Let’s get into it!

My Own Example

My site loads pretty fast. I’m actually really happy with its load time and overall performance, and I’ve put a lot of work into getting it as fast as it is. I score very well with performance monitors like GTMetrix and with Google’s own tools for measuring Core Web Vitals and PageSpeed.

Would you care to guess how many WordPress plugins I’m using on this site?

At the time of writing: 45 plugins. Some are created by my team, some you’ve probably never heard of, but most are popular and commonly known.

There are plenty of other sites like mine out there, many with even more plugins, including specialized plugins they develop for themselves. Custom code in particular is often designed with functionality in mind, not speed, and yet sites can still have near-perfect speed scores while running them.

Now, I’m guilty of giving the advice to cut down on plugins as well. I’ve written that into some of my articles before, but here’s the thing: I don’t recommend it as a speed issue. Rather, I recommend cutting back on plugins to eliminate redundant or overly-simple plugins, maintenance load, and potential security issues with outdated plugins.

Every plugin on your site needs to be kept up to date. That’s because they’re written by third-party developers, and open source code that is exposed to millions of people can have security holes. An out of date plugin can become a security liability. Moreover, when you get into using dozens of plugins, you may end up with multiple plugins that all do the same thing. Many plugins like to add their own ways of managing parts of SEO, and overlapping features make it difficult to maintain consistency. Additionally, conflicting plugins can cause serious issues with your site.

Yes, some plugins can certainly slow down your site. Though, whether or not it does depends entirely on the plugin and how well it was built.

Types of Plugins that Impact Site Speed

Plugins can be broadly categorized into two groups: front-end and back-end.

1. Front-end plugins are the plugins that deal with the things that render on your site – the things that users see and interact with. Lightboxes, media players, fancy pop-up bars, social sharing buttons, social embeds; this kind of plugins are all layers of code that has to contact your database, load their individual dependencies, render for the visitor, fetch images and other media, and so on.

A plugin that runs two lines of code and adds a simple advertisement bar to your site really isn’t going to make a drastic difference to your site’s load times. If you have twenty, or thirty, or forty of them, though, all of those extra dependencies and server requests will add up.

2. Back-end plugins are plugins that deal with server-side issues, give you additional control or features in your admin console, set up passive monitoring or active checks, helps with sorting, organizing, and optimizing, and so on. A plugin that limits the number of login attempts before locking you out, a plugin that checks your site for broken links, a plugin that generates and updates a sitemap each time you publish new content; these generally aren’t going to affect the user experience in any way, especially if you’ve installed a caching plugin.

You can have 50, 100, or 500 of them, and while it might make your admin dashboard very slow-loading, it won’t impact user load times on the frontend.

The trick is identifying which of your plugins are slowing down your site.

Warning Signs of a Slow Plugin

There are a few ways you can check to see if a plugin is going to slow down your site.

1. The first and easiest way to check is to do a before and after comparison. Run a few speed benchmarking tools like GTMetrix and PageSpeed Insights and record the results. Next, install the plugin in question and run those tests again. If your score is significantly worse and if you see more errors appear for unnecessary JavaScript and CSS includes, you may have found your culprit.

Unfortunately, there are a lot of confounding variables here. You might have a caching plugin installed on your site, or the tool might be loading a cached version of your site, and it might have enough variability between tests that it can show a false positive or a false negative. It’s not always the most consistent test, after all, and it can vary based on server location and even time of day for the tests.

2. Another thing you can check for, again, in a before-and-after installation comparison, is the list of .js and .css files being loaded when your site loads. A plugin that adds new files and scripts to load (or bloats up the size of existing files) will likely slow down your site.

If you use caching on your website, it will likely resolve some of the issues you’re having with your site speed. If you want to see the most direct reading of what’s going on, disable any caching plugins or caching tools (like Cloudflare) that you’re using, and then run your PageSpeed tests. With caching out the window, Google PageSpeed will be forced to load the site the same way along with all of the database checks and plugin dependencies, and they will be able to see all the performance issues that would otherwise be improved with caching. From there, you can analyze what’s necessary and what’s not, where it all comes from, and how to address it. This is the best way to identify plugins that are loading unnecessarily on pages where they don’t belong.

3. One of the biggest problems I see with certain kinds of plugins is that they load many different plugin dependencies on every page of your site – even on pages where those plugins aren’t being used. This may be necessary if the plugin is, in fact, necessary to have loaded on every page on your site.

The problem comes when these plugins load those assets on pages that don’t require that plugin at all. It makes no sense to preload a media player on a page that has no embedded media, after all. If a user is reading a blog post on your site, it shouldn’t be loading code that is only required when a user starts filling out your contact form. This small percentage of sloppily-written plugins are usually the ones that end up slowing your WordPress site down the most.

You can also just look at the plugin itself. If you’re savvy enough with code, you can dig through the plugin files and see how and where the plugin assets are being enqueued on the frontend of your site. Some of the more complicated plugins make this trickier, sure, but you can still get a basic idea of how things work and how they’re interfacing with your site.

For example:

• Is the plugin loading a bunch of scripts, styles, code, or assets, especially on every page load regardless of content or context?
• Does the plugin need to query your database, and if so, is it doing it in an efficient way?
• Does the plugin perform any complex operations on the page?
• Does the plugin call external resources or APIs for data, like for a widget?

All of the worst offending plugins I’ve seen when it comes to slowing down your site fall into one of four categories.

1. A plugin that serves a purpose that you need, but which slows down your site to do it by necessity. These plugins are a value proposition: is the decrease in speed worth the increase in functionality for you?
2. A plugin from a third-party repository such as CodeCanyon. From what I’ve seen – and no offense to CodeCanyon themselves – many plugins on this site, and similar plugin stores, tend to be a little less refined than many of the top plugins on WordPress’s official plugin directory. It’s by no means universal, though; I’ve seen and use some plugins from CodeCanyon that have no impact on site speed and are perfectly well designed. I’ve just noticed a higher incidence of lower-quality plugins there than elsewhere.
3. A plugin from the bottom of the barrel in the WordPress directory. All of the popular plugins tend to be optimized because they know that the people who care about these metrics will write negative reviews if they slow down a site too much. The less popular or less well-maintained plugins – and especially the old plugins from before website speed was important – tend to not care as much. These plugins may be out of date or possibly a developer’s first plugin.
4. Anything that comes from a drag-and-drop or modular page builder. The vast majority of WordPress-based site builders use a building block style of construction, which is fine for easy design, but almost universally bad for load times and optimization. They’re really bad about the “load the media player on every page regardless of whether or not it has media on it” problem I mentioned above, and most plugins have a tough time interacting with assets that are being loaded by these page builders.

In broad strokes, the more popular and well-known a plugin is, the less likely it is to slow down your site. If it does, it will likely have options you can configure to help counteract that effect, or it will be minimized by using other plugins or tools in conjunction, such as a caching plugin.

How to Solve Plugin-Based Speed Issues

There are a few different things you can do to speed up your site if you’ve found a plugin, or multiple plugins, are slowing it down.

1. Replace the plugin. If a plugin is slowing down your site, replace the plugin with something that offers similar functionality at a lower speed cost. The media player example is a good one. A plugin that gives you a custom embedded media player can be a great option from a site design standpoint, but if it slows down your site too much by loading those assets on every page regardless of the presence of media, it’s not going to benefit you nearly as much as you would like it to. You can likely find a different plugin that gives you a custom media player but is designed to only load on pages that have media to play. Try to find a plugin that is popular and recently updated, when possible.

2. Remove the plugin. In some cases, I’ll encounter a client site that is distressingly slow. Normally I’m not selling an SEO service, just my content marketing services, but the two usually go hand-in-hand, and if I can make a few simple changes to a site to improve the performance on one of my client’s websites, I’ll gladly do it. Sometimes I’ll find a site that has old plugins that are providing them with functionality that they no longer use, and those plugins are slowing down the site. If they aren’t being used anywhere on the site, all you need to do is remove them.

The caveat here is that if you have old content that relies on that plugin to function properly – such as a landing page, an old blog post, or a deprecated media page – you will want to either redesign it, apply the rel="noindex" tag, or remove and redirect that page. Even if users are no longer landing on those pages – if Google has cause to check on them and finds that those pages are now broken, they could potentially hurt your organic search performance.

3. Implement caching. I already mentioned that caching can hide a lot of the dirty secrets going on with your website by providing a cached version that is pre-rendered and loads quickly to the people who load it. Caching has one problem, which is that the first user to visit has to trigger the cache, and typically that page-load has a much slower response time than subsequent visitors between them (and when the cache expires).

There are, of course, modern caching plugins that help get around this issue by preloading the cache and implementing some other trickery, but there’s always the chance for an issue to crop up. Personally, I’ve found the greatest benefit from WP Rocket, so you can check that out.

Caching is recommended on just about every WordPress website. I can’t think of a situation where you wouldn’t want to have it enabled on the majority (or all) of your pages.

4. Custom code. WordPress provides this handy little section of its themes called functions.php. It’s a file specifically designed for functionality that is specific to your website’s theme, so you don’t need to go in and edit your WordPress or plugin files directly. Years ago, when WordPress was still in its infancy, this was the case, but thankfully making theme-specific changes to your functionality is much simpler now.

If you discover that a plugin is causing issues with your load time, you can write some code to counteract those issues and add it to your functions.php section. There are two downsides to this method. The first, obviously, is that you need to come up with that code, which means either coding it yourself (if you know your way around PHP), or hiring a freelance web developer to do it for you. The other is that, if the plugin updates and drastically changes the way it functions, your functions.php code might stop working, so you have an added maintenance overhead to consider.

With functions.php, you can force plugins to load assets only when relevant, or load them asynchronously, so they don’t affect your initial load times. It works, but sometimes it can feel like a kludge, and the other options are often better. I’ve had to do this a few times with this site (see an example in the screenshot above), and it was primarily for plugins where I couldn’t find any suitable alternative that fit my needs.

Wrapping Up

So, that’s a myth busted. I repeat: more plugins does not necessarily mean your site will be slower. It all depends on the design and function of the plugins in question. You should investigate which plugins are loading extra code on pages where they are not needed and then take the necessary steps to solve the issue. Some of these are going to be as simple as clicking “Deactivate” to remove plugins that are no longer needed, and others are may require a bit of custom code to keep them lean. All that’s left is to actually take the steps to audit your plugins and isolate the ones that are slowing you down.

A question for all of you out there: if you’ve grappled with this issue in the past, which plugins did you find were the biggest culprits at slowing down your site? I’m curious which names pop up, and what you all have done about it. Please share with us in the comments section below!

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