One essential component of URLs is the URL parameter, which plays a vital role in customizing web pages, tracking user behavior, and optimizing search engine visibility. 

In this article, we’ll explain URL parameters, how they impact SEO, and how you can handle them effectively on your site.

What is a URL Parameter?

A URL parameter (also called a query arg) is a string of characters appended to the end of a URL, typically following a question mark (?). These parameters pass additional information to the web server, enabling dynamic content generation and personalization. URL parameters are often represented as key-value pairs, with the key and value separated by an equal sign (=).

Here’s an example of a URL parameter that can be found on an eCommerce store: 

https://example.com/products?category=electronics&price=high

The parameters are category=electronics and price=high. The server can then use these parameters to filter and display products based on the specified category and price range.

What are URL Parameters Used For?

URL parameters have a wide range of applications in web development, online marketing, and eCommerce:

• Filtering and sorting content: URL parameters can be used to filter or sort content or products on a web page based on user preferences or search criteria.
• Tracking and analytics: By appending unique parameters to URLs, website owners can track user behavior, campaign performance, and traffic sources.
• Personalization: URL parameters can be employed to personalize web pages based on user preferences, location, or other factors.
• Passing data between pages: URL parameters provide a convenient way to pass data between different web pages or to maintain state across multiple page requests.
• Pagination: URL parameters can be used to implement pagination on websites, allowing users to navigate through large data sets across multiple pages.

The SEO Impact of URL Parameters

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) is a critical aspect of online marketing, and URL parameters can significantly impact how search engines crawl and index web pages. Here are some key considerations:

• Duplicate content: If not handled properly, URL parameters can lead to duplicate content issues, where search engines perceive multiple URLs as serving the same content. This can result in search engine penalties or lower rankings.
• Crawl budget: Search engines have limited resources and a finite crawl budget. If a website generates excessive URLs with different parameter combinations, it can strain the crawl budget and potentially lead to pages being missed or crawled less frequently.
• Indexation and ranking: Search engines may choose to ignore certain URL parameters or treat them as session identifiers, which can affect how pages are indexed and ranked.

As you can see, URL parameters can hurt your SEO. That’s why you should know how to manage them. 

How to Handle URL Parameters in WordPress

Here are a few tips for managing URL parameters on your site include: 

Use the Right WordPress SEO Tool

One of the first steps to handling URL parameters is to use the right SEO tool. For WordPress users, there’s no better tool than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use WordPress SEO plugin with over 3 million active users. Because it’s regularly updated, you can be assured the plugin stays abreast of changes in SEO best practices and keeps up with WordPress versions.

Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs because the plugin has many powerful features. These are designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings.

Regarding URL parameter handling, AIOSEO has a feature called the Query Arg Monitor. 

This handy tool makes monitoring and managing URL parameters pretty easy.

Other SEO features you’ll find in AIOSEO include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. It also has a dedicated WooCommerce SEO module for those with eCommerce stores. 

Plus, if you’re a WooCommerce user, AIOSEO has a tailor-made WooCommerce SEO module to help you rank your online store higher in search rankings.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Check for and Block Unnecessary URL Parameters

With the right WordPress SEO plugin installed, managing your URL parameters is super easy. If you’re an AIOSEO user, this is where the Query Arg Monitor comes in handy. It has powerful functionalities that enable you to log and manage your URL parameters effectively.

Once your URL parameters have been logged, they appear in a table where you can manage them.

You can block an individual URL parameter by clicking on the Block Key or Block Key & Value action buttons. You can also block bulk URL parameters using the Bulk Actions feature.

For detailed instructions, check out our tutorial on managing query args in WordPress.

Use Your Robots.txt File

You can handle URL parameters in the robots.txt file by instructing search engine crawlers on how to treat URLs containing specific parameters. This is another aspect in which AIOSEO shines above other SEO plugins.

To edit your robots.txt file, go to your AIOSEO settings » Tools » Robots.txt.

Next, Enable Custom Robots.txt and disallow the crawling of URLs containing certain parameters.

For more tips, check out our tutorial on editing robots.txt files.

Canonicalize the Primary Versions of Your URLs

Another way of handling URL parameters is by canonicalizing primary versions of your URL. You can do this by opening a post or page in editor mode, AIOSEO Settings » Advanced » Canonical URL field.

This helps consolidate link equity and prevent duplicate content issues. Granted, it isn’t the best way of handling URL parameters, especially in bulk, but it is a viable option. 

What is a URL Parameter? Your FAQs Answered

We hope this article has helped you understand URL parameters and how to manage them. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our tutorial on implementing bulk redirects using a CSV file or our guide to managing query args in WordPress.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay

WordPress, by default, offers many essential content blocks to help you create any type of page you want. Examples include blocks for paragraphs, images, buttons, lists, and more. However, you can extend the functionality of the WordPress editor using plugins that add more blocks to the editor.

In this article, we’ll share some of the best Gutenberg block plugins you should consider for your site.

What is the Gutenberg Block Editor?

Gutenberg is the block-based WordPress editor that was first introduced in WordPress 5.0, replacing the classic editor. It allows you to build pages by stacking different types of content blocks. This modular approach makes building pages more intuitive and visual.

For a typical blog post, you will have many paragraph blocks, some heading blocks for subheadings, and some image blocks.

What are Gutenberg Block Plugins?

Gutenberg blocks plugins provide additional blocks that enhance the functionality and features of the Gutenberg editor. They allow you to extend the default set of blocks provided by WordPress, giving you more flexibility and options for creating diverse and visually appealing content. 

Some Gutenberg block plugins focus on specific types of content or functionality, such as social media integration, advanced layout options, or e-commerce elements. Others offer a suite of elements you can add to your posts or pages.

Installing and activating Gutenberg block plugins allows you to customize the editing experience and create more dynamic and interactive content. All this without needing to write custom code. Gutenberg block plugins give you a way to leverage the modular nature of the Gutenberg editor and expand its capabilities to suit specific website needs.

The 2 Types of Gutenberg Blocks Plugins

There are 2 types of Gutenberg plugins you’ll find when looking for plugins to install on your site.

• Single-purpose block plugins: These add only one feature, but offer the most comprehensive set of options and integrations. They’re often the best solution for specific tasks.
• Block library plugins include a collection of blocks for different purposes. However, these blocks are not as fine-tuned as the single feature blocks. While they offer a lot of blocks, they may not be as robust.

Why Use Gutenberg Blocks Plugins?

The Gutenberg block editor has revolutionized WordPress content creation, but its core functionality can sometimes be limiting. 

That’s where Gutenberg block plugins come in.

Gutenberg block plugins offer a treasure trove of additional blocks to elevate your website’s design and functionality.

So, buckle up as we dive into some of the best Gutenberg plugins you should consider for your site.

17 Best Gutenberg Blocks Plugins: Expert Picks

1. All In One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts over 3 million times.

Millions of smart business owners use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their WordPress sites. And every successful site depends on organic traffic for growth. After all, you can only achieve your goals if you make it easy for people to find your site and content. 

The plugin also has some powerful blocks to help you boost your SEO. These include:

Table of Contents Block

This block enables you to add a table of contents to your posts.

A table of contents helps improve user experience (UX) as it enables users to quickly go to the sections they want on your page. It even works on search engine results pages (SERPs) by helping you get jump links. These are great ways to improve your organic clickthrough rates (CTR) on SERPs.

Check out our tutorial on adding a table of contents in WordPress for more information. 

FAQ Block

Another Gutenberg block you’ll find in AIOSEO is the FAQ block. This helps you add an FAQ section to your posts or pages.

The best part about AIOSEO’s FAQ block is that it outputs JSON schema, making it easy for search engines to understand your questions. This is one way to get featured in the people also ask section. It also helps you rank for more question-based, low-competition keywords.

Author Bio Block

Need to boost your Google E-E-A-T signals? 

AIOSEO’s Author SEO module was developed to make it easier for DIY SEOs and veteran marketers to meet Google’s E-E-A-T guidelines. One way it does that is by helping you add an author bio block in your posts and pages.

Not only does it help inject beautiful bios into your content, but it also outputs JSON schema from the author info section.

You can even showcase your areas of expertise:

All this is essential to proving that you’re an expert with experience who has authority in your niche and whose content can be trusted.

Reviewer Block

Another block in AIOSEO’s Author SEO module is the Reviewer block. This helps show that your content has been fact-checked and is accurate, boosting your credibility and authority.

This is particularly important for YMYL articles, where you need to demonstrate that your content is accurate, up-to-date, and reliable. A reviewer also shows that your content is backed up by an expert and can be trusted.

Adding a reviewer goes a long way in helping you build trust and authority, boosting your Google E-E-A-T score.

 If you’re looking for the best Gutenberg block plugin to help boost your SEO, AIOSEO is it.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Other Features

AIOSEO has many other powerful SEO features and modules to help you implement SEO best practices. Some examples include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

So, if you’re looking for the best Gutenberg block plugin that also helps boost your WordPress SEO, AIOSEO is it.

Pricing: Starts at $49.60. A free plan is also available.

2. WPForms

Lead generation is a critical component of successfully growing a website and business. And this is where a WordPress plugin like WPForms comes into play.

WPForms is a powerful contact form plugin that helps capture visitor information without adding friction to the user experience. Plus, it’s easy to install and deploy on your site thanks to the user-friendly drag-and-drop builder functionality and over 700 pre-built form templates.

This powerful WordPress plugin also offers a Gutenberg block to add contact forms, surveys, order forms, payment forms, etc., to your posts and pages.

WPForms also integrates with popular marketing and payment platforms like Stripe, PayPal, Square, and Authorize.net so that you can build powerful forms in less than 5 minutes.

Besides the Gutenberg block addon, WPForms comes with advanced features you won’t find in other form builders. Examples include conversational forms, lead forms, form landing pages, user journey tracking, form abandonment, geolocation tracking, GDPR-friendly, custom WordPress user registration and login forms, and more.

If lead generation is your priority, then WPForms is definitely the best Gutenberg block plugin for you.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $49.50/year.

3. OptinMonster

OptinMonster is another WordPress plugin that tops many of the best Gutenberg plugins lists. That’s because it’s a very capable conversion rate optimization (CRO) plugin that works well with WordPress sites. It’s an excellent lead-generation tool to help you grow your subscriber and customer base. 

OptinMonster is loved by over 1 million websites because it makes it easy to create stunning opt-in campaigns using popups, floating bars, fullscreen welcome mats, and more.

You can also use OptinMonster’s robust customization options to reduce cart abandonment, increase sales, grow your email list, and more. That’s because OptinMonster is perfect for creating highly targeted offers. For example, you can show your popups based on the items in your customer’s cart, a blog post they’re on, and much more.

OptinMonster also has an inline campaigns feature, which allows you to add campaigns to your posts and pages in just a few clicks using the OptinMonster Gutenberg block.

You can use inline campaigns to quickly and easily embed eye-catching email signup forms on your page. This helps you convert engaged users. It also comes with a content-locking feature to gate some of your content. This gives readers a bigger incentive to subscribe and boost the impact of your content strategy.

Plus, with OptinMonster’s drag-and-drop builder, creating eye-catching popups that can help grow your business is easy.

Pricing: Starts at $9/month (billed annually).

4. WPCode

WPCode is a powerful WordPress plugin that boasts over 2 million users. The plugin enables you to add code snippets to your site without writing a single line of code. It makes it super easy to add snippets to your site exactly where you want. 

With the WPCode Gutenberg Block Plugin, you can insert snippets directly in the block editor. The best part is that you can also use all the snippet attributes directly in the block interface without having to meddle with shortcode attributes. This means that all the attributes that you define in the Shortcode settings as Shortcode attributes will automatically be available for you to fill in easily wherever you use the block.

Pricing: $49/year.

5. Smash Balloon

Smash Balloon is the best WordPress social feeds plugin. It makes it easy to add social media posts to your site. You can use it to integrate your site with social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), YouTube, and TikTok.

Smash Balloon also has a Gutenberg block for adding each social media feed. For example, you can simply drag and drop the Facebook block into a post or page to add your Facebook feed. There is no need for any coding knowledge! 

The best part about Smash Balloon is you can get separate plugins for each of your social media accounts or get the entire suite with all social platforms supported. Each plugin is 100% mobile responsive and looks great out of the box. It automatically matches your WordPress theme’s fonts and styles.

Pricing: $49/year for the individual plugin. The suite of 6 plugins costs $299/year. 

6. Envira Gallery

Envira Gallery is another plugin that ranks high among the best Gutenberg block plugins for WordPress. It’s a gallery plugin that allows you to create image and video galleries on your website easily.

While WordPress has a default gallery block, it’s quite basic and lacks a lot of functionality. For example, you can’t share the same image galleries outside the editor. Envira Gallery lets you keep your Galleries separate and add them to any post or page. The plugin is fully compatible with the Gutenberg editor and has a native block to instantly embed galleries.

Examples of advanced features of Envira Gallery include watermark protection and image proofing. It also integrates seamlessly with WooCommerce, making it easy for you to sell your images.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $39.50/year.

7. Blockons

Blockons is a powerful and intuitive Gutenberg block plugin designed to help you create stunning web pages in minutes. The plugin has 17+ blocks to build your pages with, 3 of which are dedicated WooCommerce blocks. And the team behind the plugin is constantly adding more blocks, so expect that number to change.

Besides Gutenberg blocks, the plugin also offers 3 site addons to enhance your website even more. These include a Back To Top button, a Website Page Loader, and a Page Scroll Indicator. Examples of the Gutenberg blocks you can expect from the plugin include:

• Search Bar/Icon block: Add an editable search bar or an icon with a search bar drop-down or popup for your site viewers to search for content on your website.
• Icon List block: A fully customizable list with your own icons to enhance the look of your lists.
• Content Toggler block: Show or hide longer sections of content by using the content toggler block. Users can click to show and re-hide the content (Inner blocks) that have been added within the toggle block.
• WooCommerce Account Icon: Add a simple icon to your header or footer to let users quickly access their account or log in to your website.
• WooCommerce Mini Cart: Add a fully customizable WooCommerce cart to your site header, footer, or anywhere you like.
• WooCommerce Featured Product: Display featured products with ease. The blog has multiple display and design settings to help you bring attention to your best-selling products.

Pricing: Free.

8. Kadence Blocks

Kadence Blocks is a popular Gutenberg plugin that boasts over 300K users. It has many features and customization options that give you greater control over the design and aesthetics of your WordPress site.

The plugin also allows you to deactivate any blocks you’re not using, keeping your editor clean and lightweight. Some of the blocks in the plugin’s library include the following:

• Row Layout Block: Insert content blocks in one or multiple columns in a row.
• Tabs Block: Lets you create horizontal or vertical tabs and customize them.
• Accordion Block: Create beautiful accordions within your content.
• Icon List Block: Lets you create attractive lists with custom icons instead of default bullets.
• Advanced Gallery: Create stunning photo galleries, carousels, and sliders.
• Testimonials: Build confidence in your brand or product by featuring beautiful and unique testimonials. Display them as a carousel or a grid.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $89/year.

9. Genesis Blocks

Genesis Blocks is a free Gutenberg plugin suite featuring a collection of custom WordPress blocks. Included in the suite are 14 essential Gutenberg blocks, four pre-built page layouts, and eight pre-built page sections.

Some of the blocks in the library include:

• Advanced Columns Block: Create beautiful multi-column layouts.
• Author Profile Block: Easily add an author profile box to posts or pages.
• Pricing Block: Build beautiful pricing tables in WordPress.
• Share Icons Block: Add social share buttons to your posts and pages.
• Testimonial Block: Include customer testimonials to help drive sales.

Genesis Blocks also has a pro version called Genesis Pro. It has additional blocks, 26 pre-built full-page layouts, 56 pre-built sections, and much more. These make it one of the most versatile Gutenberg block plugins for building beautiful and effective websites quickly. Plus, if you get Genesis Pro, you’ll also get access to all premium StudioPress themes.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $30/month.

10. WP Call Button

WP Call Button is a single-purpose Gutenberg block plugin that lets you easily add a click-to-call button on your WordPress site. The phone button block has many customization options, making it easy to customize the call button to match your website design.

Besides adding clickable phone numbers on your posts or pages, WP Call Button also allows you to include a smart floating call button. With this, you can add a highly visible click-to-call button on all the pages on your site. 

WP Call Button is the best Gutenberg block plugin for booking more calls for your business, making it an invaluable tool for marketers and salespeople. It also works with any professional business phone service you use. 

The best part is that the call buttons have built-in tracking with Google Analytics. This means you can easily see which pages on your site are performing the best.

Pricing: Free.

11. PublishPress Blocks

PublishPress Blocks gives you a great way to extend the functionality of your WordPress editor by adding 20+ new blocks. These help you create professional web pages easily and quickly.

Some of the blocks in PublishPress Blocks include:

• Accordion block: This helps you display a lot of content in a small area. Clicking on the accordion bars reveals more content.
• Columns Manager block: This block is based on the default Columns block in Gutenberg and allows you to create columns within your content. It comes with extra features, including extra layout options, padding, margins and much more.
• Contact Form block: The Contact Form Block allows you to create a form anywhere on your page or post, enabling you to capture visitors’ contact details or take customer messages.
• Content Display block: Easily display your latest posts using different view styles, including Grid, List, Slider, Frontpage, Newspaper and Masonry. 
• Count Up block: This block is perfect for showcasing a number on your site. You can use it to show how many sales you’ve made, people signing up for your product, how much money you have raised, or anything else relevant to your business.
• And more.

Pricing: Free. Paid plans start at $69

12. Spectra

With over 600,000 active installations, Spectra is probably one of the most popular Gutenberg block plugins for WordPress. That could be because it was created by the team behind the popular Astra theme.

Spectra is a suite of Gutenberg blocks that include:

• Core Blocks: This is a set of essential blocks every website and landing page needs. These are blocks like Container, Heading, Image, Icon, Buttons, Info Box, Call To Action, and Countdown, which are crucial for crafting your pages.
• Creative Blocks: These include blocks aesthetic blocks to capture site visitors’ attention. Examples include Star Ratings, Countdown, Marketing Button, Icon List, and Image Gallery blocks. It also has support for Lottie Animations. 
• Content Blocks: These help you showcase your content beautifully. Examples include sliders, image blocks, content timelines, Google Maps, inline notices, and more.

Pricing: Free.

13. Stackable – Page Builder Gutenberg Blocks

Stackable is a free WordPress block library plugin featuring many beautiful custom blocks. It includes 40+ easy-to-use blocks for Gutenberg. In essence, it transforms the Gutenberg editor into a powerful responsive page builder. 

Examples of the blocks you’ll find in Stackable’s library include:

• Container Block: Allows you to combine different blocks in a single row.
• Feature Grid Block: This powerful block lets you showcase your product features or portfolio in stylish grid layouts.
• Team Members Block: This lets you showcase your team members with their respective positions, duties, and specialties.
• Video Popup Block: This block lets you add full-screen video popups for your Vimeo and YouTube videos.

Pricing: Free.

14. Otter Blocks Gutenberg Blocks

Otter Blocks Gutenberg Blocks by ThemeIsle is another useful WordPress blocks plugin that adds extra Gutenberg blocks to your site. The plugin has 26+ blocks and also comes with templates and layouts to help you create stunning pages without touching a line of code.

Some of the useful blocks included in the plugin are:

• Section Block: Allows you to build layouts using columns like in page builder plugins.
• Google Maps Block: This lets you embed Google Maps on your website.
• About Author Block: Allows you to show an author bio box on your website.
• Sharing Icons Block: This lets you add social sharing icons to your WordPress articles easily.
• Add to Cart Block: This makes it easier to convert visitors into customers.
• Business Hours Block: Easily display your business hours by adding a block on a page. 

Pricing: Paid plans start at $49/year.

15. Ultimate Blocks

Ultimate Blocks is another Gutenberg block collection plugin with several extra blocks for the block editor. These are designed to help make it easy for you to create custom pages to suit your needs.

Here are some of the additional blocks offered by the plugin:

• Button Block: Enables you to add custom buttons on your pages.
• Review Block: Let you add a review with the product name, features, summary, and star rating.
• Table of Contents Block: Helps you create a table of contents from the headings in your article.
• Call to Action Block: This lets you create a call-to-action box with a heading, description, and button.
• Click to Tweet Block: Easily add tweetable content to your posts and pages.
• Notification Box Block:  This allows you to add a simple notification box to your articles.

Pricing: Paid plans start at $49/year.

16. CoBlocks

CoBlocks is a free WordPress plugin with a robust collection of page-building Gutenberg blocks. The plugin is made by the team at GoDaddy, and boasts over 400K installs. Like most of the block collection plugins on this list, it offers extra blocks to add functionality to the block editor in WordPress.

The plugin enables you to customize your blocks with great ease. You can also change fonts, set the margin and padding, pick colors, and more.

Here are some useful Gutenberg blocks offered by this plugin:

• Rows and Columns Block: This lets you design dynamic layouts based on a grid system.
• FAQ Block: Lets you add FAQs anywhere on your posts or pages.
• Carousel Gallery Block: Enables you to create carousel galleries and showcase your images.
• Logos and badges Block: Easily display your logo or badges to showcase your achievements or credentials.
• Alert Block: Create attractive alerts and insert them into your WordPress posts and pages.
• Author Profile Block: Lets you add an author profile box to your WordPress post or page.

Pricing: Free.

17. Advanced Editor Tools

Advanced Editor Tools (previously TinyMCE Advanced) is the perfect Gutenberg block plugin for those who love the Classic Editor. It helps you inject a “Classic Paragraph” block in WordPress’s block editor (Gutenberg). And since it’s made by Automattic, the team behind WordPress, you can rest assured it’s a reliable plugin.

This is the go-to plugin if you are not ready to switch to the Gutenberg editor or if you have plugins that cannot be used there. The plugin enables you to continue to use the familiar TinyMCE (Classic) editor while giving you full access to the power of the block editor.

Pricing: Free.

Gutenberg Blocks Plugins: Your FAQs Answered

Best Gutenberg Blocks Plugins: Our Top Picks

Our recommendation for the best Gutenberg block plugin is All In One SEO (AIOSEO). This is because SEO is a priority for any website. Plus, AIOSEO comes with essential blocks like FAQ, table of contents, and Author SEO blocks.

We also recommend Gutenberg block plugins like WPForms, OptinMonster, and Genesis Blocks to add greater functionality to your site.

We hope this post helped you know which of the Gutenberg block plugins are the best for your site. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our ultimate WordPress SEO guide or our list of the best WooCommerce plugins.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

Negative SEO is the use of SEO to reduce another site’s rankings and credibility, resulting in poor performance and conversions. It can be subtle to spot and can counter your legitimate SEO efforts.

In this article, we’ll show you what negative SEO is, how to spot it, and how to combat it.

What is Negative SEO?

Negative SEO refers to the malicious practice of using search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to harm a competitor’s website ranking in search results. This is usually done to take over said competitor’s keywords, rankings and traffic.

Negative SEO can involve activities such as building low-quality backlinks, creating duplicate content, spreading misinformation, and even hacking the targeted website.

How to Spot Negative SEO

While negative SEO attacks can be subtle, here are some red flags to watch out for:

• A sudden influx of low-quality backlinks: Check your backlink profile for links from irrelevant, spammy websites. Semrush and Ahrefs have capable backlink checkers that can help identify suspicious links.
• Duplicate content appearing online: If you start seeing your website’s content appearing on other domains without your permission, it could be a case of content scraping or theft. This can dilute your search engine visibility.
• Negative online reviews and comments: Monitor your online reputation and promptly address malicious attacks.
• Unusual drops in website traffic: Analyze your website traffic trends to detect sudden dips that might be linked to an attack.
• Website security issues: If your website has been hacked or compromised, and you start seeing unusual or spammy content appearing on your pages, it could be a sign of malware injection or other security breaches.

These signs (and others) should raise red flags, prompting you to examine what’s negatively affecting your rankings and traffic.

Is Negative SEO Illegal?

While not explicitly illegal, engaging in negative SEO activities can violate search engine terms of service. Besides, negative SEO is an unethical business practice. If successful, it can damage the target site’s reputation, which can have legal consequences depending on the tactics used.

Is Negative SEO Relevant Today?

Negative SEO still remains relevant today, despite being against Google’s policies and a highly unethical digital marketing practice. Although its effectiveness has changed over time, thanks to search engines like Google constantly updating their algorithms and security measures, it can still negatively impact websites if not taken seriously.

Despite search engines being better able to identify negative SEO attacks, some reasons you still need to keep an eye out for it include:

• Evolving tactics: While older methods like low-quality backlinks are less effective, attackers keep devising new ways, like manipulating reviews, creating fake social media profiles, and exploiting vulnerabilities.
• Impact on reputation: Even unsuccessful attacks can damage your online reputation, requiring effort to clean up.
• Potential for success: Negative SEO attacks can still have significant consequences for websites with weak backlink profiles or security measures.

In a nutshell, negative SEO still exists. However, it’s less effective since search engines, especially Google, have become more sophisticated at detecting and mitigating negative SEO attacks. 

6 Types of Negative SEO To Watch Out For

Some common negative SEO tactics include:

Now that you know what negative SEO is and why you should care, let’s quickly dive into some types of negative SEO to watch out for.

1. Link Spamming

Link spamming involves building many low-quality backlinks to your website with the intention of triggering a penalty from search engines and hurting your rankings. This is often done through automated means to build the links at scale.

2. Content Scraping

Content scraping refers to copying and republishing content from your website to other domains. This can cause duplicate content issues and confuse search engines. It can also dilute your site’s ranking, as search engines can choose the copied content above yours.

3. Hacking and Malware Injection

This malicious negative SEO technique compromises a website’s security and injects malicious code or spam content. In some cases, attackers can redirect visitors from your site to another site of their choice. All this can trigger search engine penalties, harm your site health, and damage your reputation. 

4. Smear Campaigns

Another common negative SEO tactic entails creating fake negative reviews, social media posts, or other content intended to harm your website’s online reputation and credibility. These smear campaigns are mainly designed to deter potential customers and divert them to other providers. They can also negatively impact your search engine rankings.

5. Fake Link Removal Requests

In this instance, malicious actors can submit false copyright infringement complaints to search engines, attempting to get your legitimate backlinks removed. This damages your link profile and ranking potential.

6. Hotlinking and Heavy Crawling

Hotlinking refers to the practice of hosting media files on your site’s servers without permission. Despite being hosted on your servers, the images load on another site. This overwhelms your server resources, leading to poor speed and performance. Speed and performance are important SEO factors that impact rankings, conversion rates, and other metrics vital to site health.

Heavy crawling is another server-intensive negative SEO attack you may encounter. Malicious agents use software that crawls your site with the sole purpose of overloading your server resources. This may result in your site crashing. If this happens several times, your site can lose credibility with search engines.

How to Combat Negative SEO Attacks

What do you do when you’re the victim of a negative SEO attack?

It all depends on the type of attack. However, here are some proven ways to combat negative SEO attacks.

Focus on Positive SEO

The best long-term strategy for combatting negative SEO is to build your site’s authority and reputation through legitimate SEO practices. This is why SEO plugins like All In One SEO (AIOSEO) come in.

AIOSEO is a powerful, easy-to-use SEO plugin with over 3 million active installs. Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. It also has a dedicated WooCommerce SEO module for those with eCommerce stores. 

All these SEO modules give you an edge to outperform your competitors’ negative SEO activities against you. 

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Check out our other proven SEO best practices for more tips on focusing on positive SEO.

Build a Positive Online Reputation

Another great way to combat negative SEO is by building a positive online reputation. 

Online reputation management (ORM) is the practice of managing how people perceive your brand on search engines and other digital platforms. This involves monitoring online mentions of your brand, products, and services to ensure your business is perceived positively. 

ORM is also a fantastic way to combat negative SEO.

While ORM may not take down the negative content about you, it helps you counter it. Some ways ORM can help you combat negative SEO include:

• Identifying negative content: ORM tools can monitor online mentions of your brand and identify negative reviews, articles, or social media posts that might be part of a negative SEO campaign.
• Responding to negative content: ORM strategies can help you craft professional and appropriate responses to negative content, potentially mitigating its impact and demonstrating transparency.
• Promoting positive content: ORM can involve creating and promoting positive content about your brand, such as blog posts, press releases, or customer testimonials. This can help push down negative content in search results.
• Building brand trust: By actively engaging with your audience and addressing concerns, ORM can help build trust and credibility, making negative SEO tactics less likely to damage your reputation.

These practices will help build a positive reputation. Some of them will also boost your SEO. Both go a long way in combatting negative SEO.

Use Google’s Suite of Tools

In their quest to help legitimate users get the most out of their online presence, Google has provided some tools to help combat negative SEO. Two of the most useful in Google Search Console (GSC) are:

• Email alerts: Opt in to receive email alerts from GSC when any unusual activity is detected.
• Disavow Tool: This tool helps you dissociate your site from toxic backlinks.

Using these tools helps you identify and combat negative SEO attacks more easily.

Beef Up Your Site Security

Vulnerabilities on your site give malicious agents an open door to manipulate your site. That’s why site security plays a huge role in combatting negative SEO. 

This is why we strongly encourage you to implement SSL/HTTPS on your site. Once you install an SSL certificate, a padlock sign will appear in the address bar. This shows your site visitors that they’re on a secure page. 

In addition, your website address will begin with HTTPS instead of just HTTP. These small visual queues are a great way to gain user trust, an important factor in encouraging repeat visitors. 

For more information on how security impacts SEO, check out our article on HTTPS and SEO.

Other security measures for WordPress sites include:

• Keep your software updated: This includes your CMS (Content Management System), plugins, themes, and any other software used on your website. Updates often contain security patches that address vulnerabilities hackers might exploit.
• Use strong passwords and enforce password policies: Encourage users to create strong passwords with a mix of uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols. Consider implementing two-factor authentication (2FA) for added security.
• Regularly back up your website: Having a recent backup allows you to restore your website quickly in case of a security breach or other unforeseen event. A great plugin you can use for this is Duplicator.
• Use a reputable WordPress security plugin: Reputable security plugins help block intruders. They Install a web application firewall (WAF): A WAF acts as a shield, filtering out malicious traffic and protecting your website from common attacks like SQL injection and cross-site scripting (XSS). Examples of WordPress security plugins that offer this functionality include Sucuri, Wordfence, and others.
• Limit user access: Only grant access to your website and its functionalities to users who need it. This minimizes the potential damage if someone gains unauthorized access.

Keeping your site secure is one of the most beneficial ways to protect it from negative SEO attacks. Investing time and resources into it should be high on your list of best practices for optimizing your site.

Keep an Eye on Your Backlink Profile

Spammy links and redirects are some of the most common negative SEO tactics malicious actors use. The best way to combat that is by keeping an eye on your backlink profile. A great tool for doing this is Semrush.

Instead of manually checking your backlink profile, you can use Semrush’s Backlink Audit tool to speed things up and improve efficiency. 

Once you find the toxic backlinks, analyze each backlink to determine whether it’s harmful. Depending on your analysis, send each backlink (in Semrush) to one of three lists:

• Whitelist: This is where you move backlinks that you’ve deemed safe
• Removal list: From here, you can contact the referring site and ask them to remove the link
• Disavow list: From here, you can create a disavow file that asks Google to ignore the link

While Google maintains that toxic backlinks should be ignored, they can lead to penalties and should be disavowed. 

In the same vein, work on building a strong natural backlink profile. Focus on acquiring high-quality backlinks from relevant and authoritative websites through content marketing and outreach. This strengthens your site’s resilience to negative attacks.

Check out our link building guide for more information.

Monitor for Duplicate Content

Checking for duplicate content is easy with tools like Grammarly, Copyscape, and other similar content marketing tools. Simply copy and paste sections of your content into them and run a plagiarism check.

However, if you want an easier way of checking for duplicate content, use tools like Semrush’s Site Audit tool, Ahref’s Site Audit tool, and other similar SEO tools. It crawls your site and checks for issues negatively impacting it, including duplicate content. 

Work with Your Hosting Company

In the event of attacks like heavy crawling, it’s best to contact your hosting company so they can help you check where the unusual traffic is coming from. They can also help you devise solutions like rerouting traffic through a DDoS protection service or implementing stronger firewall rules.

Monitor Your Online Reputation

Set up Google Alerts for your brand name and track mentions across social media and review sites. If you find any negative content, address it promptly and professionally. 

You can also proactively manage your Google reviews to ensure there are more positive reviews than negative ones. This helps you maintain a good online reputation and boost your SEO, credibility, and sales. 

If you discover some reviews that are unfounded or part of a negative SEO attack, you can get them pulled down by Google. Here’s how to report them and request a takedown.

Negative SEO: Your FAQs Answered

We hope this article helped you learn more about negative SEO. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our guide to common SEO mistakes to avoid or our article on the benefits of SEO for small businesses.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

Query args are an important part of website functionality. However, if not managed properly, they can negatively impact your SEO. This means poor rankings, low traffic, and poor business growth.

In this article, we’ll show you how to manage query args so your SEO is on point. 

What is a Query Arg?

Query args are elements added to the end of a web address. They are any part of a URL after and including a question mark (?), ampersand (&), percentage sign (%), equals sign (=) or other attributes (markups) added to a URL.

Here’s an example of a URL with an arg:

https://www.example.com/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=tweet&utm_campaign=spring-sale

Query args are also known by many other names. Examples include query arguments, query strings, URL parameters, URL params and more.

What are Query Args Used For?

Query args have many different uses depending on their purpose. One of their primary use cases is to pass information about a URL’s clicks to webmasters. This helps them get valuable metrics about its performance. Other common uses include:

• Filtering: For example, filtering different product pages.
• Organizing: You can use URL parameters to organize content on a website, such as by categorizing it.
• Tracking: Tracking parameters are useful for monitoring the performance of marketing campaign sources (especially for referral traffic). They also help attribute conversions.
• Search parameters: Often denoted by the letters “q” and “s,” search parameters help organize and return results for search queries.

Are Query Args Bad for SEO?

Query args are generally considered potentially problematic for SEO. However, their impact can vary depending on how they are used.

Here are some key points showing how query args can impact SEO:

• Duplicate content issues: Search engines may treat URLs with different query arg values as separate pages, even if the main content is the same. This can lead to duplicate content issues, which can negatively impact SEO.
• Crawl budget wastage: Having too many URLs with different query arg combinations can waste a website’s crawl budget (the number of pages a search engine bot will crawl), as the search engine may waste resources crawling duplicate or low-value pages.
• Poor link equity flow: Internal links with query args may dilute the flow of link equity (ranking power) from one page to another, as search engines may treat them as separate pages.

These, and other complications of query args can negatively impact your SEO. Because of this, you should have a way of handling them.

How to Manage Query Args in WordPress

So, how do you manage query args in WordPress?

Step 1: Install All In One SEO (AIOSEO)

The first step to proper handling of query args is to install All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin with over 3 million active users. And because it’s regularly being updated, you can be assured the plugin stays abreast of changes in SEO best practices and keeps up with WordPress versions.

When it comes to query arg handling, AIOSEO has a powerful feature called a Query Arg Monitor.

This is a game-changing feature that enables you to have granular control over how query args are handled on your site.

Another reason millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs is that the plugin has many powerful features. These are designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Step 2: Check Your Query Arg Log

Once you’ve installed AIOSEO, the next step to managing query args on your website is to check your query arg log for the args you want to block search engines from crawling.

AIOSEO’s query arg log can be configured to retain information about your log for a specified period of time. All the logged query args will be displayed in a table.

Step 3: Select the Query Args to Block

Armed with a list of logged query args, managing them on your site is now easier. To do that, select the action you want to take, in this instance, blocking the ones you don’t want. For a single query arg, you can do so using the action buttons next to the query arg:

Click on the Block Key button to block query args by key only or select the Block Key & Value to include the value in detecting the query args to be blocked.

If you want to block multiple query args, you can select them from the log and then select Block Key or Block Key & Value in the Bulk Actions menu.

No matter the method you use, you’ll be asked to confirm the action you’re taking.

Click Block Query Args, and your selected query args will be blocked.

Step 4: Manually Input Query Args to Block (Optional)

You can also manually input the query args you want to block by using the Block Query Arg field.

Simply enter the key and values of the query args you want to block and click the Block Query Arg button.

For advanced users, you can also use the Regex function to block unwanted query args.

This makes it easier and faster.

Managing Query Args in WordPress: Your FAQs Answered

We hope this article has helped you learn how to manage query args in WordPress. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our tutorial on implementing bulk redirects using a CSV file or our guide to SEO content.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

SEO content is an essential ingredient to a successful website as it helps boost your online visibility, drive traffic, and grow your business. However, creating content that does all of these is a science that many don’t take the time to master.

In this article, we’ll show you everything you should know about SEO content.

What is SEO Content?

SEO content is online content designed to rank high in organic search results. But to understand it properly, we need to break down the term:

• SEO: Search engine optimization (SEO) is the practice of improving your site and its content to increase visibility on search engines when people search for keywords and topics related to your business.
• Content: Refers to any information created to live and be consumed on the internet.

This means SEO content is any information designed and created to live and be consumed on the internet and must be easily discoverable by searchers. 

Types of SEO Content

Now that you know what SEO content is, let’s quickly look at some common types of SEO content. 

Blog Posts and Articles

These comprehensive content pieces are the backbone of many successful SEO strategies. They are designed to be educational, informative, and authoritative. They can also have conversion-based elements to encourage readers to take a particular action. 

Product Pages 

Product pages are pages on your website that showcase your products. They help your customers decide what they want to buy on your site. They have valuable information such as specifications, prices, features, reviews, product comparisons, etc.

Guides and Tutorials 

These are designed to help a reader solve a problem, ideally with your product or service. They are a great way to get your target audience to trust you and your product. Plus, creating this kind of content is a great way to become the go-to resource in your industry, resulting in more organic traffic and inbound leads.

Infographics and Multimedia Content

Visual elements are great tools to enhance engagement. But they can also help your SEO efforts as they give you an opportunity to rank for video and image searches. Check out our guide on image SEO for details on enhancing the visibility of your visual elements in search.

Why is SEO Content Important?

SEO content goes beyond just climbing the ranks on Google. After all, your blog or business doesn’t grow from rankings alone. 

So, why is SEO content important?

Let’s quickly look at why you should invest in SEO content.

High Rankings, More Traffic

SEO content is optimized for specific keywords and phrases relevant to your business or niche. When people search for these terms, your content has a higher chance of appearing on the search engine results pages (SERPs).

Ranking high on SERPs results in higher visibility, which, in turn, translates to increased organic traffic to your website.

Build Credibility and Authority

Remember, SEO content is designed to rank high on SERPs. If you have a lot of high-ranking content, searchers will see your brand appearing often for terms they input into search engines. As a result, you’ll be seen as an authority in your niche.

Boost your Bottom Line

Well-crafted SEO content helps you demonstrate expertise in your field and establishes your website as a credible source of information. This results in readers trusting your brand, resulting in higher conversion rates. It also plays a big role in increasing customer loyalty and retention. All these are elements that can help boost your bottom line.

How to Develop an SEO Content Strategy

For your SEO content to be effective, you need to develop a strategy for creating and promoting it. You can’t create impactful content randomly. You have to deliberately design an effective SEO content strategy. It’s essential for improving your online visibility and attracting organic traffic. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you craft a successful SEO content strategy:

Use the Right WordPress SEO Tool

One of the first steps to developing an effective SEO content strategy is investing in the right SEO tool. And for WordPress users, there’s no better tool than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts over 3 million active installs. Millions of smart marketers and bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. It also has a dedicated WooCommerce SEO module for those with eCommerce stores. 

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Research Intent-focused Keywords

Keyword research is a foundational aspect of creating SEO content. That’s because every online search starts with a keyword.

Keyword research involves understanding the words, phrases, and questions your target audience uses when searching for information relevant to your business or product. It also involves strategic tasks like checking keyword difficulty and whether targeting those keywords is feasible. 

To make your keyword research easy, use a keyword research tool. Examples include Semrush, Ahrefs, Google Keyword Planner, and more. Also, focus on long-tail keywords to capture more specific search queries. Plus, they have low competition, giving you better chances of ranking. 

Besides keyword discovery, you also need to understand search intent. This is the reason behind the search query. While it may sound complicated, figuring out search intent is quite easy. Two of the best ways to do it are: 

• Using tools: keyword research tools like Semrush have a search intent feature that helps highlight the most common user intent behind a keyword.
• Studying SERPs: Study the SERPs and see the type of content that ranks well.

Understanding search intent is important as it helps you create SEO content that satisfies your target audience’s search queries. As a result, it will convert better.

Understand Your Target Audience

Many marketers and SEOs make the mistake of optimizing content for search engines. That’s not what SEO content is about. Genuine SEO content also considers the target audience. 

That’s why you must include audience research when developing your SEO content strategy. This includes thinking about:

• Who is your intended audience?
• What problems are they likely to have?
• What solutions are they looking for?
• Do they have a particular way of speaking (lingo)?

Answering these questions will give you the foundation you need to conduct impactful keyword research. It also helps you create personalized content, making your audience trust you more. It also helps boost your conversion rates and increases the chances of it being shared.

By tailoring your content to address the needs and interests of your audience, you ensure that it ranks well and satisfies your audience.

Create a Content Calendar

A content calendar, or an editorial calendar, is a planning tool used to organize and schedule content creation over a specific period. It makes managing your content marketing tasks easier, from ideation to promotion.

Creating a content calendar is essential as it will help you publish SEO content consistently. As a result, you’ll always have fresh content. This is important to SEO because:

• Search engines favor fresh content over old content
• You can create content to target different keywords
• More content results in greater search visibility

You should also consider including content refreshes in your content calendar as they help you combat content decay. 

Prioritize High-Quality Content

An essential aspect of an impactful SEO content strategy is creating high-quality content. This means creating valuable, informative, and engaging content that addresses the needs of your audience.

Aim for longer-form content when appropriate, as it tends to perform better in search rankings. This is because it comprehensively covers a topic. You should also leverage content optimization tools to ensure your content is primed for rankings.

Be Strategic About Distribution

Content distribution refers to the strategic promotion and sharing of content across various online channels to maximize its reach, visibility, and impact. Content distribution aims to ensure that your content reaches the right audience in the right places at the right time. This helps foster engagement, brand awareness, and, ultimately, achieving your marketing objectives.

For your content distribution to be effective, focus on the channels and platforms your target audience spends the most time on.

How to Write and Optimize SEO Content: 7 Tips

Now that you know what SEO content is and why it’s important, let’s dive into some best practices for creating it.

1. Nail Your Research

The first step to writing SEO content is researching your content thoroughly. We’ve already looked at keyword and audience research, so we’ll take the research aspect a bit further here and look at competitor research.

Competitor research, also known as competitor analysis, refers to the process of evaluating your primary competitors to see what’s working for them. This includes:

• Identifying your primary competitors
• Keywords they’re ranking for
• The type of content performing well for them
• Keyword and content gaps
• Their internal and backlinking strategy

You can use AIOSEO’s SEO Analysis to analyze your competitor’s SEO and some of their gaps.

You can use this data to improve your site and content.

2. Focus on Quality and E-E-A-T

For your SEO content to stand a chance of ranking, it must be of high quality. This means it must be:

• Well-written
• Informative
• Structured well
• Relevant
• Accurate and credible 

You should also ensure that your SEO content meets Google’s E-E-A-T content standards. It should be expertly written, feature personal experiences, be authoritative, and be trustworthy. One way of achieving this is by enlisting the help of subject matter experts when creating content around complex topics. 

Check out our tutorial on implementing E-E-A-T right inside WordPress.

3. Keyword-optimize Your Content

While you could get away with keyword stuffing in the past, that isn’t the case anymore. Instead, you should use your keywords strategically in your content. This means using your target keyword in your:

• Headline
• Introduction and conclusion
• Headers
• Meta description and SEO title
• In your content

Besides using your target keyword, consider including synonyms and LSI keywords. This helps search engines understand your topic and that you’re covering it thoroughly.

4. Craft Compelling Headlines

Your headlines play a huge role in how search engines rank your content. They’re an essential part of on-page SEO. They also help users determine whether your content will satisfy their search query or not.

That’s why you should invest time in crafting compelling SEO-friendly headlines.

To do this:

• Include your keyword, preferably as close to the beginning as possible
• Craft a headline that meets search intent
• Use action words to spur readers into action
• Keep it simple and avoid being clever, using jargon, etc.

Your headline helps set expectations for the rest of your content. Getting it right encourages users to read the rest of your content.

Here are a few more tips for optimizing your headlines.

5. Optimize Your Search Snippets

A search snippet is the short blurb of your content on search engines and includes the:

• URL
• Meta description
• SEO title

Sometimes, it can include special features like jump links.

Here’s an example of a search snippet:

Optimizing your search preview is easier using AIOSEO’s SEO Preview tool. This shows you what your search snippet will look like on SERPs.

It also shows you how your snippets will look when shared on Facebook and X. Using a SERP preview tool as part of your SERP analysis helps you boost your conversion rates.

6. Optimize Your Headers

Header tags, also known as HTML header tags or HTML heading tags, are HTML elements used to markup and separate headings and subheadings in your content. 

Besides breaking up content into subsections, header tags also:

• Tell web browsers how to display content
• Help search engines understand your page and content better

Header tags rank in order of importance, starting from H1 (which is usually the title tag or most important heading) to H6 tags. 

When crafting SEO content, some tips for optimizing your header tags are:

• Include your target keyword
• Reinforce search intent
• Be descriptive

For a detailed look, check out our guide on header tags and how to use them to boost your SEO.

7. Add Internal Links

Internal linking means adding links to and from the pages on your site. We call these links “internal” because they’re within your website. 

Internal linking is a powerful SEO practice as it helps:

• Keep readers on your site for longer
• Distribute “link juice” across your site
• Search engines better understand what your site is about
• Improve crawling and indexing
• Improve site navigation

But as your website grows, remembering all the articles you can link to becomes next to impossible. Manually adding internal links becomes impossible. That’s why you should consider a tool like AIOSEO’s Link Assistant.

Link Assistant helps you build strategic internal links on autopilot, making the task much easier. It also shows the orphaned pages on your site, which are pages without any internal links, a problem that can hurt your SEO and user experience (UX).

To make internal linking easy and fast, Link Assistant will suggest which articles to link to in your content and the anchor text to use. You can include all link suggestions at once or add them individually as you vet them.

Click here to learn more about how to improve internal link building on your site. This is one of the many WordPress SEO tips that should be non-negotiable.

Monitoring the Performance of Your SEO Content

Monitoring the performance of your SEO content is a crucial aspect of running an impactful SEO campaign. If you’re a WordPress user, this can be easily done using AIOSEO’s Search Statistics module.  

Search Statistics is a powerful Google Search Console integration that lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click. It comes with many reports for monitoring SEO performance.

There are 3 ways you can use Search Statistics to monitor SEO performance:

1. Monitoring Your Overall SEO Metrics

Checking the performance of your SEO content in WordPress is super easy. To do so, head over to Search Statistics in the AIOSEO menu. Clicking on this leads you to the Search Statistics Dashboard.

The Dashboard section will give you an overview of important SEO metrics like Search Impressions, Total Clicks, Average CTR, and Average Position. It also shows you an overview of the number of keywords ranking at different positions. You can see this in the Keyword Positions section.

The Keyword Positions graph gives you an overview of how your content is performing.

Besides the overview on the dashboard, there are two other reports that can help you check your search visibility. These are the Keyword Ranking report and the Content Performance report.

2. Using the Content Performance Report

AIOSEO’s Search Statistics module comes with a Content Performance report that shows how your posts and pages are performing on SERPs. To access it, go to AIOSEO » Search Statistics » SEO Statistics. Next, scroll down to the Content Performance report.

The Content Performance report shows you 3 main content metrics, namely:

• Top Pages: This shows you your best-performing pages.
• Top Losing: This shows the pages losing rankings the most.
• Top Winning: This shows the content that’s gaining higher rankings.

The Content Performance report gives you key metrics like Clicks, Impressions, Position, and Diff (change in position) for each page in this report. These give you deep insights into what’s happening to your content on SERPs. 

Regarding the performance of your SEO content, the 2 most important metrics are Position and Diff. The positions tab shows you each page’s position on SERPs, while the Diff shows whether your content is improving in performance or decaying.

3. Checking SEO Content Performance Using the Keyword Rankings Report

The Keyword Rankings report gives you great insights into how your content is performing for your target keywords. You can check this report by going to AIOSEO » Search Statistics » Keyword Rankings.

This is where you get a detailed report of all your keywords and their performance on SERPs. The report shows vital information like the Total Keywords you’re ranking for, Search Impressions, and Average Position. These metrics give you a general overview of your rankings and online reach.

To get a more granular view of how you’re performing for specific keywords, scroll down to the Keyword Performance section.

Essential metrics for each keyword include Clicks, Average CTR, Impressions, Position, and Diff.

The tab to keep an eye out for as you monitor the performance of your SEO content is the positions tab. It gives you the SERP position of your keywords, enabling you to see how well you’re ranking for it.

2 SEO Content Case Studies to Learn From: Plus Takeaways

Before we wrap things up, let’s look at some case studies to validate the principles and practices we shared above.

1. Golf Blog Boosts Traffic By Optimizing Content

Golfer Geeks was founded in 2015 by Jamie Boudreaux, an avid golfer and entrepreneur.

He started the website to share his enthusiasm for the sport and connect readers with the right equipment and tips for improving their game.

Nine months into 2023, the site more than doubled its organic traffic compared to the total traffic generated in 2022.

How did they do it?

The team behind the site focused on improving their content and optimizing it for search. Of particular note, some SEO best practices they implemented include:

• Using content structure to improve the user experience
• Fighting content decay with regular updates
• Optimizing images for search engines
• Implementing FAQ schema for People Also Ask results

Check out the full Golfer Geeks case study for more insights on how this blogger skyrocketed his rankings and organic traffic by optimizing their content.

2. AI High School Program Grows Traffic by 427% in 3 Months

Inspirit AI is an online AI training program for high school students. It was developed by alumni and graduate students from Stanford and MIT.

Their mission is to inspire the next generation to use AI as a tool for shaping a brighter future.

Inspirit AI was founded in 2019, although traffic was minimal during its first year. In 2022, the total traffic was 34,165. However, from January 2023 to September 2023, the site had a whopping 293,444 organic visitors.

Some of the key factors that led to the site’s traffic skyrocketing include:

• Increasing content production
• Targeting long-tail keywords
• Optimizing for People Also Ask

In a nutshell, SEO content resulted in some pretty big wins for the brand.

Check out the full story and some practical takeaways from our InspiritAI case study.

SEO Content: Your FAQs Answered

SEO Content: The Key to Organic Traffic

SEO content is an essential ingredient of any content marketing strategy. It helps boost your search visibility, conversion rates, and revenue.

We hope this post has helped you understand SEO content and its importance. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our beginners’ guide to SEO or our guide to SEO copywriting.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

SERP preview tools are invaluable in helping boost your SEO and drive traffic to your site. 

In this article, we’ll show you the best WordPress SERP Preview tools you can consider using on your site.

What are SERPs?

Search engine result pages (SERPs) are the web pages Google and other search engines return when users input a query. They are the results pages served to users after they input their keywords.

While every SERP may be unique, they usually have the same features, namely:

• Ads
• Organic search results
• Featured snippet
• People also ask (PAA) section
• Related searches section

However, to provide a personalized experience, you may find that SERPs may be slightly different, even for search queries performed on the same search engine using the same keywords or search queries. This happens because search engines try to customize the experience for each user by presenting results based on a wide range of factors apart from the search term. This includes the user’s physical location, browsing history, and social settings. 

Another note is that SERPs constantly change in appearance due to experiments search engines perform to offer users a better experience. For example, with the advent of generative AI, one of the most prominent SERP features has become an AI-generated overview of the answer to your search request.

Why are SERPs important for SEO?

SERPs are crucial to your SEO for many different reasons, with the top ones being:

• That is where your search listings are found
• SERPs determine how your search listing will look to users
• Understanding the competitiveness of a particular SERP result helps guide your SEO efforts

SERP analysis is important because it helps determine what you need to do to rank high and improve your organic clickthrough rates (CTR). This is exactly why you would need a SERP preview tool.

What is a SERP Preview Tool?

A Google SERP preview tool lets you check how your search listing will appear in search results. It can provide an accurate view of your title tag, meta description, and URL, exactly how users will see them when they perform a Google search for terms you rank for.

SERP preview tools are important because they can help you optimize your search snippets for engagement, higher clickthrough rates (CTRs), and traffic.

5 Top SERP Preview Tools for WordPress: Our Top Picks

Ready to pick the best SERP preview tool for your site?

Here’s our expertly curated list:

1. All In One SEO (AIOSEO)

AIOSEO is hands down the best SERP preview tools. It’s the most powerful WordPress SEO plugin on the market and is trusted by over 3 million savvy marketers and website owners to help boost their rankings and drive traffic to their sites. The plugin has many powerful SEO features designed to help you optimize your website and to dominate the SERPs.

For detailed instructions on installing AIOSEO, check out our step-by-step installation guide.

AIOSEO also has a powerful built-in SERP preview tool in the SEO Preview module. You can find AIOSEO’s SEO Preview module in your WordPress admin bar when viewing a published post as an admin or in preview mode before publishing a post.

When you open the SEO Preview tab, you’ll find a search and social media snippet tool that gives an overview of how your snippets will look on SERPs and social media.

For your Google snippet, you get a quick overview of your URL, title tag, and meta description. And if you’ve added schema markup, it also shows how your rich snippets will look!

What makes this the best SERP preview tool is that if you’re an AIOSEO user, you can easily edit your snippets if you want to optimize them better. Simply click the Edit Snippet button, and you’ll be taken to AIOSEO’s meta box, where you can edit your snippet.

Besides helping you optimize your search and social media snippets, AIOSEO’s SEO Preview tool also comes with an SEO Inspector. This tool gives you an overview of your basic SEO and meta tags, allowing you to see how to best improve your page’s SEO at a glance.

Pricing: Starts at $49.60/year. Free plan available.

2. Mangool’s SERP Simulator

Mangools is a suite of SEO tools that covers keyword research, backlink analysis, and more. One of the tools in the suite is the SERP Simulator, a SERP preview tool that shows how your snippets will appear in search results. 

To see your search snippets, fill in the necessary fields (URL, title, description, etc.), and the tool will generate a SERP preview of your page. It also allows you to compare your search snippet to competing articles.

Pricing: The SERP Simulator is free. Pricing for other SEO tools starts at $229.20/year.

Pricing: $99/year.  

3. Rank Math

Rank Math is another WordPress SEO plugin that’s a newcomer compared to Yoast and AIOSEO.

Like AIOSEO, Rank Math also has a SERP Preview tool for optimizing your search listings. The plugin also allows you to review and edit your search snippets quickly.

Compared to Yoast, Rank Math would be the better option, as the Lite version has more features. But both come trailing behind AIOSEO when it comes to value for money.

Pricing: Starts at $59/year

4. Yoast SEO

Yoast SEO is one of the WordPress SEO plugins that can help you add meta tags like SEO titles and descriptions to posts and pages on your website. It also comes with a SERP preview tool that enables you to visualize what your search snippets look like on SERPs. 

Like AIOSEO, Yoast SEO has other SEO features to help you rank your content. However, unlike AIOSEO, you have to pay extra for each SEO module you add to the basic plan.

Pricing: Starts at $99/year.

5. TextMagic

TextMagic is a free SERP Preview tool that allows you to generate search snippets in 2 ways. First, you can manually fill in the URL, title, and description fields and generate a preview of your search snippet on SERPs. Secondly, you can fetch the search snippet of an already published post by posting the URL in the URL field and clicking the fetch button.

Like the Mangools SERP Simulator, this tool doesn’t work on WordPress. However, its simplicity makes it a handy tool for quickly checking if your search snippets are properly optimized.

Pricing: Free.

The Best WordPress SERP Preview Tools: Your FAQS Answered

The Best WordPress SERP Preview Tool: Our Top Pick

If you’re a WordPress user, we recommend AIOSEO as the best WordPress SERP preview tool for you. The plugin makes it easy to visualize your search snippets and edit them from within WordPress. It also comes with many other powerful SEO features, making it a one-stop shop for all things WordPress SEO.

If you’re looking for a SERP preview tool that works independently of WordPress, then Mangool’s SERP Simulator would be your best bet.

We hope this post helped you pick the best SEO preview tool for your WordPress website. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like the best redirect plugins for WordPress and our ultimate WordPress SEO guide.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on Twitter, LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

Why is technical SEO important?

How do you optimize for technical SEO?

This post will answer those questions and more, helping ensure that your digital marketing efforts have a better chance of being effective.

What is Technical SEO (and Why is it Important)?

When you dive into the world of search engine optimization (SEO), you’ll discover that there are three main categories of SEO:

• On-page SEO: This category mainly deals with factors directly related to the content on your website
• Off-page SEO: Off-page SEO involves actions taken outside of your website yet can impact your search rankings. Examples include backlinks, social shares, and more.

Then comes technical SEO. 

Technical SEO refers to optimizing the technical elements of your website and server that impact your performance and user experience. These are the two primary elements that impact how users and search engines appreciate your website. 

Traditionally, technical SEO refers to optimizing your website for crawlability and indexability.

• Crawling is the ability for search engines to access the pages on your site.
• Indexing refers to a search engine’s ability to analyze your pages and add them to its database, called an index.

Today, however, technical SEO encompasses any technical processes that can improve search visibility. These can include, among many others:

• Site architecture
• XML sitemaps
• Site speed
• Duplicate content
• Security
• User experience

Before we get carried away, let’s back up and look at the essential components you need to get right for your technical SEO to be on point. 

9 Best Technical SEO Checklist Points

Mention technical SEO, and many people feel it’s something out of their depth. However, it’s not as daunting as it sounds. Here’s a technical SEO checklist you can use to improve yours:

1. Use the Right SEO Tool

One of the first SEO tips for writing an optimized author bio is to ensure you’re using the right SEO tool. And for WordPress users, there’s no better tool than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts 3+ million active installs. Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. 

Examples of AIOSEO’s revolutionary features include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO and on-page SEO. It also has a dedicated WooCommerce SEO module for those with eCommerce stores. 

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

2. Nail Your Page Experience 

One of the first stops when looking to boost your technical SEO is to nail your page experience. That’s because page experience encompasses many other technical SEO aspects that you need to optimize.

What is page experience?

As the name suggests, page experience refers to a set of signals Google uses to measure how users perceive the experience they have when interacting with any of your web pages. These signals include:

Core Web Vitals

Core web vitals are Google’s three metrics for measuring user experience when a page loads. These are:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP): This measures a page’s load speed, and Google recommends it be within 2.5 seconds of when a page first starts loading.
• Interaction to Next Paint (INP): INP is a web performance metric that measures the responsiveness of a web page after a user interaction. A lower score is desirable.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS): CLS measures a page’s visual stability as it loads. Elements moving around a lot result in a high CLS. A good CLS is 0.1 or lower.

You can measure your website’s core vitals in Google Search Console (GSC) under the enhancements section.

The other page experience signals include:

Mobile-friendliness

While this may sound like old news, you’ll be surprised at how many websites are still lagging in providing a mobile-first experience. However, with mobile devices enjoying a 54.37% market share, search engines prioritize mobile-friendly sites over those that aren’t.

Security With HTTPS

Security plays a huge role in how people experience your website. When people feel that your website is secure, they interact more freely (and longer) with it. For example, the lock icon in the screenshot below indicates that the website is secure.

That’s why search engines, particularly Google, use HTTPS as one of the metrics for measuring page experience. 

What’s the difference between HTTP and HTTPS?

The main difference is that HTTPS is encrypted, making it more secure. And with the increase in cybercrime, search engines want to be sure they’re sending users to safe domains. 

Intrusive Interstitial Elements

With the advent of mobile-first websites came a problem — unscrupulous webmasters and advertisers who want to manipulate the limited real estate on mobile devices by displaying full-screen popups. An intrusive interstitial is any element on a page that covers most of the content on a web page, making it difficult to access.

Search engines frown on this practice as it results in a negative user experience. Remember, search engines prioritize user satisfaction above many other factors. Therefore, anything that takes away from a good experience negatively impacts your SEO.

3. Check Your Website for Crawl Errors

To know the purpose of a website, search engines “crawl” your web pages. Crawling simply means following the links from one page to another. This is why having an internal linking strategy is crucial — it helps search engines understand your website and the hierarchy of the pages.

That’s also why you must ensure there are no crawl errors on your website. A few common factors that could lead to crawl errors include:

Broken links

Because a website is always a work in progress, there are bound to be broken links. Always monitor your website for these and create redirects.

You can also check out how to find and fix broken links in this article.

Redirect Chains 

As much as redirects are handy, they can do more harm than good to your website if not properly handled. You can end up with redirect chains, a situation where one redirect leads to another, and another, and another, and so forth. Redirect chains can lead to serious crawl errors. 

The easier it is for search engines to crawl your site, the better your chances of ranking higher.

That’s why AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager is an essential tool for anyone who wants to master technical SEO.

This powerful tool makes managing your redirects super easy. For example, among other things, you can:

Schedule Redirects

This feature works well with both temporary and permanent redirects and helps eliminate 404 errors.

Import Bulk Redirects from a CSV File

Importing bulk redirects this way is more efficient and less laborious.

The Redirection Manager also has many other features, like automatic redirects, a URL slug monitor that detects any changes in your URLs, and many more.

4. Create a User-friendly Site Architecture

Site architecture refers to how the pages on your website are organized, grouped, and linked together. Your site architecture, done well, can help users and search engines easily find what they are looking for on your site. From a user point of view, this results in increased time on site, signaling to search engines that your site offers a positive UX and valuable content. A few factors that can influence your site architecture include:

• Navigation menus
• Categorization
• URL structures
• Breadcrumbs
• Internal linking

Remember, search engines are all about providing users with a positive UX. On a website, one of the most significant elements that contribute to UX is your site architecture. So, make sure you optimize it for SEO. 

5. Optimize Your Robots .txt File

A robots.txt file gives search engines instructions on which pages to crawl and display in search engine results. 

Yes, there are some pages you’d rather not have search engines waste their time by crawling. Examples include:

• Admin pages
• Cart and checkout pages
• Login pages
• Resources like PDFs

Optimizing your robots.txt file ensures that only the important pages on your website are crawled and indexed. For large sites, optimizing the robots.txt file also helps maximize crawl budget.

Again, this is another area in which AIOSEO shines. It allows you to manage and optimize your robots.txt file easily. You can find this under the “Tools” section of AIOSEO’s dashboard:

Besides automatically optimizing the default robots.txt file WordPress generates for your site, AIOSEO also allows you to edit your robots.txt file manually.

This enables you to give search engines specific instructions about how to crawl your site, allowing you to prioritize the URLs search engines should crawl.

6. Create and Optimize an XML Sitemap

XML sitemaps are often overlooked elements of an effective technical SEO strategy. Yet, they can be powerful if executed well.

If you’re wondering, an XML sitemap is simply a blueprint of your website. It helps search engines easily find, crawl, and index your content. This helps speed up the indexation of the pages on your website.

Besides making it easy for search engines to crawl your site, a sitemap also provides valuable information such as:

• The relationship between the important pages on your website.
• How often each page on your website is updated.
• When they were last updated.

Creating a sitemap is super-easy if you use a tool like AIOSEO — that’s why it’s one of the best WordPress SEO plugins around.

To get started creating your sitemap, all you have to do is to go to the plugin’s settings and click on “Sitemaps”.

This will take you to the page to enable AIOSEO to generate a sitemap for your website.

Toggling the “Enable Sitemap” results in AIOSEO automatically generating a sitemap of your website. You can even preview your sitemap by clicking on the “Open Sitemap” button.

If you’re confident playing around with sitemap settings, AIOSEO gives you the flexibility to further optimize the sitemap by changing various settings. Examples include enabling/disabling sitemap indexes, setting the number of posts per sitemap, and much more.

Once you’ve created your sitemap, submit it to Google via Google Search Console. Also, make sure to add it to your robots.txt file. 

7. Create Search Engine and User-friendly URLs

Another item to include on your technical SEO checklist is your URL structure.

According to Google, your website’s URL structure should be as simple as possible. Your URLs should be search engine and user-friendly.

Part of that means organizing your content so that URLs are constructed:

• Logically
• Easy to read
• Intelligible to readers

URLs aren’t just meant to help search engines find a page’s address. They should also show readers that the page they’re clicking on will meet their search intent. To do this, use readable words that include your keyword. Avoid using the default URLs WordPress assigns, as they’re incorrigible and contain meaningless ID numbers. 

So, how do you edit your URLs?

The easiest way is to use the URL slug editor in AIOSEO. Simply click on the “Post” settings and scroll down to the “Permalink” option. Next, input the words you want to show in your URL, making sure to include your keyword. Also, keep the URL as short as possible.

If you’ve read this far and haven’t downloaded the plugin yet, we suggest you take a moment to do so. AIOSEO is one of the best WordPress SEO plugins and can help you effortlessly tick off items on your technical SEO checklist.

8. Eliminate Duplicate Content

Duplicate content is a plague that can easily attack any website. Particularly if you run an e-commerce website that sells similar products, you’ll have to be careful with your product descriptions.

However, duplicate content is not just a problem e-commerce stores face. Every website can suffer from duplicate content.

What is duplicate content?

As the name suggests, duplicate content is content that is similar but appears on different URLs. this can be on other sites or even other pages on your website. This can mean the content, meta tags, 

And if you’re wondering, duplicate content impacts SEO negatively as search engines won’t know:

• Which version to index.
• Whether to direct link metrics to one page or split them between the multiple versions.
• Which version to rank for query results.

Search engines never display the same content on search engine results pages (SERPs). So, no matter how good the content is, it will struggle to rank if it’s duplicate content.

How do you deal with duplicate content?

For duplicate content on your site, one of the best ways to solve the problem is to 301 redirect all duplicate pages to the original page.

Another excellent way to deal with duplicate content is to add a rel= canonical tag to the URL you want search engines to index. This tag tells search engines that the canonicalized URL is the original one and should be indexed.

Lastly, you can also consider deleting the duplicate pages. When you do this, however, remember to redirect the URLs to the remaining page. 

9. Implement Schema Markup

For search engines to better understand your website, it needs to be structured in such a way that the bots can easily understand it. But because humans and bots don’t speak the same language, it makes it difficult to create web pages that cater to both.

That’s where schema markup comes in.

Schema markup, or structured data, is the language of search engines. It’s a collection of standardized tags you can place on your website to describe various page elements in “robot speak.” 

Schema markup helps search engines better understand the content on your website, resulting in them giving users a better experience. With schema markup implemented, search engines can show users “rich results” on SERPs.

These rich results are more interactive and give more information about your webpage, resulting in improved clickthrough rates.

Another advantage of adding schema markup is that it helps boost your entity SEO. In short, an entity is something unique and distinguishable enough to be searched for by name. This takes SEO to a more contextual level than the basic keyword level.

Take, for example, a person who types in “Paris” in a search engine. Search engines may not know whether the person is referring to the city or a person. Entity SEO takes into account the context of the keywords, thereby enabling search engines to give users relevant results. 

What does this have to do with schema markup?

A whole lot!

Schema markup enables search engines to associate your brand with entities in your niche, field, or industry. As a result, when a search is made concerning entities that match your brand, your chances of showing up greatly increase. If we take our example of searching for “Paris,” here are the entities Google recognizes.

Entity SEO is still an untapped SEO tactic. And implementing schema markup is one of the ways to help you get it right.

So, how do you add schema markup to your pages?

If you’re an AIOSEO user, this is pretty easy — and you don’t have to hire a developer. This is all thanks to our next-gen Schema Generator. All you have to do is go to the page you want to add schema markup to and go to the AIOSEO Settings section beneath the page. Click on the Schema tab, and you’ll be led to the page with schema markup settings:

Next, select the type of schema markup relevant to that particular page:

With other types of schema markup (like product schema or recipe schema), you’ll have the option to include other tags:

Once you’ve filled in all the relevant fields, AIOSEO will do the rest and automatically implement schema markup for you.

Technical SEO: Your FAQs Answered

Technical SEO: Laying a Strong Foundation for Your Digital Marketing

No matter how amazing your content may be, ranking will be an uphill battle if your technical SEO is poor. 

Using this checklist, you can lay a strong foundation for a powerful content marketing engine. With your technical SEO sorted, ranking high on SERPs will become easier.

We hope this post has helped you know what technical SEO is and how to implement it in WordPress. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our ultimate guide to WordPress SEO or how to implement a full site redirect.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

Redirects are an essential aspect of site maintenance and help ensure your site is functioning as it should. They also play a crucial role in helping boost your search rankings.

In this article, we’ll look at the redirect types you should know to keep your site healthy.

What is a Redirect?

A redirect, in SEO, is a way to send users and search engines to a relevant URL when the one they were looking for has been moved or deleted. When users land at your old URL, the redirect immediately forwards them to your new URL.

Getting more technical, redirects are a type of HTTP status code in the 3xx category that tells search engines that the requested resource (web page, image, etc.) has been found but is located somewhere else. Depending on the type of redirect, the server tells your search engine (or other client) to take an additional step (like following a new link) to reach the actual content. 

In the example above, we’re redirecting the Source URL (old URL) to the Target URL (new URL).

Redirects are an essential part of site maintenance. This is why setting up automatic redirects is an excellent way to ensure your site health is good.

How Many Types of Redirects Are There?

Depending on the reason you’re changing the URL, there are many different redirect types you can use to achieve your goal. Some of the main ones include:

3xx Redirects

3xx redirects are a category of HTTP status codes that specifically deal with redirection. When you encounter a 3xx code, it means the requested resource (web page, image, etc.) has been found, but it’s located somewhere else. The server is telling your browser (or other clients) to take an additional step (like following a new link) to reach the actual content.

4xx Redirects (Client Side Error Responses)

HTTP status codes in the 4xx range are categorized as Client Error responses. This means the issue lies with the request itself rather than the server’s ability to fulfill it. Therefore, 4xx HTTP status codes aren’t technically redirects.

 In many cases, they result from an issue with the request itself, like incorrect syntax, missing information, or unauthorized access attempts.

Examples of 4xx HTTP status codes include 404 (Not Found), 403 (Forbidden), and 400 (Bad Request).

5xx Redirects (Server Side Error Responses)

Like 4xx HTTP status codes, the 5xx category of status codes isn’t a redirect. Instead, 5xx Server error status codes mean that while the request to retrieve the web page is valid, the server cannot complete the request. If you’re experiencing 5xx server errors for your website, you should immediately look at your server. 

Examples of 5xx errors include 500 (Internal Server Error), 502 (Bad Gateway), and 503 (Service Unavailable).

Since server errors signal problems on the server side, there wouldn’t be a need or possibility to redirect the user. Instead, the user may see an error message indicating the issue.

How to Easily Handle All Redirect Types in WordPress

Now that you know what redirects are and the meaning of other HTTP status codes, let’s quickly look at how you can handle redirects in WordPress.

Step 1: Install and Activate All In One SEO

The first step to handling various redirect types is downloading and installing All In One SEO (AIOSEO). 

AIOSEO is a powerful, easy-to-use SEO plugin boasting over 3 million active installs. That means millions of smart bloggers and marketers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. The plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. 

Regarding setting up redirects, AIOSEO has a powerful Redirection Manager. 

This game-changing tool helps you manage redirects and eliminate 404 errors, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. It also helps ensure a positive UX for your site visitors.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check out our installation guide.

Other examples of revolutionary features  include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

Step 2: Open the Redirection Manager and Redirect Your Page

Once you’ve installed AIOSEO, the next step is to set up your redirects. To do this, navigate to AIOSEO » Redirects.

You’ll be taken to the Redirection Manager, where you can add your redirect.

To add your redirect, first enter the Source URL, which is the URL you want to redirect from. Next, add the destination URL in the Target URL field. You can also simply start typing the page title, slug, or ID, and the plugin will automatically pull up suggestions for you to add.

Using AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager is super easy! For more detailed steps, check out our tutorial on adding redirects to posts or pages in WordPress.

19 Redirect Types You Should Know

Now that you know what redirects are and how to handle them, let’s dive into the common redirect types you should know to ensure your site’s health is well maintained.

3XX Redirect Types to Know

1. 301 Moved Permanently

The 301 redirect is one of the most common redirect types and is used when a resource has permanently moved to a new location. It instructs browsers to follow the new URL to locate that resource or a replacement. It’s also an excellent solution regarding SEO, as link value transfers to the new page.

2. 302 Found (Previously “Moved Temporarily”)

Another redirect type you should know is the 302 redirect. It tells search engines that the resource has temporarily moved to a new location. Future requests may still use the original URL.

3. 303 See Other

The HTTP status code 303 See Other is a redirection response indicating that the server is redirecting the search engine to a different resource. It is similar to the more commonly used 302 Found status code but with a subtle difference in its intended semantics.

When a server sends a 303 See Other response, it tells the client to issue a GET request to the new URL provided in the Location header. This helps prevent issues related to the repeated submission of data and duplicate actions. A great example is form submissions.

4. 304 Not Modified

The 304 HTTP status code indicates that a resource has remained unchanged since the last request. The search browser can use the cached version instead of downloading it again, which improves efficiency and saves bandwidth.

5. 307 Temporary Redirect

Similar to 302 redirects, the 307 indicates that a resource has temporarily been moved to a new location. However, it explicitly indicates a temporary redirect, and the client should use the same request method (GET, POST, etc.) for the redirected request. It’s not as common as its 302 counterpart, as older browsers and servers may not fully support it.

6. 308 Permanent Redirect

Similar to 301, the 308 HTTP status code is s redirection response telling browsers that the resource has permanently moved to a new location. It was introduced later and is meant to address some ambiguities associated with the 301 status code. It’s useful when you want to be explicit about a permanent redirect and how it’s handled by search engines.

Remember, the appropriate redirect type depends on the specific situation and desired behavior. Choose the one that best aligns with your goals.

4xx HTTP Status Codes

Now that we’ve looked at the redirect types, let’s briefly discuss status codes. Remember, AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager can also help you with some of the most common 4xx HTTP status codes. 

Let’s quickly dive in!

7. 400 Bad Request

The server couldn’t understand the request due to incorrect syntax or formatting. This could be a malformed URL, missing data, or an invalid form submission.

8. 401 Unauthorized

Access to the resource requires authentication, and the provided credentials were not valid. You might need to log in or provide the correct permissions.

9. 403 Forbidden

You don’t have permission to access the resource, even with valid credentials. This could be due to restricted access or specific user roles.

10. 404 Not Found

The requested resource couldn’t be found on the server. This could be a broken link, an incorrectly typed URL, or a page that has been removed.

11. 410 Gone

The resource used to exist but is no longer available and won’t be back. This is different from 404 as it indicates a permanent removal.

12. 418 I’m a Teapot

This humorous status code signifies the server is not a teapot and cannot brew coffee. It’s often used for lighthearted responses to requests for coffee-related functionalities.

13. 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

Access to the resource is blocked due to legal restrictions or government censorship.

Check out our tutorial on finding and fixing 404 errors, which provides step-by-step instructions on dealing with 404 errors (the most common 4xx status codes).

5xx HTTP Status Codes

The 5xx errors are the last category of HTTP status codes you need to know. As said, these are server-side errors and don’t redirect to another page. Again, AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager can help you manage these critical status codes.

So, what do all these HTTP status codes mean?

14. 500 Internal Server Error

The server encountered an unexpected issue and couldn’t complete the request. This could be a software bug, hardware problem, or other internal malfunction.

15. 501 Not Implemented

The server doesn’t support the requested functionality or feature. This might occur if you’re using an outdated browser or accessing a new feature before it’s fully implemented.

16. 502 Bad Gateway

The server received an invalid response from another server it was trying to communicate with to fulfill the request. This could be an issue with the intermediary server.

17. 503 Service Unavailable

The server is currently overloaded or undergoing maintenance and cannot handle the request. Try again later.

18. 504 Gateway Timeout

The server didn’t receive a timely response from another server it was communicating with. This could indicate a network issue or slow response time.

19. 505 HTTP Version Not Supported

The server doesn’t recognize the HTTP version used in the request. This might happen if you’re using an extremely outdated browser or trying to access a server that only supports newer versions.

Remember, understanding these status codes can help you diagnose web-related issues more effectively. This is because these HTTP status codes help communication between clients and servers by providing information about the success or failure of a request and guiding further actions.

Redirect Types: Your FAQs Answered

We hope this article has helped you learn about the different redirect types you should know. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our tutorial on implementing bulk redirects using a CSV file or our guide to automating redirects in WordPress.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay 

Your author bio is a critical yet often overlooked part of your content marketing strategy. This short paragraph at the end of your articles provides important context for readers while also sending crucial signals to Google about your expertise, authority, and trustworthiness (E-E-A-T).

In this article, we’ll show you how to write an author bio that boosts your Google E-E-A-T signals. 

What Is an Author Bio?

An author bio is a short, paragraph-long piece of text that gives readers context about you, the writer of a blog post or article. It usually includes details about the author’s background, expertise, experience, and credentials.

The bio appears at the end of articles and lets readers learn more about the author after reading the content.

Why is an Author Bio Important for SEO?

Author bios have a significant impact on SEO. Writing an author bio that boosts E-E-A-T signals is essential in helping you rank your content for the topics you write about. This is particularly true for your money, your life (YMYL) niches, as it helps showcase your authority and expertise.

Google E-E-A-T stands for Expertise, Experience, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness. It is a set of criteria that Google uses to assess the quality of content on the web, particularly for pages that deal with topics related to health, finance, and other areas where accuracy and reliability are crucial. 

The concept is prominently mentioned in Google’s Search Quality Evaluator Guidelines, which are guidelines given to human evaluators who assess the quality of search results. Google designed these to ensure the content published online is of high quality. E-E-A-T is an acronym that stands for:

• Experience: refers to the first-hand experiences the author or other members of the team have with that particular topic.
• Expertise: refers to the expertise of the creator of the main content.
• Authoritativeness: refers to the authoritativeness of the main content creator, the content, and the website the content is published on.
• Trustworthiness: Refers to the trustworthiness of the main content creator, the content itself, and the website it’s published on.

The purpose of these standards is to help improve the quality of content published on the web. In addition, it helps ensure that content is accurate and helpful to users. This has become even more critical since the rollout of the Helpful Content Update (HCU).

Optimizing your bio for search engines while also engaging readers takes skill. In this article, you’ll learn actionable tips to write a compelling author bio that boosts your Google E-E-A-T factors.

How to Write an Author Bio that Boosts Your Google E-E-A-T Signals: 9 Tips

Ready to supercharge your SEO by crafting an author bio that boosts your E-E-A-T signals?

Let’s jump right in.

1. Use the Right SEO Tool

One of the first SEO tips for writing an optimized author bio is to ensure you’re using the right SEO tool. And for WordPress users, there’s no better tool than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts 3+ million active installs. Millions of smart bloggers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. That’s because the plugin has many powerful features and modules designed to help you properly configure your SEO settings. 

Regarding author bios, one of the most important features is the Author SEO module. 

This revolutionary feature helps you demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T content quality standards by making it easy to create optimized author bios.

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check our detailed installation guide.

Other examples of AIOSEO’s revolutionary features include:

• Cornerstone Content: Easily build topic clusters and enhance your topical authority and semantic SEO strategy.
• Author SEO: Easily demonstrate Google’s E-E-A-T in WordPress.
• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• SEO Revisions: Track any changes you make to your site and see their impact on your SEO. Plus, you get to see on a timeline how Google updates affect your site.
• Advanced Robots.txt Generator: Easily generate and customize your robots.txt file for better crawling and indexing. 
• TruSEO Highlighter: Makes it easy to spot on-page SEO issues and gives recommendations for fixing them.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has many other features to help you boost your local SEO, on-page SEO, and technical SEO. 

2. Showcase Your E-E-A-T

Another important aspect of writing an optimized author bio is to showcase Google’s E-E-A-T content quality guidelines. 

How do you demonstrate E-E-A-T in your author bio?

This is another area in which AIOSEO is an indispensable SEO plugin. It has a revolutionary Author SEO module that enables you to inject author bio blocks into your posts or pages.

You can use this feature to create author bios for every author on your site. You can even add your experience and expertise:

The best part is that AIOSEO outputs all this information you input as JSON schema. This makes it easy for search engines like Google to quickly understand your expertise and experience. 

With this powerful tool, you can easily showcase your E-E-A-T in WordPress with little to no effort!

3. Include Main Keywords

Keywords have always been and will always be a staple of SEO. That’s why they also play a big role in crafting an author bio that boosts your E-E-A-T signals.

That’s why you must also conduct keyword research for your author bio. Keyword research involves understanding the words, phrases, and questions your target audience inputs in a search engine when searching for information relevant to your business, product, or topic.

Including the keywords that are most popular in your industry or niche in your author bio is a great way to help boost your rankings.  

4. Write in the Third Person

Writing your author bio in the third person helps you maintain a professional tone. For example, instead of writing, “I have X years of experience” (first person), write, “Brian has X years of experience” (third person).

Not only does writing in the third person sound professional, but it also fosters objectivity and lends an air of authority to your bio. Don’t worry, you can still inject your personality and unique voice while maintaining professionalism. And that brings us to our next point.

5. Let Your Personality Shine

While maintaining professionalism, add a touch of your unique voice and personality to your author bio. A few ways to do that include:

• Use relevant anecdotes
• Talk about your interests or hobbies
• Feature your pets

Giving readers a peek into your life is a fantastic way to connect with readers on a deeper level and stand out from the crowd. This is important as it increases engagement and social shares, both important elements for boosting your SEO.

6. Keep It Short and Simple

Your author bio shouldn’t be the story of your life. It’s only supposed to introduce you to your readers and prove your credibility.

That’s why you should keep it short and simple.  A concise bio is always more impactful than a long, drawn-out one. Aim for 100-200 words so readers can scan your bio quickly. Because of this, every word must count. To do this:

• Focus on the most impactful information that showcases your expertise and builds trust.
• Use concise language and avoid fluff or overly complex sentences.
• Use short sentences.

Besides being short, make your bio easy to read by using simple words and language.

7. Add Your Credentials

Credentials are a great way to showcase your expertise, boost your credibility, and add authoritativeness to your bio. List any relevant degrees, certifications, or affiliations you hold. This provides concrete evidence of your expertise and builds trust with your readers.

You should also consider highlighting any awards or achievements that further solidify your authority in your field. This way, your readers will trust you more. You don’t have to list them all. Remember, your author bio should be brief. Instead, include those most relevant to the topics you mainly write about. 

8. Include Links to Social Media

Another great tip for writing author bios that boosts your Google E-E-AT signals is to include links to your social media profiles. This encourages further engagement and allows readers to learn more about you. 

Giving your readers a way to connect with you on social media is also a great way to build an audience you can market your content. The traffic you get from your social media platforms plays an important role in establishing your authority and boosting your search rankings.

9. Use a Professional Author Bio Photo

A high-quality headshot is essential for a professional bio. It helps readers know that there’s a real person behind the words. If you’re an AIOSEO user, adding an author bio photo is super easy.

The best part is you can use your Gravatar image or upload a different image.

For best results, choose a clear, well-lit photo that conveys your expertise and approachability. Other tips for a professional author bio photo include:

• Composition: Choose a close-up portrait with your head and shoulders centered. Leave some space around your head to avoid feeling cramped.
• Focus: Ensure sharp focus on your face and avoid blurriness.
• Professional attire: Dress in a way that aligns with your genre and target audience. Aim for a polished and appropriate look.
• Neutral background: Choose a simple, uncluttered background that doesn’t distract from you.
• Friendly expression: Smile genuinely and appear approachable. This creates a positive and welcoming impression.
• Eye contact: Look directly at the camera to connect with viewers and establish trust.

Remember to smile and appear friendly to make a positive first impression.

How to Write an Author Bio: Your FAQs Answered

What information should I include in my author bio?

Focus on showcasing your expertise, experience, and credibility. Highlight relevant degrees, certifications, awards, and achievements. Briefly mention your experience and unique skills. Also, touch on your personality and interests to connect with readers.

How long should an author bio be?

Aim for a concise bio, typically around 100-200 words. Longer bios are acceptable for websites or book jackets, but brevity is essential for online platforms.

What tool can I use to create an author bio that boosts E-E-A-T signals?

The best tool you can use to create an author bio that boosts E-E-A-T signals is All In One SEO (AIOSEO). This WordPress plugin has a powerful Author SEO module that outputs your author information as JSON schema, making it easier for search engines to understand who you are.

We hope this post has helped you know what author SEO is and how to implement it in WordPress. You may also want to check out other articles on our blog, like our tutorial on boosting your author SEO in WordPress or our handy blog post SEO checklist to help you rank higher.

If you found this article helpful, then please subscribe to our YouTube Channel. You’ll find many more helpful tutorials there. You can also follow us on X (Twitter), LinkedIn, or Facebook to stay in the loop.

Search engine optimization (SEO) can be complex and time-consuming. However, if you can get it right, the rewards are worth it, as your site and content will rank high on search engine results pages (SERPs).

It also results in more traffic to your site and a boost in revenue.

In this article, we’ll show you some of the top SEO best practices to help you outperform your competitors and dominate SERPs.

Feel free to use our table of contents below to navigate through this jam-packed WordPress SEO guide: 

Let’s get started with the basics: what is SEO, and why is it important? 

What Is WordPress SEO?

SEO or Search Engine Optimization is the practice of optimizing your web pages to drive free organic traffic from search engines like Google.

Therefore, WordPress SEO is the practice of optimizing your WordPress pages and posts to rank high on SERPs. This will result in high-quality targeted traffic being driven to your site.

With SEO, your goal is to follow WordPress SEO best practices on your site. Doing so helps search engines easily discover your content and display it in the search results.  

There are 3 things search engines do to find and display your content to their users: 

• Crawling: Discover content on the internet by scanning each URL they find
• Indexing: Organize the content they found during crawling so they can quickly list it in search results for relevant queries
• Ranking: Ordering the indexed content in search results in such a way that the most relevant content appears at the top

Daily, Google processes over 5.5 billion searches… Imagine how much more traffic you could get with a high ranking!  

To put it simply, SEO brings your website to life. It’s not an overnight strategy, but the results are worth it. 

Not to mention, there are guides out there (like this one) to jumpstart your WordPress SEO strategy. 

Getting the WordPress SEO Basics Down 

Before you start, ensure your website is set up for SEO. Answering the following questions will help you kick everything into gear.  

1. Are You Using the Right SEO Plugin?

One of the first steps to winning at SEO is to use the right SEO plugin. For WordPress users, it doesn’t get better than All In One SEO (AIOSEO).

AIOSEO is a powerful yet easy-to-use SEO plugin that boasts over 3 million active users. Millions of smart bloggers and marketers use AIOSEO to help them boost their search engine rankings and drive qualified traffic to their blogs. The plugin has many powerful features and modules to help you properly configure your SEO settings. Examples include:

• Search Statistics: This powerful Google Search Console integration lets you track your keyword rankings and see important SEO metrics with 1-click, and more.
• Next-gen Schema generator: This no-code schema generator enables users to generate and output any schema markup on your site.
• Redirection Manager: Helps you manage redirects and eliminate 404 errors, making it easier for search engines to crawl and index your site.
• Link Assistant: Powerful internal linking tool that automates building links between pages on your site. It also gives you an audit of outbound links.
• SEO Preview: This gives you an overview of your search and social snippets and general SEO so you can improve your optimization.
• IndexNow: For fast indexing on search engines that support the IndexNow protocol (like Bing and Yandex).
• Sitemap generator: Automatically generate different types of sitemaps to notify all search engines of any updates on your site.
• And more.

AIOSEO also has other powerful tools to help you master your on-page SEO, off-page SEO, and even technical SEO. The best part about AIOSEO is that it’s a no-code SEO plugin. This means you can use it to perform most SEO tasks even if you don’t have any technical or coding knowledge.  

For step-by-step instructions on how to install AIOSEO, check out our installation guide.

2. Is Your Website Indexed? 

The first thing you need to do is to ensure your website can be indexed by search engines. 

You can think of “index” as another word for database. When Google indexes a website, it stores its information in its database. 

If your website isn’t in Google’s index, users won’t find your website over search. It’s critical to make sure your site is indexed. 

You can see if your site allows indexing on your WP dashboard. Head to Settings » Reading on your dashboard. 

Uncheck the box next to Search engine visibility to allow indexing. 

You can speed up the indexing process using our IndexNow feature.

IndexNow is a protocol that automatically notifies search engines like Bing, Yandex, and others when you publish new content or update your old content. You can access this powerful feature by going to your AIOSEO settings and then General Settings » Webmaster Tools.

You can get detailed instructions on activating IndexNow here.

Plus, you can easily use AIOSEO to check the index status of your posts and pages.

This will help you easily keep tabs on the index status of your pages.

3. Is Your Website WWW or non-WWW?  

Wait… you can choose if your website URL has WWW or not? 

That’s right. Your site address will look like one of the following: 

https://www.samplewebsite.com or http://samplewebsite.com 

Google will only identify one of these URLs as your website—you can’t choose both. 

On another note, there’s a lot of talk about which URL is better… Is WWW better than non-WWW? 

It doesn’t matter which one you choose. However, once you do, choose your site address and stick with it. As we mentioned earlier, Google identifies one site address only. 

Fortunately, with WordPress, it’s easy to set your URL preference by navigating to Settings » General. Then, insert your preferred URL in both WordPress Address (URL) and Site Address (URL). 

4. Have You Optimized Your Robots.txt File?

A robots.txt file is a powerful SEO tool that instructs search engines on how to interact with your site. You can use it to prioritize pages, disallow crawling of URLs, instruct search engines when to crawl your site and more.

You can easily generate and optimize your robots.txt file using AIOSEO’s robots.txt editor. To access it, go to your AIOSEO menu » Tools » Robots.txt editor.

This powerful tool makes optimizing your robots.txt file easy, as it has many useful directives or instructions for search bots. Examples include Allow, Disallow, Clean-param, and Crawl-delay.

You also have the option to import a robots.txt file from another site, saving you a lot of time optimizing yours.

For more details, please visit our post on how to edit a robots.txt file in WordPress.

5. Are Your WordPress URLs SEO-friendly? 

An SEO-friendly URL looks like this: 

http://www.example.com/how-to-make-a-website

This URL is short, organized, and easy to read. Search engines and online users can tell what this webpage is about—how to make a website. 

Unoptimized URLs, on the other hand, are disorganized and long. They usually include numbers, letters, and special characters. 

https://www.example.com/?p=10467X&UKEwiv9vuz1tXsAhU

To ensure your URLs are SEO friendly, head to Settings » Permalinks and Post name. 

This URL structure is SEO-friendly in most cases, but it doesn’t apply to every website. 

For example, a news publication site might need a URL with the day and name. Or, a large site with hundreds of articles might need a custom structure. 

You can check out this article to find the best URL structure for your business.  

6. Is Your Website Secure? 

Website security has always been a top priority for Google. They also want to ensure that websites people access from Google are secure and protect users’ privacy. 

And that’s why Google recommends implementing SSL / HTTPS on all websites. 

SSL is an industry-standard security measure that creates an encrypted link between each visitor’s browser and your website. This adds an additional security layer to your WordPress site.

Once you install SSL on your site, a padlock sign will appear in the address bar, showing your visitors that they’re on a secure page. In addition, your website address will begin with HTTPS instead of just HTTP.

MonsterInsights, for example, has a lock next to its URL and an ‘s’ after HTTP. This means their site is encrypted. 

So, when an online user logs into your site or buys a product, the SSL certificate will better protect their information. 

You can get a free SSL certificate through a WordPress hosting site or WordPress SSL plugin. 

You can also check out this post to learn more about keeping WordPress secure. 

7. Have You Generated and Optimized An XML Sitemap? 

An XML sitemap is a list of every important URL on your site. When you submit a sitemap, Google can understand and index your content. 

If you don’t upload an XML sitemap, Google will have trouble identifying your web pages. 

With All in One SEO, you can easily create your sitemap and send it to all popular search engines. To generate a sitemap, go to All in One SEO » Sitemaps. 

When you scroll down, you’ll notice a list of Sitemap settings. These settings let you choose what pages you’d like to add. 

Make sure to set the toggle to Enable Sitemap Indexes option. 

For more details, check out our article on XML sitemaps vs. All in One SEO. 

Download A Free SEO Checklist

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8. Avoid 404 Errors By Implementing Effective Redirects

As your website grows and evolves, you may change some pages and delete others. If this process is not handled properly, it could result in 404 errors on your site.

404 errors in WordPress mean that the URL or web page a user is trying to visit is broken or the page doesn’t exist anymore. Too many 404 errors on your website can negatively impact your rankings.

Fortunately, if you’re an AIOSEO user, you can easily avoid 404 errors on your WordPress site. And this is automated by our Slug Monitor. Whenever the Slug Monitor detects a change in a URL, it prompts you to add a redirect.

Clicking the “Add Redirect to Improve SEO” button will open a modal where you can add a redirect from the old URL to the new URL automatically. You can also avoid 404 errors by:

Scheduling Redirects

Scheduling your redirects is another great way of avoiding 404 errors on your site. AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager makes it easy by enabling you to schedule your redirects to be implemented at a particular time. Below is an example of scheduling a permanent (301) redirect:

For temporary redirects, you can even schedule when the redirect should be implemented and when the redirect should “expire.” When the redirect expires, the address of the page reverts to the original URL.

Scheduling redirects this way is an excellent way of setting up automatic redirects. It’s efficient and time-saving.

Automate Redirects

Another way of avoiding 404 errors is automating your redirects. To do this, go to Redirects in the AIOSEO menu and then click on the Settings tab. Next, scroll down until you see the Automatic Redirects section.

Once you’ve located the Automatic Redirects section, you can then set up automatic redirects.

You can either select the Include All Post Types toggle, or you can select individual post types using the check boxes.

A

You can also set the default settings for your automatic redirects:

Now, whenever you change the URL for published content in these post types, AIOSEO’s Redirection Manager will automatically create a redirect based on your options and settings.

Alternatively, to avoid 404 errors on your site, you can consider adding automatic redirects to your Homepage.

How to Optimize Your Blog Posts

Now that you know how to configure the basic WordPress SEO settings, it’s time to learn how to optimize your posts for SEO. 

9. Keyword Research 

Keyword research is a crucial part of SEO. It’s the practice of identifying the terms people enter into search engines so you can use them in your posts. 

Keywords are an important Google ranking factor that determines whether or not your post shows up in search results.  

So, how do you do keyword research? There are a lot of different factors to consider: 

• Relevance – Make sure to choose the keywords that are most relevant to the content you’re providing
• High search volume – Choose the keywords that most people are likely to use 
• Competition – Ideally, you need to use low-competition keywords so you can easily rank your content for them

We suggest using keyword research tools to find useful and high-volume keywords for your audience. You can also read more about how to do keyword research. You can also use a keyword rank tracker to monitor how you’re performing for your keywords.

10. Add Internal Links 

Internal linking is simply linking one page to another page on your site. We call these links “internal” because they’re within your website. 

So why are internal links SEO-friendly?

They keep readers interested –  When a user reads your blog post, they can click on an internal link to read another blog post, and so on. 

For example, let’s say you write a guide about plant health. You could add internal links to other posts about house plants, outdoor plants, and trees. 

A reader might think, “Wow! There’s so much information about plant health. I don’t need to go to another source. This website has everything I need.” 

When readers are engaged with your content, it can increase your authority and rankings.   

They improve site navigation – Internal links help your readers and Google navigate your site. Google has an easier time identifying and ranking your posts for search. 

To add an internal link, head to your blog post. Highlight the word you want to link and click on the link icon. 

Type in a blog post you’d like to link and hit enter. 

But as your website grows, remembering all the articles you can link to becomes next to impossible.

Again, this is where AIOSEO comes to the rescue with its powerful Link Assistant feature.

Link Assistant helps you build strategic internal links on autopilot, making the task much easier. In addition, it also shows the orphaned pages on your site. These are pages without any internal links, a problem that can hurt your SEO and user experience (UX).

To make internal linking easy and fast, Link Assistant will suggest which articles to link to in your content and the anchor text to use. You can include all link suggestions at once or add them individually as you vet them.

Using Link Assistant is also super easy. With AIOSEO installed, scroll down to the bottom of your blog post. In AIOSEO Settings, you can click on the Link Assistant tab to see a list of internal link suggestions, including relevant anchor text you can use. 

Simply select the link suggestions you want to add to your post and click the Apply button. It’s that simple!

Another way to improve blog post navigation is with anchor links. Anchor links let readers jump around your page. This is especially important for long articles. 

Anchor links are commonly used to link a table of contents to the post’s headings and subheadings. This post will teach you how to add anchor links.

Click here to learn more about how to improve internal link building.

11. Build Topic Clusters

Topic clusters are a group of relevant content pieces that comprehensively cover a subject from many angles and are interlinked. They help build topical authority and enhance your semantic SEO, both great ways of getting your site and content to rank in a competitive niche.

Creating a topic cluster requires 2 main components:

Cornerstone Content (Pillar Page)

Your cornerstone content is the hub of the topic cluster. This page covers the main subject in-depth, with each subheading briefly addressing related subtopics. 

You can easily mark these using AIOSEO’s Cornerstone Content feature:

Marking your post/page as cornerstone content also adds it to a new post list filter dedicated to cornerstone content.

This filter gives you an easy way to see your important pages at a glance, making it easier to create links to them.

Subtopic Pages

Subtopic pages are the pieces of content you create to provide in-depth coverage of a single aspect of the main subject and link to the pillar page.

Once you’ve built your pillar pages and subtopics, create strategic internal links between them. This can be automated by using AIOSEO’s Link Assistant module, where the cornerstone content is denoted by a building icon.

Simply click the Add Link button to add links to your cornerstone content, and Link Assistant will work its magic in the background. You don’t even have to open the pages in editor mode!

12. Edit External Links 

It’s common to add external links within your content. Websites externally link to other sites for a few reasons: 

• Research 
• Affiliate partners 
• Recommendations 

Linking to valuable sources can make your content more credible. But here’s the thing about external links. 

When search engines identify them on your website, they can pass some of your link authority over to those external links. 

That said, when you link to an outside source, and you don’t want to pass the link juice, add nofollow. This tells Google, “This link isn’t affiliated with my website. Please don’t crawl this link.” 

You can add nofollow to your external links with All in One SEO. 

Head to your blog post editing page. Select the block containing your link and hit the link icon. Once you insert your external link, click Add “nofollow” link. 

13. Optimize Images 

While images are a great addition to your content, they can slow down your site. You can avoid this with compressed, high-quality images. This is an important part of image SEO, another powerful.

When you compress a photo, it shrinks its image files without taking away the quality. We suggest compressing images before uploading them to WordPress. 

Along with compressing images, you should also add a title and alt text to photos. Alt text stands for “alternative text.” 

The alt text and title help Google understand what your images are. This is also a helpful tool for someone with vision loss. 

You can add alt text and a title to each image you upload to WordPress. 

Try to add alt text and a title to each image you upload. If it makes sense, you can add keywords to rank your photos. 

14. Add Categories and Tags 

Organized content is easy to navigate—categories and tags help with that. Before we explain how categories and tags affect SEO, let’s explain what they are. 

We’ll start with categories. Categories organize your posts by topic. For example, let’s say you own a Spain travel blog. 

Some categories you might have are: 

• Spanish cuisine
• Drinks
• Sightseeing 
• Getting around 

You can also think of categories as the chapters of a book—each chapter covers a broad topic. In WordPress, every post must be categorized, or else it’ll be labeled as “uncategorized.” 

Now, let’s talk about tags. While categories group your blog posts into broad topics, tags describe each blog post with 1 or 2 keywords. 

Let’s go back to the Spain travel blog example. 

Some tags you might add to blog posts about “Sightseeing” are: 

• Architecture 
• Statues 
• Nature 

See how these tags specify the category, sightseeing? So, if you write an article about Spain’s beaches, you would add “Sightseeing” as the category and “Nature” as the tag. 

So, how do categories and tags improve WordPress SEO? 

Categories and tags improve your site navigation. Readers and Google have an easier time going through your blog posts when they’re organized. 

You can optimize your categories and tags with MonsterInsights’ category and tag tracker. This tool analyzes which categories and tags get the most traffic. 

15. Optimize for Search Results  

Now that your content is SEO-friendly, you can optimize it for search results. 

This is one of the best ways to improve clickthroughs of your content in the results so you can possibly drive more traffic. 

From your post or page editor, scroll down until you see AIOSEO Settings. Enter the title of your blog post under Post Title. 

AIOSEO will calculate how long your title tag is. It shouldn’t be any longer than 60 characters. 

Next is your meta description. Your meta description summarizes your content on search engines. All in One SEO suggests keeping your meta description at 160 characters or less. 

Last are your keywords. When you enter your primary and secondary keywords, AIOSEO will evaluate how well they’re placed. 

It can also analyze your on-page SEO—content length, internal links, and external links are a few examples. 

Optimizing for search results will help improve your clickthrough rates and, ultimately, your SEO. 

Once done, you can use the SEO Preview tool to ensure everything is perfect.

16. Optimize for Multilingual SEO

The internet has helped the world become a global village. As a result, you can get website visitors from every corner of the globe. That’s why a WordPress SEO hack you must employ is optimizing for multilingual SEO. This simply means optimizing your website and its content for discoverability in localized native languages.

With AIOSEO’s translation API, optimizing for multilingual SEO is super easy. That’s because the API was designed to make it easy for your translation plugin to localize important elements of your content. Examples include keywords, metadata, social settings, and much more.

Implementing multilingual SEO will result in your content having a better chance of ranking internationally.

17. Respond to Comments 

It’s always encouraging to receive comments from your readers…But sometimes, it can get out of hand. 

First things first, get rid of spam comments. Spam comments take up space and add no value to your content. Plus, spam comments used to have bad links, which could sabotage your authority and negatively impact SEO.  

A spam filtering service like Akismet will keep those comments out of your site. 

Whew, that was an easy fix. But here’s another problem you may come across—a LOT of comments. 

While blog post comments boost WordPress SEO (and make you feel good), they can also slow down your site speed. 

If this is the case, you’ll have to split your comments into different pages. This post will help you paginate comments, step by step. 

18. Analyze Your Site 

You won’t know how your WordPress SEO is doing without analyzing your site. You can target critical issues and warnings with AIOSEO’s site analysis feature. 

Under All in One SEO, click on SEO Analysis. 

From here, you can check your SEO site score. The general rule of thumb is to aim for a score of 60 and above. If you end up with a low score, then scroll down and look for the recommendation to improve your overall score and ranking. 

For example, from the above screenshot, it looks like this website is missing some critical areas of basic SEO. Now that we know these problems, we can fix them and raise our SEO score. 

On another note, you can also analyze competitor sites. Click on Analyze competitor site and enter their URL. 

From here, you can compare important metrics, like keywords and site loading time. 

Along with AIOSEO, you should also use Google Search Console and MonsterInsights to analyze organic traffic. 

You can learn more about using MonsterInsights with this guide: How to add Google Analytics the right way. 

19. Add Schema Markup

Schema markup is code that you put on your website to help search engines return more informative results for users. With schema markup, you can add rich snippets to your search results, which could improve your organic traffic.

For example… have you ever seen search results that look like this? 

Or maybe this? 

These are 2 examples of schema markup. Without a doubt, schema markup reveals more information about the page than a typical search snippet, which helps your business stand out from other search results and also boost organic traffic.  

To add schema, click on Search Appearance under All in One SEO. 

Then, scroll down to Schema Markup. 

Enter your business information to add schema markup on Google. If you’re a local business, you can add local schema with our local SEO feature.

20. Optimize Your Social Sharing 

You’ve probably shared a blog post on Twitter or Facebook at least once. When you share a blog post, something like the image below will be seen in your feed. 

Notice how the headline, description, and featured image are ready to share? This didn’t happen by accident—Smash Balloon optimized its social settings. 

Optimizing your social settings does 2 things: 

It makes it easy to share – With everything ready to go, all users have to do is click “share.”    

Keywords and alt text – You can add your keywords and alt text to the image, title, and description for extra optimization. 

With AIOSEO, you can set up Facebook and Twitter sharing. On your blog post editing page, head back to AIOSEO settings and click on Social. 

As you scroll down, edit your title, description, and media. We recommend using relevant keywords and alt text to optimize the post. 

Now, your blog post is ready for social sharing. You can add social sharing buttons to your blog with this post: How to add social share buttons. 

The Ultimate WordPress SEO Guide: Your FAQS Answered

We hope this article helped you understand WordPress SEO and how to get started. Make sure to follow every step, and your WordPress SEO will be optimized quickly! You may also want to check out our ultimate link building guide, or see our WordPress SEO tips for beginners. These are resources that will help further boost your WordPress SEO.

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