Managing a growing blog: technical SEO

As a blog starts growing, you’ll need to do more things to keep the technical aspects of your SEO covered. The first thing you should do, whether your blog is big or small, is installing our Yoast SEO plugin. That pretty much covers everything concerning technical SEO. We made it that simple. But, as your blog or website starts growing, you should also take care of some other technical aspects: 1. security, 2. speed and 3. mobile. In this post, we’ll explain the importance of these three technical aspects for a growing blog.

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The very beginning: Install Yoast SEO

WordPress actually is a really SEO-friendly platform, so most technical things are already covered in your WordPress install. For all things not covered, you install the (free) Yoast SEO plugin. Installing the plugin and using the default settings already improves your SEO quite a lot. If you make sure to run all updates of our SEO plugin, all major technical SEO things will already be covered.  

Yoast SEO premium offers some extra features and the help of our support team. If you have a hard time installing our plugin, they’ll help you out. Admittedly, the plugin has quite a lot of different settings and it can be a challenge setting up. We’re currently working on a Yoast SEO plugin training. If you want to know more about what the plugin does and what the different settings are for (and which settings you should use for your specific blog) you should definitely look into the Yoast SEO plugin training (expected spring 2016).

1. Security

As your website gets bigger, you’ll become a more important target for hackers. That’s why you’ll need to make sure your website’s security is really taken care of.

Failing to take the necessary precautions for your WordPress security can lead to malware infections, branding issues, google blacklists and possibly have a huge impact on your site’s SEO 

Read more: ‘WordPress Security’ »

2. Speed

Site speed is one of the factors that determine whether you get a good ranking in Google. Having a faster website will increase your ranking position in Google. A slow website will result in a slow crawling rate that Google uses to index your site. Making your website faster, is a relatively easy way to increase the ranking position in Google.

Moreover, a fast blog will give a much better User Experience than a slow one. That’s another very important reason to make sure your site speed is optimal.

Keep reading: ‘Site speed: tools and suggestions’ »

3. Mobile

In april 2015 Google announced a new update which included the performance of websites on mobile devices as a ranking factor. In the SEO world this update is known as ‘Mobilegeddon’. Consequences of this update are rather simple: if your website isn’t deemed mobile friendly, it won’t rank well in mobile search results. You can’t do without a mobile friendly website anymore!

Read on: ‘Mobile-friendly sites and SEO ’ »

Conclusion

Your WordPress site will be relatively SEO-friendly because you use WordPress. However, so does 25% of the web. Make sure to use Yoast SEO as well and you’ll have most technical aspects of SEO covered. And don’t forget to look into security, speed and mobile!

Sadly, you will not be done with SEO. Ever. You will have to start optimizing your content after you have handled the technical issues.

Read more: ‘10 tips for an awesome and SEO-friendly blogpost’ »