First Steps

Before making any changes that impact how your site loads and handles content, it’s worth auditing its current performance. To start, you can use a free tool like PageSpeed Insights. It will assess your Core Web Vitals (metrics Google uses for page ranking) on mobile (by default) or desktop and let you know if you passed. 

It will also provide a color-coded score reflecting your site’s overall performance and identify opportunities for improving your score. This test will show you where your site needs improvement. 

Image Optimization: Shaping Your Visual Experience

Images can make your site more engaging and memorable, but they can also drag down loading times, especially if they’re high resolution. There are a few ways to achieve image optimization. 

Compressing images before adding them to your site can save precious space and time upon page load. There are a few ways to optimize image size for your site. The best way is to make sure they were originally saved out for the web, usually as a .jpg or .png, although .pngs can be on the larger side.

CDN

You could use a CDN (Content Delivery Network). A CDN stores your cached website on servers around the globe so that when a user visits your site it grabs the data from the nearest location which can cut down on loading time.

Lazy Loading

Lazy loading is a tool used to delay image loading until a user gets closer to the image upon scroll. This means that a user would see the top part of the page, as the site would not be trying to load the entirety of the site.

Streamlined Code: Empowering Faster Experiences

Every HTTP request — for images, stylesheets, scripts, and fonts — adds to your site’s overall load time. As your site grows, these HTTP requests start to stack up and eventually create a noticeable delay between user click-throughs and actual page loading. Optimized code ensures quicker loading times, smoother user interactions, and improved overall performance.  By focusing on code optimization, you can unlock the following benefits:

1. Eliminate unnecessary characters and whitespace: By removing redundant code elements, such as extra spaces and comments, you can reduce the file size and make your code more concise. This step helps minimize the amount of data that needs to be transferred, resulting in faster loading times.

2. Consolidate CSS and JavaScript files: Combining multiple CSS and JavaScript files into a single file reduces the number of HTTP requests required to load a webpage. This consolidation simplifies the loading process and accelerates the rendering of your website, enhancing user experience.

3. Utilize code minification techniques: Minifying your code involves removing unnecessary line breaks, indentation, and whitespace to reduce its size. This optimization technique improves performance by reducing file sizes and decreasing the time required for the browser to parse and execute the code.

4. Avoid Page Builders: While page builders offer convenience there are several drawbacks to consider. Firstly, page builders often generate bloated and messy code, resulting in slower page loading times and compromised website performance. Secondly, they can limit design flexibility and customization options, as they are built around pre-defined templates and modules.

Optimized code paves the way for a more efficient website, leading to increased engagement, improved search engine rankings, and ultimately, the success of your online presence.

Is your website in need of a redesign? Get your free website development consultation now.

Let’s Talk

Caching: Embrace the Power of Speed

Caching is a game-changer when it comes to enhancing website speed and delivering a seamless user experience. By storing frequently accessed data and resources, caching eliminates the need for repetitive and time-consuming processing, resulting in significantly faster loading times. Whether it’s static content like images and CSS files or dynamic database queries, caching optimizes content delivery, reduces server load, and ensures a blazing-fast browsing experience for your website visitors.

1. Configure browser caching: By setting appropriate expiration dates for static resources, such as images, stylesheets, and scripts, you enable returning visitors to enjoy faster load times by retrieving cached files from their local browser storage. This reduces the need for repetitive downloads and improves overall website performance.

2. Leverage caching plugins: Utilizing powerful caching plugins specifically designed for platforms like WordPress, such as W3 Total Cache or WP Super Cache, generates static HTML versions of your web pages. This caching process minimizes server load and allows content to be served more quickly to users, resulting in significantly faster loading times.

3. Optimize caching for dynamic content: While static caching is effective for unchanging content, dynamic websites require more advanced caching techniques. Implementing database caching, object caching, or using technologies like Redis or Memcached can efficiently cache dynamic content, reducing database queries and enhancing website performance.

By embracing the power of caching and incorporating these strategies into your website development process, you can unlock the full potential of speed and deliver blazing-fast websites that captivate users and keep them engaged. Caching plays a vital role in reducing server load, optimizing content delivery, and ensuring a seamless browsing experience for visitors, resulting in improved user satisfaction, higher conversion rates, and ultimately, the success of your online endeavors.

Embrace the power of a lightning-fast website today and captivate your audience like never before. Contact our team of WordPress experts and elevate your digital presence to new heights.

The post Improve Website Performance With Faster Loading Times and Better User Experience appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Understanding WordPress Security Risks

WordPress websites are vulnerable to various security risks, including outdated software, weak passwords, and insecure themes or plugins. These vulnerabilities make WordPress sites attractive targets for hackers. Attack methods like repeated login attempts, unauthorized database queries, and malicious code injection can compromise WordPress sites, resulting in serious outcomes such as unauthorized access to sensitive data and eroding user confidence.

With that in mind, making updates a priority is a basic step in fortifying your website’s security and safeguarding your online presence. Keeping WordPress and plugins up to date is crucial for maintaining a secure website. Updates often include security patches that address known vulnerabilities and weaknesses. By regularly updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins, you ensure that any identified security flaws are patched, reducing the risk of exploitation by hackers. 

Outdated software is a common target for cybercriminals, as they actively search for easy ways to gain unauthorized access or inject malicious code into websites. By staying up to date with the latest versions, you benefit from the continuous efforts of developers who actively work to improve the security of their products.

Is your website in need of a redesign? Get your free website development consultation now.

Let’s Talk

Best Practices for WordPress Website Security

1. SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) Implementation:

By enabling SSL, you ensure secure communication, protecting sensitive information from unauthorized access. SSL’s can sometimes be difficult to install yourself, it can be useful to have a developer take care of it for you. Luckily many hosting providers include these with their services. i.e.: WP-Engine, Bluehost, and HostGator.

2. Changing Login URL:

Changing the default WordPress login URL is a simple yet effective security measure. By modifying the login URL, you can deter brute force attacks and unauthorized access attempts. Consider using plugins or methods that allow you to customize the login URL and enhance the security of your WordPress site. While we would suggest using code, as you should try to limit plugin use when possible, there can be some significant issues if done wrong.

3. Strong Passwords:

Using strong and unique passwords is essential for protecting your WordPress user accounts. Weak passwords are easily compromised, providing unauthorized individuals access to your site. Create strong passwords using a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and special characters. Additionally, consider using password manager tools to securely manage your passwords. i.e: Keeper, Last Pass, Norton Password Manager.

4. Limiting User Account Access:

Limiting user account access privileges, especially for non-administrative accounts, helps minimize potential security risks. Implement user role management plugins that allow you to assign specific permissions to each user role. By granting only necessary access rights, you can reduce the likelihood of unauthorized actions on your WordPress site.

5. Cleaning Up Unused Users:

Unused or inactive user accounts pose a security risk to your WordPress site. These accounts can potentially be exploited by hackers. Regularly review and remove any unnecessary or unused user accounts to minimize potential vulnerabilities.

6. Security Plugin-Monitoring:

Security plugins can significantly enhance the security of your WordPress website. These plugins provide monitoring and detection features, allowing you to identify potential threats and suspicious activities. Popular security plugins such as Sucuri or Wordfence can actively protect your site by monitoring and mitigating security risks in real-time.

7. Limiting the Number of Plugins:

Minimizing the number of installed plugins is crucial for reducing the attack surface of your WordPress site. Each plugin introduces potential vulnerabilities, so it’s important to evaluate and select only essential plugins. Regularly review your installed plugins and remove any unnecessary ones to maintain a lean and secure WordPress environment.

8. Keeping Plugins and WordPress Up to Date:

Regularly updating WordPress core, themes, and plugins is vital for addressing security vulnerabilities. Outdated software can become a prime target for hackers. Stay informed about updates and promptly implement them to ensure your WordPress site is equipped with the latest security patches and improvements.

Essential WordPress Security Plugins:

1. Plugin Security:

Consider using plugins that help detect and mitigate vulnerabilities in other plugins. These security plugins can provide an added layer of protection to your WordPress site, ensuring that potential security loopholes are identified and addressed promptly.  

2. Malware Scanning and Removal:

Install plugins that offer malware scanning capabilities for your WordPress site. These plugins can scan your site for malicious code and malware, enabling you to detect and remove any infected files promptly.

3. Login Protection:

Enhance login security with plugins that offer additional login protection features such as CAPTCHA and login limiting. These plugins help prevent brute force attacks by adding an extra layer of authentication and limiting the number of login attempts.

4. Two-Factor Authentication (2FA):

Implementing 2FA plugins adds an extra layer of security to the login process. With 2FA, users are required to provide an additional verification code or token, greatly reducing the risk of unauthorized access even if passwords are compromised.

Suggested Plugins

1. Sucuri
2. All-in-One Security
3. Wordfence
4. Defender
5. Google Authenticator

By implementing best practices such as SSL implementation, changing the login URL, using strong passwords, limiting user account access, cleaning up unused users, and keeping plugins and WordPress up to date, you can significantly enhance the security of your WordPress site. Additionally, incorporating essential security plugins adds an extra layer of protection, monitoring, and detection. Take immediate action to implement these practices and plugins to safeguard your WordPress website, protect user data, and ensure a safe online presence.

The post Improve WordPress Website Security With These Best Practices and Plugins appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

If you have any fears about adding this must-use web analytics platform to your site, we would love for you to join us to get up to speed and have your questions answered.  

DOM President Justin Seibert and Senior Digital Advertising Analyst Steve D’Angelo will join John Murcott and Jeremy LaDuque from WooRank in a live webinar on February 22, 2023 at 12 PM EST to share their insights on making the big move.

Titled “GA4 For WordPress: Everything You Need to Know,” this webinar is intended to be your WordPress site survival guide for the big move to GA4.

Unsure how moving to GA4 will impact your data? Have technical questions about adding Google Analytics 4 to WordPress that require answers from a specialist? Want to tune in live and give your ears a break from an endless stream of Taylor Swift’s channel or that 8 hour stream of Lofi hip hop?

This is the event for you.

Don’t miss this opportunity to learn about all things GA4 for WordPress and prep your site to survive the big move!

In addition to answering your questions live, this webinar will also cover:

• The GA4 setup checklist (want to grab your own copy of our GA4 implementation checklist)
• Common pitfalls to avoid, including:
  • Not planning ahead
  • Not changing data retention settings
  • Not configuring Enhanced Measurement events
  • Not registering conversions
  • Not taking advantage of event parameters
  • Not registering event parameters
• The pros and cons of using plugins to deploy GA4 vs Google Tag Manager
• Reporting challenges you are going to face due to API quotas
• And more

Click here to watch on demand

Looking For More Information On Adding Google Analytics 4 To WordPress?

This move to GA4 is much more than a simple upgrade from UA – it’s a complete shift in how you are going to measure web performance.

Need an introduction or refresher to this game-changing analytics platform before saving your seat for this webinar? Check out any of these resources below. 

• WordPress: Google Analytics Installation Made Easy
• Begin Your Google Analytics 4 Training In Our Upcoming Webinar
• Is GA4 Better Than UA? Find Out In Our Next Webinar!
• Still Putting Off GA4 Implementation? Here’s Why You Can’t Wait.
• Our Top-Rated GA4 Analytics Services

The post Fear You Won’t Survive Adding GA4 To WordPress? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

The company’s own website features a list of notable Big Names who use it, from The New York Times to UPS to eBay. Heck, even Lollapalooza is on that list.

We love WordPress because it’s easy to use, adaptable, has built-in blog functionality, and sites made with WordPress generally rank pretty highly, relatively speaking.

However, the reason we really, really love it is because WordPress features the ability to use plugins. More specifically, SEO plugins. And SEO is what we live and breathe over here at DOM.

So, while this whole thing could just be a love letter to WordPress, we thought it would be beneficial if we, the CEOs of SEO, shared our favorite SEO plugins for our favorite site-building tool.

The Best WordPress Plugins
For SEO In 2022

This list is in no particular order. Simply saying that one of these plugins is more crucial than another could lead to bedlam amongst SEO experts (and within the DOM office).

• Best for Content Optimization: Semrush SEO Writing Assistant
• Best for On-page SEO: Yoast SEO
• Best Comprehensive Plugin: AIOSEO
• Best for Internal Linking: Internal Link Juicer
• Best for Image Alt Tagging: BIALTY
• Best for Google Analytics Installation: MonsterInsights
• Best for Google Monitoring: Search Console
• Best for Site Caching: WP Rocket
• Best for Image Compression: Smush
• Best for Structured Data: SchemaApp
• Best for Redirects: Quick Page/Post Redirect
• Best for Mobile Page Speed: AMP
• Best for Securing URLs: Really Simple SSL
• Best for Content Delivery: Cloudflare APO
• Best for Increased Product Review Counts: wployalty

More details (plus some free alternative options) are listed below.

Best Plugin For Content Optimization:
SEMRush SEO Writing Assistant

One of the most popular tools with SEO professionals, SEMRUSH is filled to the brim with useful features that are all designed to aid you in your quest to reach the top of the search engine rankings.

The Writing Assistant plugin takes many of those features and brings them over to your WordPress to provide on-page SEO assistance with features like an overall SEO score, readability score, link-checking, target and recommended keywords, and more.

The plugin will even check your content for plagiarism to avoid any snafus down the road.

To get it to work, you’ll have to have an existing Semrush account to connect with the plugin. After that, it’s all gravy.

• Plugin URL: Semrush Writing Assistant
• Developer: Semrush
• Free Alternative Option: Got one? Read below to learn how to contact us and have it listed here.

Did you know that we’re also a Semrush Certified Agency Partner? Learn more about our ability to help your team take a shortcut to better marketing results by checking out The DOM Difference.

Best WordPress Plugin For On-Page SEO:
Yoast SEO Plugin

A venerable name in the SEO game, Yoast has been a part of SEO for a very long time. The plugin takes all that experience and expertise and puts it right there in the WordPress ecosystem for your convenience.

The magic of Yoast is how it balances content optimization to please both human audiences and search engine crawlers. Features like a content and SEO analysis that scans your pages and posts for readability ensure that your site is as engaging to real people as it is to Google’s algorithm.

Yoast also features a redirection tool for 301 redirects, internal link tracking, Google Search Console integration, automatically generated XML sitemaps, and much, much more.

• Plugin URL: Yoast SEO
• Developer: Team Yoast
• Free Alternative Option: SEO Ultimate, The SEO Framework

Does your website content struggle with the use of passive voice? Learn how that can affect your SEO (and how Yoast can help you get rid of it) here.

Best Comprehensive WordPress Plugin For SEO:
AIOSEO

Perhaps the most popular of the overall WordPress plugins for SEO, AIOSEO really tries to live up to its name by packing in a nearly exhaustive list of features that covers rich snippets schema, built-in social media integration, robots.txt file editing, an SEO health checker, and most of the features contained in the two entries above.

However, some may argue that it doesn’t do some things as well as Yoast or SEMRush in terms of SEO analysis, but that’s a subjective thing for another time.

AIOSEO even allows for user roles for varying levels of content access and WooCommerce SEO tools for eCommerce sites and online stores.

There’s a pretty robust free version available on their site.

• Plugin URL: All In One SEO Pack
• Developer: All in One SEO Team
• Free Alternative Option: SEO Ultimate, The SEO Framework, Rank Math

Best WordPress Plugin For Internal Linking: Internal Link Juicer

There’s a lot of debate about the “best way” to do internal linking SEO on WordPress websites. Plenty of traditionalists that have been using the platform to build sites for years will tell you that manually adding links is the best way to get it done “right” and avoid issues with over optimization.

On the contrary, a lot of progress and updates have been made over the years to internal linking plugins. If you manage the settings correctly, these plugins can save you a lot of time while also boosting your page rankings. Also, if you ever make significant changes to your site architecture, using a tool like this to overwrite potential broken links is a smart suggestion.

Internal Link Juicer builds internal links within post content by using a “per-post configuration” method. There are both free and paid versions of this plugin, with the Pro version including custom targets, keyword import, and silo structure building.

• Plugin URL: Internal Link Juicer
• Developer: Internal Link Juicer
• Alternative Option: Internal Links Manager

Best WordPress Plugin For Image Alt Tag Optimization: BIALTY

If you run a WordPress website that leverages a massive directory of content (yes even larger than a 200+ word glossary) or sell products online using WooCommerce, then you likely have a high volume of image files on your site.

To help you save a whole lot of time, effort, and calloused fingertips, the team at PAGUP have created BIALTY (an acronym for Bulk Image Alt Texts with Yoast). BIALTY pulls content from the titles of your posts, pages, and products and then combines those with focus keywords assigned in Yoast.

Prefer to do manual image alt tag optimization based on some other form of keyword research? Not a problem, BIALTY comes with a Post Meta Box that gets added to the edit area for each individual page.

• Plugin URL: BIALTY
• Developer: PAGUP
• Alternative Option: Got one? Read below to learn how to contact us and have it listed here.

Best WordPress Plugin For Analytics Integration: MonsterInsights

If this blog were about the best Google Analytics plugins for WordPress, MonsterInsights would definitely be at the top of the list, and that list would be in a particular order (unlike this one, please don’t fight).

However, not only does MonsterInsights completely rule the Google Analytics game, but it’s also a powerful SEO tool in its own right that can keep you on top of what’s happening on your site from the convenience of your WordPress dashboard.

The plugin shows you your top-performing content, where your users are coming from, where they visit most on your site, and much more. It also gives you easy access to your eCommerce SEO performance by showing how all your products are performing on an individual basis.

• Plugin URL: MonsterInsights
• Developer: MonsterInsights
• Free Alternative Option: Google Site Kit
• More Reading on Google Analytics:
  • How to Track Blog Posts by Author in Google Analytics
  • Track ANY Form in Google Analytics in Under 5 Minutes
  • How Google Analytics Empowers Content Marketing Strategy
  • Why Your Direct Traffic in Google Analytics Is So High
  • Bounce Rate In Google Analytics (Everything You Should Know)
  • A Guide to Button Tracking Using Google Tag Manager and Google Analytics
  • What is Google Analytics 360?

Prefer to add Google Analytics directly to your website by copying and pasting the code into your theme? Check out this tutorial.

Got a complex Analytics project you’d rather have a team of experts work on with you and your team? Learn about our Google Analytics services.

Best Plugin For Google Monitoring:
Search Console

It’s no secret that Google is the largest and most popular search engine on the planet. So when they offer a plugin for WordPress, you can bet everybody’s ears perk up. Better yet? It’s totally free.

Google Search Console is an essential tool for tracking your content’s performance across the mega giant’s titular search engine. It allows users to submit sitemaps and new content for indexing, find and fix malware and spam issues, discover what your page is ranking for, check inbound links, and even helps with brainstorming new blog ideas.

When integrated with MonsterInsights, Google Search Console lets you see your site’s average position on SERPs, along with clicks, impressions, and click-through rates.

Like we said before, Google Search Console is completely 100% free, so there’s no reason you shouldn’t already be on the page and downloading it.

• Plugin URL: Search Console
• Developer: Tropicalista
• Free Alternative Option: Google Site Kit
• More Reading on Google Search Console:
  • How To Link Google Ads To Google Search Console
  • Set Your Course In Google Search Console With International Targeting
  • Get To Know Google Search Analytics Report

Best WordPress Plugin For Site Caching:
WP Rocket

This is our preferred plugin solution for addressing issues related to optimizing for Core Web Vitals areas like Largest Contentful Paint and Total Byte Time.

WP Rocket also simultaneously takes care of many of the high volume warnings found in SEMRush Site Audits related to uncached, uncompressed, and unminified JavaScript and CSS files. If your goal is to find a solution to optimize your site for delivery on all device types, this is it.

• Plugin URL: WP Rocket.me
• Developers: Jonathan Buttigieg and Jean-Baptiste Marchand-Arvier
• Free Alternative Options: Autoptimize, Hummingbird, WP Optimize
• More Reading on WP Rocket: How To Crush Your Unminified JavaScript And CSS Issues In Site Audits

Best WordPress Plugin For Image Compression:
Smush

An awesome plugin for image file compression from the team at WPMU Dev.

Smush works retroactively on media files that already exist on your site, but can also be set up to work proactively on media files as you continue to create content to scale your website.

There’s a premium version of this plugin that automates some things. If you are going to use the free version, be prepared to watch and wait for it as you do your initial file compressions. It will only compress 50 files at a time in the free version.

• Plugin URL: Smush
• Developer: WPMU DEV
• Free Alternative Option: Imagify

Best WordPress Plugin For Structured Data: Schema App

We currently use this on our own website for schema markups. While we have the experience and expertise with schema markup to deploy it manually, part of the reason we use Schema App so much is because Schema App allows someone who doesn’t code for a living to deploy accurate schema with ease.

Why do something the hard way if you don’t have to?

• Plugin URL: Schema App
• Developer: Mark and Martha van Berkel
• Free Alternative Option: All In One Schema Rich Snippets, Schema & Structured Data for WP & AMP

Best WordPress Plugin For Redirection:
Quick Page/Post Redirect

There are a ton of redirect plugins for WordPress, and they all perform the exact same function. So why do we work with Quick Page/Post? Well, it’s simple. We don’t mean that the reason why we use the plugin is simple, we mean that the plugin itself is simple.

For quick redirects, you don’t even have to have an existing page or post to add a redirect. You simply enter the Request URL and the Destination URL and QuickPage/Post does the rest. There is also the option to perform individual redirects for existing pages and content.

The feature list is huge, especially considering how easy the plugin itself is to use.

• Plugin URL: Quick Page/Post Redirect
• Developer: anadnet
• Free Alternative Option: Redirection

Best WordPress Plugin For Mobile Page Speed: AMP

Your potential customers are using mobile devices to research their issues and educate themselves on the topics you blog about on your WordPress site.

AMP markup is a must-have for any business using WordPress as their blogging platform to generate a high volume of traffic from mobile searches.

While there are a few alternative plugin options for AMP, this one is available for free and is developed specifically for WordPress by the collective that started AMP development in the first place.

When in doubt, go to the original source!

• Plugin URL: AMP for WordPress
• Developer: AMP Project
• Free Alternative Option: AMP for WP

Best WordPress Plugin For Securing URLs:
Really Simple SSL

While we usually prefer that websites have their SSL setup with their domain name provider or their hosting provider, Really Simple SSL is a great alternative option.

Streamlined minimal options keep things light and breezy, and the plugin does a spectacular job of doing what it says: Enabling simple SSL.

• Plugin URL: Really Simple SSL
• Developer: Really Simple Plugins
• Free Alternative Option: WP Force SSL & HTTPS SSL Redirect

Best WordPress Plugin For Content Delivery:
Cloudflare APO

According to the plugin’s directory listing, Cloudflare APO can “speed up your WordPress site by up to 300%.” If your website has a global reach, tapping into Cloudflare’s 250+ data centers makes sure your content is deployed quickly and consistently with no lag.

In order to use this plugin, you will need a Cloudflare account. If you are currently a free user of Cloudflare, that’s fine – but you will need to invest a small annual fee to cover for the APO features, which includes free DNS, free automated SSL certificates, free DDoS mitigation, and more.

• Plugin URL: Cloudflare
• Developer: Cloudflare
• Free Alternative Option: Sucuri

Best WordPress Plugin For Increased Product Review Counts:
wployalty

According to the plugin’s website, wployalty is a WooCommerce plugin for WordPress that builds loyalty for your online store by rewarding your customers. This plugin is trusted by over 1,000 brands all over the world, so no matter where your target customers are located, we are confident it can help you drive better engagement from your target customers.

Speaking from an SEO perspective, if you are properly leveraging schema markup on your site for product pages, this plugin can help you increase the trust and social proof of your products by increasing the amount of reviews left after each purchase. The value of encouraging user reviews can go even higher if you offer the ability to leave video reviews or reviews with product photography.

• Plugin URL: wployalty
• Developer: Cartrabbit
• Free Alternative Option: giftbit

But Wait, There’s More WordPress Plugins For SEO!

The above list is certainly not exhaustive, and there are plenty of other WordPress plugins for SEO, hundreds even, that businesses and site-owners use on a daily basis.

Some have a lot of overlapping features with the keyword-focused tools we mentioned above. For instance, Ahrefs is an incredibly popular SEO tool, especially amongst small businesses, that deserves to be looked at.

Countless other SEO plugins can be found at the official plugin directory on the WordPress website, so feel free to browse for yourself and find some that fit your particular needs.

Of course, having the best WordPress plugins for SEO is just a small part of SEO. You also need to know how, when, where, and why to use them as part of your overall strategy. That’s where we come in.

At DOM, we’ve made it our mission to use smart, efficient, and well-studied SEO strategy to create ROI for our clients. If you or your company are looking for help with optimizing your site and your content for maximum results, be sure to contact us for a free consultation to find out how we can be of help.

Have you made (or do you use) one of the best WordPress plugins for SEO that we haven’t listed? Does it serve a benefit we haven’t included? Contact Jonathan Bentz, Sr. Digital Marketing Strategist, by email or LinkedIn DM with your request for inclusion. 

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Partner Agency before you reach out.

The post What Are the Best WordPress Plugins for SEO? (Updated 2022) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

If you’re reading this article, it is probably because the company that just hired you uses Craft CMS. Or maybe you’re an SEO agency tasked with optimizing SEO for Craft CMS. Perhaps you’re just exploring and learning about unique CMS’s, and the Craft CMS vs. WordPress debate is one you want settled once and for all.

It’s all fair. Whatever your reason, we will deliver answers in this Craft CMS vs. WordPress breakdown.

What Is Craft CMS?

Craft CMS is a content management system similar to WordPress. In fact, of all the non-WordPress CMS’s we’ve seen and used, Craft is the most similar to WordPress. For some, this adds an increased level of comfort when migrating over to Craft due to the out-of-box understanding your developers, designers, and writers will likely have.

If your writers know how to post blog content in WordPress, they will be able to learn how to post blog content in Craft CMS in 15 minutes or less.

But Craft CMS and WordPress are different, so don’t lull yourself into feeling your WordPress savvy will amount to Craft CMS expertise immediately.

What Does Craft CMS Cost?

If you’re building a single website for yourself or a client, Craft CMS is free. The pro version ($299 per project) allows you to integrate a team in a more professional website environment. Beyond that, you are looking for Enterprise level, which is based on a custom pricing model.

Why Switch to Craft CMS from WordPress (or Something Else)?

One of the most asked questions site owners and marketers have is why anyone would use Craft CMS rather than WordPress?

Because Craft CMS is run by a company named Pixel and Tonic. Craft CMS offers more security than WordPress’ open-source model. Remember, WordPress is widely used and free to download. That alone makes it the target of hackers and criminals with nefarious ambitions.

Mega-large companies who are frequently the subject of hacker attacks avoid using WordPress, for the most part. Netflix, Citibank, and Verizon use Craft CMS.

Heavily trafficked websites use WordPress, make no mistake about it, but large brands tend to avoid it due to security risks. That’s just one reason why a company might be on the hunt for a non-WordPress CMS.

Craft CMS vs WordPress

Most of us have a firm understanding of WordPress already, given it’s the most popular CMS online today. To date, WordPress is the main CMS of over 60% of all websites. That’s an enormous share of websites. But that’s not why any of us are here trying to compare Craft CMS vs WordPress.

Nope, it’s because we aren’t sure whether we should use Craft CMS, or whether Craft CMS is better than WordPress.

So let’s dive into the heated Craft CMS vs. WordPress debate . . .

First, let’s begin with the most glaring advantage WordPress has over Craft CMS: Popularity.

Everyone Knows How To Work In WordPress

WordPress is understood by every developer (and hack-developer) in the world. If you are a developer who doesn’t understand WordPress, you aren’t likely to stay in business for too long. WordPress training videos can be found for free all over Youtube. Your lowest-level digital marketing employee isn’t expected to have any issues working in WordPress. If you hire a designer, they’ll know WordPress.

But with popularity comes problems.

WordPress Plugins and Compatability

Because WordPress is so vastly popular with developers, there’s nearly a plugin for everything you want. That’s good because it cuts down on development time and offers fast solutions to seemingly big problems. But it’s also bad because WordPress’ lack of version controls leads to plugins breaking the CMS frequently. Also, many WordPress plugins expose sites to security breaches, like hacks.

All of that said, not every WordPress plugin is a risk to your website. Check out this list of 12 solutions we offer as an answer to “what is the best SEO plugin for WordPress?”

Craft CMS, on the other hand, is less popular and its plugin market is much smaller. Craft has most of the core plugins you’d want, but their number is not in the 1,000’s like WordPress. This means that a Craft CMS plugin is less likely to expose your site to security issues.

Customer Support

Let’s be real, WordPress customer support means Googling and hoping for the best. Often, you can find the remedy to your WordPress troubles after some hard search work. With Craft CMS, you use their Slack support system, and you’ll get live chat answers.

Expedited Slack support is a massive win for Craft CMS. But it’s important to remember, Craft CMS costs. If you want updates, you’ll pay $99 (sometimes $59) per year. And that doesn’t count the original, one-time $299 project cost you already paid. Simplicity and problem-solving cost money, that just makes sense.

But… Communal Solutions Aren’t So Bad

When you need to find a solution to a WordPress problem, there are lots of WordPress developer communities at your fingertips. Because WordPress is open source, there is no shortage of help online. However, you don’t often find the solution you are looking for by way of the first proposed remedy. Usually, it takes a little time.

Security

Because WordPress is so widely used, it’s a target for nefarious hackers. Hackers appreciate WordPress because they can freely download the software and begin finding backdoors.

Worse more, WordPress plugins, which are unregulated by WordPress, offer in-roads for criminals as well.

Without question, Craft CMS claims victory due to its insulated CMS. You can’t freely install plugins at random, and Craft CMS isn’t on nearly every Internet site you surf.

Craft CMS vs WordPress: SEO Plugins & Optimization

The Craft CMS plugin store features a few notable SEO plugins, including Craft CMS SEO. But in all reality, your best bet is SEOMatic. SEOMatic’s wide popularity stems from its similarity to the popular WordPress SEO plugin, Yoast.

The two plugins work almost identically, allowing marketers to update metadata information on a massive scale. The plugin functions on every page and article posted on your site. SEOMatic typically costs around $99.

There’s a lot you can do with SEOMatic. If you’re familiar with Yoast SEO, SEOMatic will be a breeze.

For more reading and advice for how to get the most out of Yoast, check out these two posts from Digital Advertising Account Manager Ryan Norman:

• Readability Analysis in the Yoast WordPress Plugin: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO
• Eliminate Passive Voice to Improve Readability and SEO with the Yoast WordPress Plugin

Update MetaData On The Fly

As mentioned, you can easily update every piece of content on your Craft CMS site using SEOMatic. This includes images. For blog posts and pages, you can see in the below screencap just how easy it is to update a blog post. If you drop the “source field” down to custom, you can write your own title or description. If you choose not to do so, global data will fill in. This is precisely how Yoast functions on WordPress.

Again, just like Yoast SEO, SEOMatic allows you to update open graph types for Facebook and Twitter.

Easily view and understand every piece of content’s SEO health on a massive scale using SEOMatic.

SEOMatic makes SEO in Craft CMS simple.

Click here if you need a reminder on why friendly SEO titles and meta descriptions are still important for SEO.

Creating a Sitemap with SEOMatic

An XML sitemap remains one of the best ways for Google to understand your site’s URL hierarchy. A properly set up Craft sitemap can improve SEO rankings, given that Google’s BOT has an easier time locating new content, or content that it previously failed to find.

To create a SEOMatic sitemap, simply click on SEOMatic in the sidebar, then Content SEO, then Sitemap.

See below:

SEOMatic creates sitemaps per group. The sitemap is a reflection of your Craft CMS content (that makes sense, clearly). But remember, you’re creating a sitemap per an individual section or category group or even a product if you are running an eCommerce store. SEOMatic includes all file types that are relevant to the sitemap, including .pdf, Word, or Excel file types. It will also deploy an image or video sitemap.

The best news of all is that SEOMatic will automatically submit the sitemap to relevant search engines whenever you update your site’s content.

Conclusion On Craft CMS Vs WordPress

Overall, Craft CMS and WordPress share a lot of similar components. Both get the job of content management accomplished, just in different ways. Craft CMS tends to win when it comes to security, but you do pay for Craft CMS, unlike WordPress. Craft CMS SEO is a breeze so long as you use SEOMatic, a plugin that is similar in build to Yoast SEO.

Craft CMS allows site owners to manage multiple sites in a stable, modern platform. Because WordPress is so popular, it commonly experiences security issues. Due to this, more and more sites are migrating over to Craft CMS. Whether your a marketer or an online marketing agency, you’ll likely encounter Craft CMS at some point in your journey.

Are you starting a website migration to a new, more SEO-friendly CMS? Check out our 7-step SEO site migration checklist for an upgrade with minimal impact. You can also learn more about our SEO migration services to help your website traffic grow confidently after you upgrade.

The post Craft CMS vs. WordPress: An Ultimate Beginner’s Guide (Updated 2021) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Why is Wikipedia so Often the Top Result?

Okay, yes, that’s true—if you looked up a subject that Wikipedia covered, it’s probably going to be the first result. But why is that? There isn’t much that’s fancy about Wikipedia, but it sure has a lot of reliable information that people want to know. That’s why Wikipedia accounts for so many number 1 results—Google knows Wikipedia, trusts the information available there, and serves its content to searchers looking for information about subjects that Wikipedia covers. 

Remember: Good SEO is Good Content

All the keywords and meta descriptions and strategies SEO experts tell you about are important, but nothing is more important for your placement in organic search results than good, informative content. Think of that as the backbone of any SEO strategy and you could probably write this blog post, too. 

With that in mind, the answer to the question posed in our title is self-evident: every website builder is great for SEO—if you have the content to support it. 

But you’re not reading this for an answer like that. You want to know which website builder, of all the website builders available on the internet, is best for search engine optimizations. We take it to mean that you want to make a website in order to tell the world about something important to you. In most cases, we talk to businesses and companies that are looking for answers about how they can market themselves on Google. Even so, our recommendation is useful even if you have a blog to promote or recipes to share. 

Speaking of Blogging, Why Aren’t You Using WordPress?

The recommendation from this search engine optimizer is easy: use WordPress to make your website, if SEO is important to you. The first version of WordPress rolled out in 2003, primarily as a content management system (CMS) for blogs. What do you see below those Wikipedia links when you search for something on Google? Without seeing what you searched, we can make a pretty good prediction that almost every link on that first page of Google is a blog post. 

WordPress is built for blogging. It does a lot of other stuff, too, but blogging is what it was made for and what it still does best. WordPress also isn’t a “website builder” in the traditional sense, because you still have to do a few things in order to get it going. The default template isn’t very pretty, but it’s lean. Google likes lean. 

Seriously, WordPress is Your Best Bet

Still need convincing? Okay, how do you feel about plugins? WordPress has a lot of those; they’re easy to install, they enhance your audience’s experience, and many of them are free. You can use plugins to do a lot of stuff that SEO experts need. For the best example of a plugin that does just one thing flawlessly, reliably and free, look at Redirection. You give it an old URL and a new URL, and Redirection applies 301 redirects for you. You don’t have to edit your website’s code by hand when you need to move a page. 

More Customization Options Than You Require

Don’t like the way the default template looks? That’s okay—there are a whole lot of themes to choose from, and lots of those are free, too. If you want a theme that’s a little fancier or does a little more than the default template, you can probably find one that fits your aesthetic. WordPress has an official gallery of themes but you can also check out sites like Themeforest for downloadable themes with templates to fit your needs. 

If You Don’t Use WordPress, Here Are Some Tips

If you decide not to use the world’s most popular CMS for websites, that’s up to you, but there are some things to look out for if SEO is important to you. You’re going to want to make sure the website builder you use has a few important qualities:

1. Content Enablement. You need a solution that’s going to let you post content that fulfills a searcher’s intent, or you’re not going to have much to optimize. You need a platform that is going to let you make pages full of simple, informative text. You’d be surprised by how many designers forget that.
2. Expandability. You never know where your business, or your blog, is going to go. Make sure that whatever builder you use has a way to implement other uses you might not be able to predict. If it’s not very expandable, that’s okay—you just need a way to migrate all that great content you’re going to put in it. That leads us directly into the next item:
3. Migratability. An alarming number of platforms don’t want you to take your business elsewhere, so they make it really difficult to migrate your content to a different provider or CMS. It’s probably best to avoid those providers because data portability is, overall, a very good thing.
4. Active development. Take a look at the recent history of the platform and make sure they’re still making updates. A good website builder will be adding new features all the time, or at least iterating its current features into better ones. If your website builder isn’t keeping up with the times, it probably won’t keep up with you.

Building your own website is challenging and fun, and you should be proud of yourself for giving it a shot. If you need help with your SEO or you’d like to give digital ads a try, we can help you out. Get a free consultation today, or read some of our other blogs about SEO:

• Does Duplicate Content Affect SEO?
• How to Make a Plan for Your SEO Strategy
• How to Do Local SEO in 2021 
• How Can Website Design Affect SEO?

The post What is the Best Website Builder for SEO? appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Taking guidance from these checks and editing your writing makes your content more forceful and can even improve that content’s search engine rankings.

Yoast’s Readability Analysis

I’m talking about this panel:

It comes complete with happy- and sad-face warnings . . .

In total, Yoast evaluates 7 aspects of writing:

• Consecutive Sentences
• Transition Words
• Sentence Length
• Paragraph Length
• Subheading Distribution
• Passive Voice
• Flesch Reading Ease

You may be thinking, “That’s great and all that Yoast can tell you all that, but my content doesn’t need to be Hemingway-level prose. I need to write an informative, compelling copy for my company and clients. I’m under the gun as it is, so unless the extra effort to improve readability scores is really going to help me, what’s the point?”

Improving Readability Improves SEO Rankings

Engineers are working continuously to get search algorithms to read the text more like the way people do. Gone are the days when you could just sprinkle keyword phrases into every nook and cranny of your site. The big players—like Google—want to serve content that users will actually read. That means writing in complete, comprehensible sentences on your site.

Marieke van de Rakt—Ph.D. in Social Sciences and CEO of Yoast—put it this way: “All the things humans do while reading text are things Google will do. That means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, will become increasingly important.”

So if your website is littered with awkward syntax and meandering paragraphs, it is falling short of its SEO potential. Yes, you must cover all your technical SEO bases to succeed as well. But don’t let poor readability negate all that hard work.

7 Readability Checks & How to Approach Them

Let’s take a look at Yoast’s readability metrics in action.

Below, I’ll be using examples from a post on our digital marketing blog called How To Crush Your Uniminified JavaScript and CSS Warnings. In that post, Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, shows you how to increase site speed and improve user experience by minifying your code.

1. Consecutive Sentences

—

—

Check

Do sentences start with the same words as those right before or after them?

Yoast advises that starting too many sentences too close together with the same words can feel repetitive to a reader.

In the screenshots above, we see that Yoast raised a red alert for just 8 sentences falling into this definition in a piece of 1,800+ words. And the uses of repetition there are intentional.

Advice

Strive to vary how you start sentences.

But don’t go to DEFCON 1 just because Yoast assigns you a scarlet circle. There are perfectly grammatical and stylistic reasons to begin a few sentences with the same word here and there.

2. Transition Words

—

Check

Do sentences contain words or phrases that signal a change in thought or topic?

Yoast suggests that transition words highlight the relationship between “between phrases, sentences or even paragraphs. Transition words make it easier for your readers to understand how thoughts and ideas are connected. They also prepare your reader for what’s coming.”

And Yoast uses these examples of transition words:

• therefore
• in other words
• however
• for instance
• above all
• in addition
• after that
• similarly
• in conclusion

In the screenshot, we see that Yoast flags the first sentence as containing transition words (“As a result,” I’m assuming), while the second sentence does not contain any. I concur with Yoast’s analysis here.

Advice

Use transitional language when it helps to emphasize your point or connect a string of ideas.

But don’t slavishly add transition words to every sentence; that can leave your text sounding elementary.

In our screenshot here, the second sentence flows on so clearly from the first that no extra effort is needed to connect it to the first.

3. Sentence Length

—

Check

Do sentences run for more than 20 words?

Yoast cautions that longer sentences are harder to understand because readers have to keep more information in mind longer. Mr. Hemingway would be on board with this. He’s a modern champion of the short, declarative utterance.

Note in our first screenshot, though, that a semicolon throws off Yoast’s word count. That sentence contains 30 words—14 before the semicolon and 16 after.

Advice

Express thoughts concisely.

That’s what I’ll say more full-throated than keeping sentences short.

Some thoughts are just so complex that you will need more than 20 words. Use more when you need more.

But the overall advice from Yoast here is good. In light of which, let’s see how we might edit the second screenshot:

Original

And if you have successfully used the Uglify apps, let us know in a chat how they worked out for you so we can share your experience with others.

Revised

And if you have successfully used the Uglify apps, let us know. Tell us in a chat how they worked out. Then, we can share your experience with others.

We’ve gone from 1 sentence of 29 words to 3 sentences of 12, 9, and 8 words. Plus, we worked in a transition word: “Then.”

Also, instead of measuring the number of sentences that are over 20 words, you might take a look at the average sentence length. This approach will give you a better sense of how long your sentences are across the board, rather than just a tally of how many times you tripped the 20-word sensor (whether by one word or twelve).

4. Paragraph Length

—

Check

Do your paragraphs contain more than 150 words?

Writing in long paragraphs “makes your text look daunting as it becomes just one big blob of text,” Yoast states.

Advice

Keep paragraphs to fewer than 9 lines as displayed. (That means drastically shorter paragraphs for mobile than desktop, mind you.)

The screenshot shows the longest paragraph in the blog post:

• 427 characters
• 73 words
• 3 sentences

And I’m kind of surprised how lenient Yoast is here.

People read online differently than they do a novel or letter. They skim. And should you present them with a wall of text (a.k.a. a bloated paragraph), you’ll be lucky to get them to read the first few words or the last few.

I’ve seen sites even provide a line break after each sentence.

That is, every sentence is treated as its own paragraph.

Think about it.

What kind of experience are your users looking for?

5. Subheading Distribution

Check

Do you go more than 300 words between subheadings?

Even if you shorten your sentences and shorten your paragraphs, your text is still just one undifferentiated blob if you don’t add organization with subheadings. Subheadings provide pleasant pauses too.

Yoast flagged our example with an orange for the opening section, which is all the text up to the first subheading “What Is ‘Unminified JavaScript And CSS’?”

The text preceding that heading contains:

• 1,949 characters
• 343 words
• ~18 sentences

Advice

Write subheadings that outline your piece.

And insert them frequently, even if that means repeating information that is in the main text.

Readers should be able to get the gist of your idea from just the subheadings.

Again, with the way people read online, subheadings may be all that surfers read of your article. Or at least, they may read those first. And then decide whether you’ve enticed them to get down into the nitty-gritty and actually read the paragraphs themselves.

6. Passive Voice

—

Check

Do sentences contain verbs in the passive voice, be-verbs, and/or do sentences begin with subordinate clauses?

There is much to say about passive voice and Yoast’s evaluation of this persnickety grammatical phenomenon. It’s anything but straightforward.

Check out the post by Ryan Norman, Digital Advertising Coordinator, on how to Eliminate Passive Voice to Improve Readability and SEO with the Yoast WordPress Plugin.

There, you’ll find his analysis of Yoast’s passive voice flags in the blog post we’ve been examining. Overall, Yoast raised 15 flags for passive voice; Ryan found only 1 of those to be a textbook case (shown in the screenshot).

That sentence could be recast to put it in the active voice like this:

Original

Depending on your budget and level of technical expertise, both of our recommended plugins can be configured to produce great results for your site. 

Revised

Depending on your budget and level of technical expertise, you can configure both of our recommended plugins to produce great results for your site. 

Advice

Write in the active voice.

Passive voice is best reserved for situations where the actor is unknown or unimportant.

7. Flesch Reading Ease

Check

Do you write short sentences? Do you use short words?

That’s what the reading ease formula—developed by library scientist Rudolf Flesch—boils down to in English.

Here’s Yoast’s take: “Flesch reading ease measures how complex a text is. The lower the score, the more difficult the text is to read. The Flesch readability score uses the average length of your sentences (measured by the number of words) and the average number of syllables per word in an equation to calculate the reading ease. Text with a very high Flesch reading ease score (about 100) is straightforward and easy to read, with short sentences and no words of more than two syllables. Usually, a reading ease score of 60-70 is considered acceptable/normal for web copy.”

Advice

Err on the side of writing simply.

Go for the common word, rather than the highfalutin. Go for the short sentence. And be willing to continue your thought in another.

But don’t make hitting a 60-70 Flesch score a mandate. You know your product. You know your audience. If you need to use a polysyllabic technical term, use it. If you need to write a sentence with multiple clauses to express a complex idea, do it.

Don’t focus on Flesch scores, in fact. Focus on the 6 other readability factors we’ve just reviewed. Get those ducks in a row and your Flesch score will likely follow suit.

Improving Readability Improves SEO Rankings

Attending to the 7 areas analyzed by Yoast’s readability checks will make your writing more readable to people and higher-ranking to search engines.

Yoast’s checks aren’t perfect – but they are a big reason why Yoast SEO is one of our 12 best WordPress plugins for SEO. They do, however, provide reminders about core concerns of writing for the web.

7 Tips to Improve Readability and SEO

1. vary how you start sentences.
2. Use transitional language when it helps to emphasize your point or connect a string of ideas.
3. Express thoughts concisely.
4. Keep paragraphs to fewer than 9 lines as displayed.
5. Write subheadings that outline your piece.
6. Write in the active voice.
7. Err on the side of writing simply.

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the search optimization of your site? Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

The post Readability Analysis in the Yoast WordPress Plugin: Tips to Improve Your Writing and SEO (Updated September 2020) appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Limiting instances of passive voice in your writing makes your content more forceful and can even improve that content’s search engine rankings.

The Problem with Passive Voice

The 2008 Oscar for Best Actor was won.

That’s passive voice for ya. It can leave you wanting a little something more. (A milkshake perhaps.) In this extreme form, passive voice eschews the most important information in the sentence. The actor!

Daniel-Day Lewis won the 2008 Oscar for Best Actor.

Yoast’s Content Analysis for SEO and Readability

I wrote this blog post to demonstrate the value of writing in the active voice. (Doesn’t that sound more natural and direct?) And, specifically, to demonstrate how limiting passive voice can improve SEO and readability scores in the Yoast SEO WordPress Plugin.

I’m talking about this panel:

It comes complete with happy- and sad-face warnings . . .

. . . and this vexing alert about passive voice.

In total, Yoast evaluates 7 aspects of writing:

• Consecutive sentences
• Flesch reading ease
• Paragraph length
• Passive voice
• Sentence length
• Subheading distribution
• Transition words

You may be thinking, “That’s great and all that Yoast can tell you all that, but I’m not Shakespeare. Nor does my content need to be Hamlet-level prose. I need to write informative, compelling copy for my company and clients. I’m under the gun as it is, so unless the extra effort to excise passive constructions is really going to help me, what’s the point?”

Features like this are just one of the reasons Yoast SEO is included in our exclusive list of the best WordPress plugins for SEO.

Limiting Passive Voice Improves SEO Rankings

Engineers are working continuously to get search algorithms to read a text more like the way people do. Gone are the days when you could just sprinkle keyword phrases into every nook and cranny of your site. The big players—like Google—want to serve users content that they will actually read. That means writing in complete, comprehensible sentences on your site.

Marieke van de Rakt—Ph.D. in Social Sciences and CEO of Yoast—put it this way: “All the things humans do while reading text are things Google will do. That means that the structure of your text, the way you write your paragraphs, will become increasingly important.”

So if your website is littered with tortured syntax and unidiomatic phrasing, it is falling short of its SEO potential. Yes, you must cover all your technical SEO bases to succeed as well. But don’t let poor readability negate all that hard work. Especially when passive voice is easy to correct—once you get your ear in for it.

What Passive Voice Is

Sentences exhibit passive voice when they don’t express their main idea directly.

Let’s flesh out this definition with help from style and usage giants.

The Elements of Style

Strunk and White—in their seminal, slim volume on writing—extol us to “Use the active voice.” It’s one of their elementary principles of composition.

Here is their explanation:

The active voice is usually more direct and vigorous than the passive:

I shall always remember my first visit to Boston.

This is much better than

My first visit to Boston will always be remembered by me.

The latter sentence is less direct, less bold, and less concise. If the writer tries to make it more concise by omitting “by me,”

My first visit to Boston will always be remembered,

it becomes indefinite: is it the writer or some undisclosed person or the world at large that will always remember this visit?

I was lucky enough to have been advised to pick up this book in high school. I’ve never constructed a sentence the same way since.

Strunk and White’s pithy explanation is characteristic of their ethos toward writing in general: writing should get right to the point, with every scrap of extraneous information trimmed away.

Garner’s Modern American Usage

Bryan Garner takes up a different task in his encyclopedia usage dictionary. He chronicles common and rare corners of language in use, with entries on phrasal adjectives, less vs. fewer, and retronyms (just to whet your appetite).

Passive voice is covered by him as well. ( ;

Garner says that the core issue with passive voice is that “the subject of the clause doesn’t perform the action of the verb.”

Garner’s 3 Problems of Passive Voice

He lays out three sticking points with using passive voice:

First, passive voice usually adds a couple of unnecessary words.

Second, when it doesn’t add those extra words, it fails to say squarely who has done what. That is, the sentence won’t mention the actor with a by-phrase (The book was written vs. The book was written by Asimov).

Third, the passive subverts the normal word order for an English sentence [actor-verb-object], making it harder for readers to process the information.

How To Correct Passive Voice

Here are common pitfalls of passive voice. And how to correct them.

Passive Voice Can Displace the Proper Subject of a Sentence

Don’t write:
The screenplay for There Will Be Blood was written by Paul Thomas Anderson.

Instead:
Paul Thomas Anderson wrote the screenplay for There Will Be Blood.

Passive Voice Can Be Used To Avoid Accountability

Don’t write:
Eli Sunday’s head was bashed in by a bowling pin.

Instead:
Daniel Plainview bashed in Eli Sunday’s head with a bowling pin.

Passive Voice Can Lead to Strange Syntax

Don’t write:
That oil was discovered by Daniel Plainview is how the film starts.

Instead:
The film starts with Daniel Plainview discovering oil.

What Passive Voice Isn’t

Passive Voice Is Not Merely the Presence of Be-Verbs

Some people erroneously call any instance of a be-verb (am, are, is, was, were, been, and being) passive voice. Strictly speaking, that’s incorrect. However, when a be-verb is present, there is usually a stronger construction lurking nearby.

Don’t write:
He is supportive of his mother.

Instead:
He supports his mother.

Don’t write:
She is in possession of a biting wit.

Instead:
She possesses a biting wit.

Don’t write:
The rings of a tree are indicative of its age.

Instead:
The rings of a tree indicate its age.

Passive Voice Is Useful When the Actor Is Unknown or Unimportant

Passive voice should not be avoided like the plague; it should be used in moderation. A dash here and there gives a pleasant variety to your sentence structure.

Beowulf was written around the end of the 10th Century.

The passive voice is fine here—necessary, in fact. The author of the Old English epic poem is unknown.

The Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776.

Here the passive voice is appropriately employed in a sentence where a process (the signing) is the subject, rather than a person (the signers). Putting this sentence in the active voice would be cumbersome, and it would change the focus of the thought.

Representatives from the Thirteen Colonies signed the Declaration of Independence on July 4, 1776.

Now, the representatives, or the fact that they were from the Thirteen Colonies, is given more weight than the signing itself.

Yoast’s Passive Voice Analysis Is Not Perfect

Yoast doesn’t always classify passive voice correctly. At the end of the day, our machines still aren’t as astute as human readers at sussing out the nuances of language.

Remember the orange warning light we saw above for 12.3% of sentences containing passive voice:

That’s an analysis of a post from our digital marketing blog called How To Crush Your Uniminified JavaScript and CSS Warnings. Jonathan Bentz, Senior Digital Marketing Strategist, shows you how to increase site speed and improve user experience by minifying your code.

Let’s take a look at what Yoast said was passive voice in that post.

Click the eyecon (I couldn’t resist) to have Yoast highlight where it thinks there are problems.

Passive Voice Analysis: Yoast vs. Human

15 Flags for Passive Voice

Yoast flagged 15 sentences for passive voice.

1 Textbook Case of Passive Voice

Only 1 of those 15 is a textbook case of passive voice to me.

This sentence could be recast to put it in the active voice like this:

Depending on your budget and level of technical expertise, you can configure both of our recommended plugins to produce great results for your site.

13 Sentences with Be-Verbs and/or Subordinate Starts

Most of the other sentences either:

• Contain be-verbs (am, are, is, was, were, been, and being)
  
• Begin with dependent clauses (phrases that do not contain their own subject, verb, and predicate)
  

1 I-Don’t-Know-What-Yoast-Was-Mad-About Sentence

I don’t know what Yoast is on about here. Perhaps it wants “I’ve got to get” to be changed to “I must get”? But “I’ve got to get” is perfectly grammatical and idiomatic speech; you’d seem oddly prim saying “I must get” in this situation.

Yoast Defines Passive Voice Broadly

I couldn’t find a precise explanation from Yoast of what exactly their passive voice assessment is doing when it flags something for passive voice. However, a Yoast page that attempts to define passive voice applies the term to sentences where the action and/or recipient comes before the actor.

Active Voice Syntax

[actor-action-recipient]
Sarah threw the ball.

Passive Voice Syntax

[recipient-action-actor]
The ball was thrown by Sarah.

[action-recipient-actor]
Thrown was the ball by Sarah.

With this understanding in mind, I can kind of see where Yoast is coming from labeling sentences that begin with dependent clauses as passive voice.

Such sentences do present a subordinate idea before the main idea, but that’s pretty far afield from how every authority I’ve ever seen defines passive voice.

Especially when starting sentences with independent clauses is perfectly grammatical and an essential way to vary your sentence structure.

The Machines Haven’t Won, Yet

Take Yoast’s Passive Voice Flags with a Grain of Salt

Spelling and grammar checkers have come a long way. But you shouldn’t yet cede all control to them. (I’m still looking for a program that can make sure I don’t leave a letter out of public.)

Yoast’s Passive Voice Assessment Casts a Wide Net

In our sample—How To Crush Your Uniminified JavaScript and CSS Warnings—Yoast flagged far more sentences that contain be-verbs or that begin with dependent clauses than bonafide instances of passive voice.

Now as I said, there is often merit in recasting sentences to eliminate be-verbs. And sure, you don’t want every sentence to start with a dependent clause. But the passive voice assessment didn’t really live up to its name here.

That being said, the overall point of this blog post still stands.

Limiting Passive Voice Improves SEO Rankings

The active voice makes your writing more readable to people and higher-ranking to search engines.

Yoast just isn’t the end-all, be-all tool for identifying and correcting passive voice. And that’s great news. You still have a job! Comb your copy for passive constructions and recast them in the active voice.

8 Tips To Improve Readability and SEO

1. Write in the active voice
2. Sentences written in the active voice are easier to understand
3. Active constructions are usually shorter and stronger than passive constructions
4. Start sentences with the actor, not the action or recipient
5. Replace be-verbs with their concise counterparts
6. Use dependent clauses to vary your sentence structure
7. Passive voice is useful when the actor is unknown or unimportant
8. Don’t use the passive voice to shirk responsibility;

Be like Daniel. Don’t say, “Your milkshake is being drunk by me.”

Interested in discovering more ways to improve the search optimization of your site? Contact us for an SEO audit or check out any of these helpful resources written by our team below:

• Internal Links: How Much Do They Affect SEO?
• Image SEO: Does Alt Text Still Matter?
• These Landing Page Optimization Tips Dramatically Boost Conversions
• How to Tell if Your Website Load Times Are Hurting Your Business

The post Eliminate Passive Voice to Improve Readability and SEO with the Yoast WordPress Plugin appeared first on Direct Online Marketing.

Google Analytics is a core component to an online marketing strategy for your website. If you have not yet installed Google Analytics (GA) on your site, I would suggest that you do so immediately. GA gives you insights into your website’s traffic data that enables you to take your marketing to an unprecedented level.

Note: The next section briefly explains the importance and functionality of Google Analytics. This section is not essential to installing GA so feel free to skip ahead.

What is GA and why would I want it?

A properly installed GA implementation includes hundreds of reports, broken down into five main categories: Realtime, Audience, Acquisition, Behavior, and Conversions.

Think about this, without using GA data, any changes that you make on your website are done almost completely blind. True, you can base website changes on market research, user studies, and the resulting feedback you get from an increase or decrease in sales/leads, but this method is archaic and overwhelmingly inefficient in comparison.

With Google Analytics, you can find the barricades to conversion on your website with real-world user data. Here are a few example reports:

Figure : Acquisition/Behavior/Conversion Metrics segmented by the user’s browser

Figure : Goal Flow and User Drop-off

Figure : Social Network Value

Installing Google Analytics on WordPress

Step 1: Make a Google Analytics Account

Navigate to analytics.google.com and log in with a google account. If you don’t already have one, create one (its free). You will then be taken to the GA home page. Click the admin icon in the bottom left-hand corner of your screen (see image below).

Once you arrive to the admin page, click the blue button labeled “+ Create Account”

Fill out the information on the next page and click the blue “Get Tracking ID” button. A Google Analytics terms of service agreement will popup. Review it and click accept.

You will then arrive at a page like the one below (Note: you will have a different tracking ID):

It’s important to celebrate small victories so congrats – you just made a Google Analytics account and property. Unfortunately, we are not done yet. At this point, you can access your website’s GA dashboard, but it won’t be populated with any website’s traffic data. In order to pass this data, we need to get your website to collect information on its users and pass that information over to your Google Analytics dashboard.

Fun fact: with a solution like Google Site Kit or MonsterInsights, doing a manual addition of Google Analytics on a WordPress site is not necessarily “required.” Learn more about these tools in our list of the 12 best WordPress plugins for SEO.

Step 2: Decide Between gtag.js and gtm.js

Notice in the screenshot above there is a tracking ID, followed by a section labeled “Website Tracking” which includes three options for implementing the tracking code. The three methods are:

1. Global Site Tag (gtag.js)
2. Google Tag Manager (gtm.js)
3. Additional Implementations

We will focus on options 1 and 2 in this post. The third option is for advanced implementations that are likely out of the scope of your needs and require advanced coding skills.

At the end of the day, both gtag.js and gtm.js will result in the same thing as far as we are concerned. Both code snippets allow you to track your user traffic as we have set out to do. The difference is in the expanded functionality that each provides beyond just tracking your site traffic.

If you are unsure which you should go with, refer to the following from Google’s developer reference guide. If you are still unsure, go with gtag.js:

Google Tag Manager or gtag.js?

Google Tag Manager is a robust and full-featured tag management system, which supports Google and 3rd party tags. You can add and modify tags through the Tag Manager interface without adjusting the code on your site. Learn more

If you are already using Tag Manager, you should continue to do so. If you don’t need a tag management system, it is fine to use the gtag.js tags provided by each product.

Tag Manager and gtag.js are built on the same infrastructure and should work properly if deployed on the same page.

Source: https://developers.google.com/gtagjs/

Step 3: Install tracking code on your site

Once you have decided whether you would like to install gtag.js or gtm.js, proceed to the relevant section below. Choose either step 3a or 3b:

3a) Installing gtag.js on your WordPress site

1. Log in to the backend of your website (ex. www.examplesite.com/wp-admin)
2. Navigate to Appearance > Editor (May be Theme Editor for some versions of WordPress)
3. Find your theme’s header in the list of files on the right-hand side of the screen. The file is usually named header.php. You will know that you have the correct file if you can find the </head> tag in the body of the file. Here are examples from a few websites:

If you cannot find this file, you may be editing a child theme. In order to access the header.php file, you may have to select the parent theme. In the following screenshot, you can see that there is no header.php file located under theme files.

To access the header.php file, simply click the “select theme to edit” dropdown and select the parent theme (It will have the same name as the child theme but without the word “child”). As you can see in the following screenshot, on our example site, the header.php file was located within the parent theme.

1. Copy the gtag.js code from google analytics. If you are unsure where this is located, navigate to your Google Analytics > admin > Property > Property Settings > Tracking Code > The code will be located under the Global Site Tag (gtag.js) label.
2. Locate the </head> tag within your header.php file and paste the gtag.js code that you copied in step 4 above it.

3b) Installing gtm.js on your WordPress site

1. Create a Google Tag Manager account. If you are unsure how to do so, see step 2 in this post.
2. Read my blog post on the best google tag manager recipes and import GTM container recipe #1: Track Pageviews in Google Analytics.
3. Within Google Tag Manager, navigate to the container that you wish to use on your site. Click on the blue GTM container ID located in the top right of the dashboard.
4. A popup with the code to install GTM on your site will appear. Copy the code that is located in the top box directly underneath “Paste this code as high in the <head> of the page as possible:”
5. Log in to the backend of your website (ex. www.examplesite.com/wp-admin)
6. Navigate to Appearance > Editor (May be Theme Editor for some versions of WordPress)
7. Find your theme’s header in the list of files on the right-hand side of the screen. The file is usually named header.php. You will know that you have the correct file if you can find the </head> tag in the body of the file. Here are examples from a few websites:

If you cannot find this file, you may be editing a child theme. In order to access the header.php file, you may have to select the parent theme. In the following screenshot, you can see that there is no header.php file located under theme files.To access the header.php file, simply click the “select theme to edit” dropdown and select the parent theme (It will have the same name as the child theme but without the word “child”). As you can see in the following screenshot, on our example site, the header.php file was located within the parent theme.

Locate the <head> tag within the header.php file and paste the code that you copied in step 4 above directly after that tag.

8. Return to Google Tag manager and copy the code in the bottom box, directly below “Additionally, paste this code immediately after the opening <body> tag:”

9. Return to your header.php file on your WordPress site, and paste the code that you just copied directly after the <body> tag. Note: spacing and exact placement of the code doesn’t matter as long as the code appears as the next element following the <body> tag.

Congratulations, you have just installed Google Analytics on your site. To test if you installed it correctly, return to your Google Analytics > admin > Property > Tracking Info > Tracking Code > Click the “Send test traffic” button.

Conclusion

Correctly installing Google Analytics onto your website can give you invaluable insights into your website’s performance and site visitor behavior. This data, when leveraged correctly, should be used to formulate the backbone of your digital marketing plan and has the potential to launch your business to a new level. Now you can make decisions based on data. This means you will be making more impactful decisions.

Want to be able to use your data to make better decisions to help grow your business? Learn more about our expert Google analytics services here.

To get more information on this topic, contact us today for a free consultation or learn more about our status as a Google Premier Partner before you reach out.

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