SEO

What is SEO?

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) are practices that enable your site to be easily found by search engines such as Google or Yahoo!. There are many things you can do to optimize your content and search result rankings. For example: having a unique and descriptive title for your pages, or adding alt text and captions to your images.

For an in-depth dive into what SEO is and what you can do to improve your site’s SEO please read Moz.com’s The Beginner’s Guide to SEO.

Web Accessibility and SEO

Web accessibility and search engine optimization (SEO) are both about getting relevant content to users. Accessible content and search engine optimized content are both machine readable. Search engines and assistive technologies (such as screen readers) are quite similar. In many ways, search engines are deaf, blind, use only a keyboard, and have limited technical abilities. Both rely on content structure, semantics, and functionality to either present content to users or determine the relevance of content.

The list of accessibility and SEO practices that are closely in alignment include:

• Using proper alternative text for images
• Providing a clear and proper heading structure and avoiding empty headings
• Providing descriptive link text (i.e., avoiding “click here”)
• Ensuring page titles are descriptive, yet succinct
• Not relying on JavaScript for things that don’t need it
• Avoiding mouse dependent interaction
• Using standard web formats when possible
• Providing transcripts and captions for video
• Identifying the language of pages and page content
• Allowing multiple ways of finding content (e.g., search, a site map, table of contents, clear navigation, etc.)
• Using text instead of images when possible
• Providing useful links to related and relevant resources
• Ensuring URLs are human readable and logical
• Presenting a clear and consistent navigation and page structure
• Avoiding CSS and other stylistic markup to present content or meaning
• Defining abbreviations and acronyms

Of course content is king, in both accessibility and SEO.

This and more information comes from following WebAim Article:
Smith, Jared. “Web Accessibility And SEO”. WebAIM Blog. N.p., 2011. Web. 12 Oct. 2016.

SEO Plugin in JumboPress: Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO allows you to control or change aspects of your site meta data so that search engines find your content more readily and show it how you want it to be seen.

Yoast SEO in Pages & Posts

Yoast SEO appears in a couple places during the creating and editing process of pages and posts. The first is under the ‘Publish’ box on the top right corner of the page/post editing screen. There are two scores for ‘Readability’ and ‘SEO’.
These scores can be changed by optimizing your meta data. To do so look under the WYSIWYG to the ‘Yoast SEO’ section. Here you can see what can be causing a low readability score, or add a focus keyword to improve your SEO score.

Use this resource to learn more about Yoast SEO and the Readability and SEO scores it provides.

Readability

The readability score is a product of the Yoast plugin going through your content and based on web best practices it ascertains if your content is readable or not. Yoast provides a breakdown of the different areas and data points it’s looking at and suggests ways to improve your content.
Note: You are not required to follow everything this section says. Take it as a suggestion.

Focus Key

To improve your SEO score, you can enter focus keywords. By adding to the meta description of your page you are helping the search engine bots find your page, which improves the findability of your page.
In this section you can also control how the page will appear on a search engine results page by changing the snippet of content that appears under the title and URL of the page.

Social Media Previews Facebook & Twitter Previews

Yoast SEO allows you to control how a page that has been shared on Facebook or Twitter looks on each platform. Under each table you can change the title, description and image that shows up on Facebook Preview and Twitter Cards.
Note: Twitter falls back to Facebook, which falls back to what the search engine results has.

Robots Meta configuration

This section allows you to change if a search engine bot should index, or follow, your page or look over it as if it didn’t exist and not follow it. All pages automatically, when published, are indexable.

Questions?

If you have any questions or would like more information about SEO and how JumboPress uses SEO tools, please contact us.