This tool is incredible. It gives you beautiful, readable data visualizations of people’s real search queries for any phrase you type in, from “wordpress hooks” to “meaning of life.”

Over the weekend, an extremely skilled and SEO-savvy content writer we’ve been working with recommended me this resource. It’s a nicely formatted PDF full of deeply sane advice on SEO-aware content creation.

Far too often, a developer comes in to “modernize” a site—and ends up wrecking a thriving online business by ruining its SEO.

This analysis of the WordPress economy came across the Advanced WordPress Facebook group earlier, and I really like it. Key points for me include:

As you probably know, SEO is tricky. Google doesn’t publish its algorithm (for great reasons), and so SEO has a “guess what’s in the black box” character that’s relatively rare in the world of technology—as opposed to the world of, say, medieval medicine.

Setting up 301 redirects is hardly the hardest task an average WordPress user or developer has before them, but it’s a very important one for SEO reasons. When you move a page—especially one that Google has shown an affinity for—it’s really good to make sure that your new page gets that old one’s racked-up affinity.

I find working as a WordPress developer to be relatively low-stress. Giving people a good web presence is both a huge service, and something that doesn’t lead to massive tragedy if you’re not perfect at it right away. It’s not like being a fireman or a fighter pilot, for example.

If you’re trying to increase traffic to your website and improve your SEO, Yoast SEO for WordPress has quickly become the go-to SEO solution for most WordPress developers. It’s a multifaceted SEO plugin that’s full of features that make optimization easier to keep up with! One of our favorite features is the snippet editor, which gives you the ability to edit your meta title and meta description in WordPress which we’ll cover in this post.

While WordPress itself is already one of the best tools you could be using to improve your site’s SEO, optimization is a large, ongoing task that should be fully integrated into your marketing and PR strategy. Without thoughtful consideration, your site could easily become invisible to the people who need your content the most. Luckily, Yoast makes a great plugin to help you stay on top of SEO.

In my work as a WordPress consultant, only once have I actually damaged a site I worked on. I left “Discourage search engines from indexing this site” checked on a live site, suppressing the site’s page rank over the weeks until I noticed the mistake.