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What I Learned About SEO
(while building a WordPress Theme)
David Zimmerman
Reliable Acorn LLC
https://wordpress.org/themes/fluid-baseline-grid/
Building A WordPress Theme
Start with a child theme.
Easy to go backward.
Safer for security holes.
Downside: can be slower.
Understand the template hierarchy
https://codex.wordpress.org/Child_Themes
https://developer.wordpress.org/files/2014/10/template-hierarchy.png
Theme Design
Mobile FIRST!
Faster (less code)
Fails friendly
Coming soon: Google’s Mobile-First Algorithm
Theme Design
Typography that makes your content readable.
Vertical Rhythm
Measure
Leading
http://webtypography.net/toc/
Theme Design
Typography that makes your content readable.
Vertical Rhythm
Measure
Leading
Theme Design
Typography that makes your content readable.
Vertical Rhythm
Measure
Leading
Theme Design
Typography that makes your content readable.
Vertical Rhythm
Measure
Leading
Duplicate Content
Is there a “duplicate content penalty”?
Common ways WordPress duplicates content:
Entire posts
Poor taxonomy
http://www.dizzysoft.com/wordpress-setup-for-seo-success/
Functions.php
Set Excerpt Length
add_theme_support();
title-tag
Post-thumbnails
Enqueue CSS/JavaScript
Remove Emojis!
Favorite Plugins
Yoast WP SEO
XML sitemaps
Open Graph
Website and organization schema
Helps control duplicate content
Favorite Plugins
Optimize Database after Deleting Revisions
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler)
WP Smush
WP Total Cache
Akismet
iThemes Security
Thanks!
My theme: https://wordpress.org/themes/fluid-baseline-grid/
Keep in touch:
Twitter: @reliableacorn
Facebook https://www.facebook.com/reliableacorn/
Signup for my enewsletter: reliableacorn.com/one-thing

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What I learned about SEO (while building a WordPress Theme)

Editor's Notes

  1. Don't change an existing theme, for your purposes. You should create a child theme and customize that. This makes it easy to keep security holes plugged (as themes go out of date) and easy to revert if a mistake is made. The downside: child themes tend to have slower load times. The "theme" controls how your site is displayed. Within your theme are several "template" files. These files show how a particular kind of content is displayed. The rules that determine how a file is displayed are called the "template hierarchy." These go from more specific, to least. In other words, the more specific template file overrides the more general. This allows you to create different looks for different pages. This is better than hacking up your WP site to make it do something you want.
  2. This is a buzzword but an important concept. It means: start from a mobile site and build-up, rather than take a desktop site and build-down. Advantages: fails friendly for mobile devices; faster load times because less code. This is especially important as Google moves to a mobile-first algorithm.
  3. Current web design focuses on images. I get it, I'm a visual person too. The thing is: SEOs like content. This can create a web design conflict. I'll capitulate to the fact that people don't read articles on the web. This is especially true for mobile devices. They scan them. Because of this, it's important your typography makes it easy to scan a page, and get the intent.
  4. Vertical Rhythm- make sure line spacing is consistent, even among different sizes (headlines). While these lines might not appear in your background, this kind of consistency is reassuring and expected.
  5. Measure- the length of each line. Too short is distracting. Too long is frustrating.
  6. Leading- the height of each line of text. Too little looks hard to read and like there’s too much to read. Too much looks hard to read.
  7. There is some debate on whether a site with duplicate content is penalized by Google. Whatever you think about this know that duplicate content wastes Google's time. The spider only crawls parts of your site at a time. You want it to be on the most important pages, not unnecessarily duplicated pages. Duplicate content on archive pages When you show your entire post on an archive page, it's duplicated. Solve this by only showing a snippet of a post. You can fix this in your template files or by using the "MORE" feature in individual posts. Duplicate content created by poor taxonomy Whenever you tag (or categorize) a blog post, it appears on a page with other posts tagged (or categorized) like it. If you are inconsistent in your tagging, you can create several unnecessary, duplicate pages. Instead, plan ahead. Also- display your tag or category description on your category page. This provides unique content for your page. Of course, you only want this content on one page (the first) of each archive. You can program this into your theme (through your functions.php file) or use an SEO plugin, like Yoast.